Doping in Football - the Evidence
Acccusations by former Man Utd legend Gary Neville that Italian sides he played against were not 'clean', have ignited a new debate on doping in the English game.
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When Jurgen Klopp held a press conference at Liverpool’s Kirby training ground in late 2020, he became one of the few Premier League managers to ever be put on the spot about the issue of doping in professional football.
Pep Guardiola, on the other hand, has been spared questioning over his two failed tests for the anabolic steroid nandrolone during his playing career. Since Guardiola became the Manchester City manager, nearly eight years ago, football reporters in press rooms up and down the country have chosen not to raise their hand, and put the uncomfortable question to him.
This same question has also not been put to the former Man Utd player Fred, who tested positive for a diuretic that also acts as a masking agent for other banned substances. And when the current Man United goalkeeper, André Onana, was asked about his failed test for the same class of substances, the interviewers tended to be sympathetic to his claim that he had accidently taken his wife’s medication.
Klopp was asked about doping in response to the news that Mahmadou Sakho had received an apology, in addition to substantial damages, from the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) after it wrongly asserted that the French defender had failed a drugs test during his time at Liverpool.
In 2016, Sakho failed a doping test for the banned substance higenamine which acts as a fat burner. As the drug was not specifically named on the WADA prohibited list in 2016, Sakho was able to argue successfully he could not have known it was a banned substance. In 2020, a more-lowly footballer playing for Barnsley, was suspended for two years by UK Anti-Doping (UKAD), who runs the Football Association’s anti-doping programme, after higenamine was unequivocally added to the banned list.
Klopp expressed sympathy for his former player but in doing so also expressed a view that is often propagated widely within football.
Doping in football is only ever a case of unintentional ingestion - as was argued in the cases of Guardiola, Onana, Fred and Sakho.
“Yes, doping is a problem, 100 per cent. I never saw it really as a problem in football, because in 30 years in football I never came in contact with it, and if there was a case it was because somebody made a silly decision, not because they wanted to improve their recovery time or whatever,” said Klopp.
The mild irony in Klopp’s comments, and the other side of the argument, is that footballers would take drugs precisely to recover faster in the ever-increasingly demanding schedule that modern footballers face.
In 2018, Klopp emphasised just how crucial even five hours of recovery is in football especially when the Merseyside derby was brought forward on the calendar. “Can you imagine how big the difference is in these five hours? It means the world in preparation and recovery,” said Klopp.
Klopp is of course entitled to his opinion, and is only speaking about his own personal experience, but it is hard to believe that all footballers are apparently of such moral standing that they do not seek an illegal edge in a sport where the prizes are the biggest and doping tests are the fewest.
There is also a dearth of evidence that doping made its way into football a long time ago. When one reads the documents related to doping cases at the lower levels of English football, it could not be clearer.
Hormones and steroids in English Football
When Michael Phenix, who was playing for Southport FC in the sixth-tier of English football, was summoned for doping control in 2018, he knew he was going to test positive for anabolic steroids.
A visibly upset Phenix told the doping control officer, “I am going to get banned now and this is the end of my career,” according to a report form completed after his sample was collected.
As expected, Phenix tested positive for oxandrolone, a steroid that promotes rapid muscle growth and is usually given to patients suffering from muscle wasting. Phenix had recently moved to the club from Salford FC, owned by several former Manchester United players such as Gary Neville and Ryan Giggs, but did not start taking oxandrolone until he started playing for Southport. He said be obtained the steroids at a local gym.
Oxandrolone was one of the key steroids in the cocktail of steroids, known as ‘The Dutchess Cocktail’ given to Russian Olympians at the Sochi 2014 Olympics during the country’s state-run doping programme. Phenix was banned for four years in 2019.
In 2018, another English footballer, playing in the Championship for Bury FC, tested positive for testosterone. It then emerged that Andrew Johnson, a club doctor, who had formerly worked at Man City, had submitted fraudulent documents on the player’s behalf for a medical exemption to take testosterone. The doctor was banned for four years by UKAD on behalf of the English FA.
The breaking of anti-doping rules has also touched the youth academies of Premier League clubs.
In 2019, a junior player at an unnamed Premier League football club was found in possession of Human Growth Hormone (HGH). When training at the club he stayed with a host who found an HGH pen, branded Somatropin, in a fridge in his bedroom.
HGH is an effective performance-enhancer, must be stored cold, and boosts recovery, increases muscle mass and reduces fat. The drug was given to footballers by the infamous doping doctor Eufemiano Fuentes, who blood doped many of Spain’s top players but whose clients were covered up by the country.
In 2020, an unknown Premier League player tested positive for a similar hormone, human chorionic gonadotropin (HCG), but not only was he not banned, he was never officially charged with a doping offence. To expand, tumour growth can cause elevated HCG levels, but it can also be used to restimulate natural testosterone levels after an anabolic steroid cycle.
The fact that HGH was found in the young player’s bedroom, raises concerns as to who provided the drug and whether the club had knowledge of it. The name of the club has never been made public.
HGH is also used to stimulate growth in children with a hormone deficit. Lionel Messi, who measured only 4ft4 (132cm) at 11, was given HGH precisely for this reason. But the young Premier League player in question, unlike Messi, did not have stunted growth. This opens up the possible double-thronged reality of whether the player was taking the drug to enhance performance or to become an artificially taller, stronger footballer, or even both.
But this damaging conclusion is rarely reached by anti-doping agencies at Premier League and Champions League level. Generally, these agencies often rule that an athlete has not intended to cheat.
Doping positives in football are often a case of innocent mistakes
Before the 2017 Champions League Final, Sergio Ramos had a medical exemption to inject betamethasone (Celestome Crinodose) to treat both a knee and a shoulder injury. The problem for Ramos was after that final he tested positive for another corticosteroid dexamethasone, that he did not have approval to take. Nevertheless, UEFA did not press charges and accepted that the Real Madrid doctor had made an ‘administrative mistake’.
So too did another Spanish doctor, Ramon Cugat, trusted by Pep Guardiola and Manchester City players, when a tennis player under his supervision tested positive. Cugat appears in the Amazon documentary series All or Nothing: Manchester City during which he is seen treating the club’s players at his clinic in Barcelona.
Cugat’s tennis player Luis Feo Bernabe tested positive for betamethasone but did not have an exemption to take the substance. According to the tribunal decision, Bernabe was administered betamethasone (Celestome Crinodose) ‘under the supervision of Dr. Cugat’. The tribunal (download link below) found that the player should have done more to ensure that the substance he was given was not prohibited, but it did acknowledge that he had taken the drug for genuine therapeutic reasons.
And in 2007, Daniel Gunkel, who was playing for Mainz 05 under Jurgen Klopp, was fined 8000 euros by the German Football Federation (DFB). Gunkel received an injection from the Mainz doctor on match day but failed to submit the necessary forms to the German anti-doping agency before doing so.
These defences, which we must take as true, will likely have been similar to those used by the 15 Premier League footballers who failed doping tests between 2015 and 2020. All of their defences were accepted and not one was banned.
In the lower leagues of English football, 67% of players who fail a doping test over the same period were sanctioned.
If one applies this conversion rate to the Premier League you would likely see 10 of the 15 Premier League players sanctioned.
Officially Premier League football is deemed to be clean.
Manchester United legends break the silence on doping in football
The recent comments of Gary Neville and Roy Keane about their suspicions Italian sides were doping, have ignited a new doping debate in England.
Neville and Keane have accused some of the Italian opponents they faced, while playing for Manchester United in the Champions League, of doping and suspect Italian teams were not always ‘clean’.
Neville told the Stick to Football podcast, “There are a couple that stick in my mind … I think there were a few teams that we played against that weren’t clean. We thought it at the time.”
Neville has said that later revelations that cycling doctors were working in football is what strengthened his view that doping in the ‘beautiful game’ was a problem.
And Neville raises a valid point. For example, in 2006, the then-Bundesliga team Hamburg SV had to sever ties with Dr. Tilman Steinmeier, who at the time was an internal medicine consultant to the club, after the doctor was arrested for supplying the Stevens cycling team with EPO. While there is no evidence Dr. Steinmeier engaged in these practices with HSV footballers, what was stopping him?
Sixteen years later, in 2022, the Hamburg SV player Mario Vuskovic became the first player in England, Germany, Italy and Spain to test positive for EPO. He was banned for two years.
Many have assumed that one of the clubs the Man United legends refer to is Juventus whose club doctor was similarly convicted of providing EPO to the Juventus players between 1994 and 1998. However, he was consequently cleared of this offence on appeal.
Neville and Keane’s comments serve as one of the rare occasions, that stars in the game, whether past or present, have been so open about the taboo topic in the sport.
But they also come at an untimely moment for Juventus Football Club.
The Pogba doping case – an important decision awaits
Last summer Paul Pogba, now in his second stint at Juventus, tested positive for testosterone metabolites – the bi-products of a drug long used in cycling, that many within anti-doping have always suspected is used in football.
In October 2015, a UEFA study was leaked that revealed that 7.7% of players in the Champions and Europa League between 2008 and 2013 exhibited elevated testosterone levels.
Similarly 13 professional footballers in England were formally investigated for elevated testosterone levels between 2006 and 2009 but UK Sport, who were in charge of anti-doping in the country, closed every case involving those players without taking any disciplinary action. They could not confirm the presence of testosterone.
But in the case of Pogba, a former Manchester United player, testosterone metabolites were confirmed to be in his system, and if he is found guilty of intent to cheat, which he says he did not, then football will be finally faced with its first major high-profile doping case for 20 years.
The only other comparable doping case involved the former Netherlands International Edgar Davids, who tested positive for the same anabolic steroid, in the same year as Pep Guardiola.
Managers, former players and football officials will no longer be able to deny that doping in football is present at the very top of the game. Even before Pogba’s positive, or the comments of the former Man Utd players, the evidence has always been there.
The next job of football authorities will be to increase testing in a sport, already some twenty years behind the likes of professional cycling in the fight against doping.
In the meantime Premier League players can expect to be drug tested approximately twice a season.
I do not expect anything to change any time soon.
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Whilst I generally think in terms of no smoke without fire, I often wonder if there is a different risk reward equation in football due to the massive “basic” salaries available.
Unlike many other sports, it not a case of win or nothing. An average premier league footballer, who never wins anything, is going to earn on a level with (or above) some of the absolute best medal winning in other sports.
Injury as with Pogba, is an area where you may see a level of desperation… but it’s not competition based.. Once you have a contract.. being injured is not necessarily the financial issue it is elsewhere. Even losing a year or two if you have a 5 year deal.
It hard to believe any athlete would take a supplement without checking or their wife’s fat burning pills..
But whilst the money on offer in football is high enough to believe it would encourage doping… the wealth available without winning would seem to be in contrast to most other athletes