Some sports are consistently linked with doping. In fact, almost all sports in all countries
have had issues around performance enhancing drugs and yet the belief persists that football
– according to players, administrators, and many fans – is entirely clean.
The former FIFA president Sepp Blatter once
said: “Footballers have absolutely nothing to gain from taking drugs because, in contrast
to other sports, they need a vast array of qualities and skills to succeed in the game,
such as strength, endurance, speed, intelligence, tactical understanding and ball control.”
And Gordon Taylor, the long-time CEO of the
English players’ union once said: “I’m almost certain that we have a clean sheet
over performance-enhancing drugs.”
Is that true? It’s unlikely.
There’s actually a substantial list of well-known
players who have faced drug allegations and a few have even been handed suspensions, fines
or prison sentences for either being caught with banned performance-enhancing drugs in
their urine or blood, or for breaking other WADA anti-doping rules.
Pep Guardiola actually twice tested positive
for nandrolone as a player in Italy, receiving a four-month ban, a seven-month suspended
prison sentence and a €9,000 fine. Over six years, Guardiola used a defence of contamination,
which wasn’t accepted, and that he had a medical condition causing the anomalous result,
which which was initially not accepted until that decision was reversed on a technicality, a
decision Italy’s anti-doping authorities disagreed with.
In 2009, a year in which he had a late-career
comeback trial with Tottenham, goalkeeper Magnus Hedman had his car raided in Stockholm
and a police blood test came back positive for stanozolol, the anabolic steroid made
infamous by Ben Johnson at the 1988 Olympics. He was fined.
Abel Xavier, who played for Liverpool, Everton
and the Portuguese national team others, served an 18-month ban after he tested positive for
the anabolic steroid Dianabol in 2005.
Former Manchester United and AC Milan centre-half Jaap Stam served a four-month ban for testing
positive for the banned steroid nandrolone, as did another legendary Dutch player: Edgar
Davids.
Christophe Dugarry, formerly of Barcelona, Marseille and Milan, faced a six-month ban
for nandrolone after a positive test. Dugarry maintained his innocence and a procedural
error meant the charges were dropped, after it was shown that the doctor who administered
his test was not qualified to do so.
Samir Nasri is another famous case. He got an 18-month ban after he had a 500ml drip
infusion of water and micronutrients at an LA clinic in 2016, which is 10 times the amount
allowed under the WADA code.
And Manchester United midfielder Fred served a one-year ban after testing positive in 2015
for a banned diuretic, hydroclorothiazide, commonly used as a masking agent.
It is nonsense, therefore, to claim that banned
performance-enhancing drugs are not used in football. Nor is doping in the game even new,
or relatively new. A 2008 paper published in the journal ‘Soccer and Society’ by
academics from Loughborough University and the Norwegian School of Sports Science cited
cases, among many, of
i: Arsenal using ‘pep pills’ in the 1920s ii: Stanley Mathews using amphetamines in 1946 iii:
Manchester United’s Albert Scanlon and Harry Gregg using amphetamines in the 1950s iv:
The British government in 1963 having gravest doping concerns in cycling, athletics and
football
So, doping does occur in football and – contrary to what Sepp Blatter claimed – it can create
many advantages.
Drugs that fall under the anabolic steroid umbrella include stanozolol, nandrolone and
metandienone, the latter commonly sold under the brand name Dianabol. In broad terms, steroids
help to increase muscle mass, reduce body fat and increase recovery time after injury.
Steroids can improve an athlete’s ability
to train harder, aid recovery by reducing fatigue and help the body build muscle by
producing more protein. Their performance-enhancing properties are therefore applicable across
almost all sports, football included.
The family of banned stimulants - which improve focus and alertness - include ephedrine
and amphetamines. Many Beta 2 agonists, meanwhile, such as Higenamine, are banned by WADA because
they help with the dilation of bronchial passages, or in laymen’s terms, they ease stressful
breathing. If you have asthma you’ll probably use a Beta 2 agonist, such as Salbutamol,
in your inhaler. You may be surprised how many elite athletes, especially cyclists, need
this asthma treatment.
Masking agents and infusions above certain levels are banned for obvious reasons: they
can mask the usage of banned performance drugs. IV infusions are included on WADA’s prohibited
list because some athletes could use this prohibited method either to enhance their
performance by increasing plasma volume levels or mask the use of a prohibited substance.
Last but not least among the most common banned
drugs and procedures are blood boosters, also known as blood doping agents, which abnormally
increase the oxygen-carrying capacity of blood. They are commonly used in endurance sports
such as race walking and biathlon, and in sports where high-tempo activity needs to
be sustained over an extended period. Erythropoietin, or EPO, is the best-known drug in this category,
and ubiquitous in cycling by the late 1990s and well into the Noughties.
Italian football was particularly plagued
with doping allegations. In 1998, a French doctor living in Italy, Jerome Malza, told
the Gazzetta dello Sport that he had given EPO to unnamed Serie A footballers. In the
same year, the manager of Roma, Zdenek Zeman publicly questioned the physical development
of some Juventus players, implying steroid use.
Local government officials started a nationwide inquiry
and when they raided Juventus, they found 281 pharmaceutical products. The club and players
have always denied any wrongdoing. In 2004, charges were brought against chief executive
Antonio Giraudo and club doctor Riccardo Agricola. Giraudo was acquitted on the charge of Sporting
Fraud, and while Agricola was initially given a suspended prison sentence for supplying
performance enhancing drugs, including EPO, he was later cleared on appeal.
The scandal wasn’t confined to Juventus,
though. Documents found during a search of an anti-doping lab in Rome which handled
samples from across the country suggested how unreliable Italy’s testing system was
when they showed urine of footballers had not been tested for steroids and that other
test results had disappeared.
In 2004, a leading haematologist, Dr Giuseppe D’Onofrio, testified in court that he was
"practically certain" that Antonio Conte, a Juve player from 1991 to 2004, had used
EPO when at Juventus, with the stated reason it was medication for anaemia
Conte has a clean sheet when it comes to
doping, but he has revealed that he took anti-depressants during his time at Juventus
and that he used an IV drip containing – what he was told – were vitamins.
And English football wasn't immune from the
problem either. That same year, 2004, the then manager of Arsenal, Arsene Wenger, said
that internal club testing of player blood samples indicated that some players joining
Arsenal from abroad had displayed symptoms of prior EPO use, in particular that “their
red blood cell count has been abnormally high. That kind of thing makes you wonder.”
Wenger claimed:
“There are clubs who dope players without
players knowing. The club might say that they were being injected with vitamins and the
player would not know that it was something different.”
Fast forward more than a decade to 2016, and
a former footballer turned academic, a German-Moroccan named Lofti El Bousidi, published research
findings based on interviews with players.
El Bousidi’s career began in the Mainz reserves in the late 1990s, and ended in Spain’s
third tier in 2010. Several times he was given supplements or IV treatments, not knowing
what they contained, and he was only ever drug tested once in his career, all of which
made him curious about drugs in football when writing his thesis.
He had 124 responses from footballer contacts
he knew personally across Germany, Spain and Sweden and concluded between 14 and 30 per
cent of players had doped in the previous year, with the rates lowest in Sweden and
highest in Germany and Spain.
While El Bousidi's sample size was small, his methodology - encrypting answers to maintain
anonymity - is accepted as a valid way to encourage honesty. More than 43 per cent of
respondents said they had not been tested in the previous year and a further 50 per
cent said they had had just one test. The reality is only a tiny minority of footballers
face anything like what might be called ‘regular’ testing.
There are approximately 140,000 professional
footballers in the world, and about 40,000 drug tests in football worldwide per year,
not all in the professional game. So on average, roughly and globally, a footballer gets tested
once every three and a half years. And given that traditional testing is not particularly
effective – with at best one in 10 dopers being caught - we can surmise a lot of footballers
who take drugs are getting away with it. There are also countries where the national
anti-doping agencies have been shown to be ineffective and, in some cases, cheats themselves.
This was true for years in Russia where the
corrupt lab boss turned whistleblower Grigory Rodchenkov was pivotal in helping thousands
of athletes across dozens of sports to either cheat and / or have failed drugs tests covered
up. Also deeply involved was Russia’s anti-doping agency, RUSADA, and Russia’s sports ministry,
headed by Vitaly Mutko, who was also the head of Russia’s FA.
In 2017, a year before Russia hosted the World
Cup, it was revealed that a cache of documents taken to the USA by Rodchenkov when he fled
Russia in fear of his life showed Russia’s 23-man 2014 World Cup squad were in effect
guaranteed never to be caught for doping inside Russia.
Then during the 2018 World Cup, names of Russian
internationals who had failed doping tests but not been punished emerged. And in an interview
in 2019, Rodchenkov said he believed an array of nations that rated poorly on Transparency
International’s ‘Corruption Perceptions Index’ probably had corruption within their
anti-doping agencies. These included Russia, Brazil, Thailand, Turkey, India, China, Romania,
South Africa and Greece. WADA labs in all of these places have been shut or suspended
for corruption or irregularities at some point.
Rodchenkov also said in 2019 that Sergey Pukhov, a former head of medicine at Russia’s most
successful club of the past decade, Zenit St Petersburg, ‘very good practical experience’
of doping sportspeople, having also been a Russian Olympic doctor.
Pukhov was Zenit’s doctor from 2006 to 2017.
In 2014, the late Dutch footballer Fernando Ricksen wrote about the club’s practices
in his autobiography, alleging there were ‘needles and syringes all over the place’
and ‘players hooked up to drips’.
Ricksen claimed Pukhov offered him injections and he accepted them ‘again and again and
again’. He wrote: ‘I didn’t have a clue what Dr Pukhov was putting in me... but, man,
it worked! I got an energy boost which was beyond imagination... nobody ever tested positive...Pukhov,
I kept telling myself, must know the boundaries. After all, the man had been the official doctor
of the Russian Olympic team.’
Zenit and Puknov have never commented on the allegations.
Early in the Noughties, two former players
from another Russian club, Spartak Moscow - Vladislav Vashchyuk and Maxim Demenko – claimed
there had been a systematic doping programme there, though the club strongly denied the
allegations. Around the same time, in his autobiography, Frenchman Marcel Desailly made
similar claims about Marseille in the 1990s, and later his team-mate Jean-Jacques Edelie said
he had agreed to take an illicit substance prior to the 1993 Champions League final.
Marseille didn’t respond to the accusation
at the time.
What’s clear is that nobody in football wants to be associated with doping: not the
players, their clubs, the national associations or the governing bodies at continental or
world level. What is also clear is that doping can enhance
performance in football and appears to have been doing so for decades.