Soccer obviously has a doping problem

For an astonishing length of time the attitude of soccer authorities to the prospect of widespread doping at the sport’s highest levels seemed best summed up in a 2017 tweet by the often spectacularly dim-seeming former pro and Match of the Day presenter Gary Lineker.

“Doping is not really an issue in football. Doping doesn’t help players play better. No amount of drugs will help you pass, dribble [or] shoot,” — a statement that will presumably now come as a considerable shock to Juventus, France and former Manchester United midfielder Paul Pogba, who has just been handed a four-year ban after being popped for use of synthetic testosterone.

Pogba, who in 2018 was a key member of France’s World Cup-winning team, is the highest profile footballer to be banned for doping in the modern era.

The idea that performance-enhancing drugs that significantly improve strength, speed and endurance — as well as hasten recovery times — would provide no benefits to elite soccer players is clearly so idiotic it hardly needs examining, something in fairness Lineker did eventually seem to recognize when he later deleted the tweet and said: “I may be naive, it’s not my area of expertise and I’m probably guilty of not wanting it to be the case, as it would taint the sport I love. I would be shocked if it was rife.”

As chance would have it, in February soccer’s second most famous Gary — former Manchester United player Gary Neville — used the Stick to Football podcast to air his suspicions that doping was indeed rife during his top-level playing career, which began in 1992 and ended in 2011. “I think there were a few teams we played against that weren’t clean… I came off the pitch against an Italian team and thought, ‘that’s not right,’” he said.

Podcast co-host and former Manchester United captain Roy Keane agreed: “When we played certain teams, I would be walking off and you were absolutely shattered. I remember it. I would be looking at the players I’d played against, a couple of the Italian teams, and they looked like they’d not even played a match.”

The comments — which came a good thirteen years after either Neville or Keane had hung up their boots — were interesting, not least because it is so rare to hear anyone in soccer discussing doping at all.

That includes the sport’s journalists, who seem amazingly incurious about the practice.  For example, no reporter as far as I know has ever thought to ask Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola for his thoughts on doping in the modern game, despite the fact that in 2001, while playing for Italian side Brescia, he failed two urine tests for banned anabolic steroid Nandrolone and was banned for four months. Eight years later he successfully appealed the findings, but surely his views on the subject would all the same be enlightening.

In 2017, I asked Angel “Memo” Hernandez, one-time illicit chemist to a number of Olympic superstars, if doping was taking place in soccer. He was unequivocal that it was. “It’s very, very common for footballers to dope. The fact is football is really dirty,” he said.

He explained testing regimes in soccer were lax and as a result too easily gamed. “There is a huge window of opportunity for doping. Footballers take advantage of that by taking substances that leave your body within two or three days. For example, you can take [red blood cell booster] EPO and it will be out of your system in three days, but the effects of EPO last a lot longer. You know that there are a lot of peptides out there that are still not traceable. You can take small doses of testosterone — it would never be traceable.’

It is worth pointing out no player in England’s Premier League has ever been sanctioned for testosterone or blood doping.

Hernandez said in 2005 he’d been asked to dope two Manchester-based elite players by their agent but was unable to as a result of being subpoenaed by the FBI to appear as a state witness in the trial that sent five-time gold medalist at the 2000 Olympic Games Marion Jones to prison. “But if I didn’t work with them, someone else did,” he said.

Given how suspicious the public has grown about doping in other sports — for example, athletics, cycling and boxing — it seems puzzling that by and large soccer gets a free pass, especially when you consider the vast financial incentives for performing better at the highest levels.

Certainly, from time to time credible evidence is uncovered suggesting elite footballers are juicing with the enthusiasm of Glaswegian tenement skagheads, but very little ever seems to come of it. In 2016, for example, the Sunday Times of London managed to film Harley Street doctor Mark Bonar boasting about having doped more than 150 athletes, many of whom he said were top-flight soccer players.

“Footballers are hardly ever tested anyway. Think about it: if you’re in your late thirties and you’re on the football pitch, how do you keep up with the eighteen-year olds unless you’re doing something?” he asked the undercover reporters. You have to admit, it’s a fair question.

Dr. Bonar subsequently denied doping athletes and quit medicine.

No doubt Pogba will appeal his ban and may even get off. Personally, I should like to see him employ the excuse heavyweight boxing champion Tyson Fury used to beat a doping charge: that the dope had entered his system as a result of eating boar testicles.

Life is full of truths that generally we don’t like to confront — death, for example, and Gary Lineker’s BBC salary. Perhaps it’s time we accepted the prospect of doping in soccer falls firmly into this category. The reasons to dope — vast wealth, fame, a vanishingly small chance of being caught — very obviously outweigh the reasons not to dope.

However, if we can’t bring ourselves to look for doping in the game, then shouldn’t we also accept that footballers — like all other athletes — don’t really have a choice? If everyone else is at it and not getting caught, then it’s either get with the program or pick up your ball and go home. I know which I’d choose. 

This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.