Gordon Taylor, the chief executive of the Professional Footballers’ Association (PFA), asserts that there is a “virtual absence” of steroid use by soccer players in the Premier League . The head of the players’ union cites this as one of his reasons behind his objections to the introduction of WADA drug testing to the popular professional soccer league in the United Kingdom. While there are several reasonable objections to increased steroid testing in soccer, the assertion that soccer players do not use anabolic steroids is not one of them (“Home drugs test idea upsets PFA,” November 11).
If we complain about anything to do with drug-testing people think we might have something to hide, but football’s record is extremely good and there has been a virtual absence of any performance-enhancing drugs over decades.
We do appreciate that football is a major spectator sport and we wish to co-operate, but football should not be treated in the same way as individual sports that do have a problem with drugs, such as athletics, cycling and weightlifting. (emphasis added)
United Manchester boss Sir Alex Ferguson made defensible objections to the more stringent anti-doping rules based on cost, convenience and privacy. But the PFA’s assertion of drug-free football (soccer) is contradicted by extensive evidence to the contrary (and basic common sense regarding performance enhancing drug use at the elite level).
Corrado Ferlaino, the former president of Napoli soccer team, recently revealed the extensive and organized efforts by the soccer team to cover-up and facilitate doping among its top player in interviews promoting “10: The Maradona Opus,” a 800-page, 30-kilogram publication about the soccer icon Diego Maradona (“Maradona comes clean as Scotland awaits,” November 15).
If a player was at risk of testing positive, they were given a small bottle with a dripper on the end, containing someone else’s urine, Ferlaino explained. So the player would hide the small pump or dripper down his tracksuit bottoms and once he was in the room where he was supposed to provide a sample, instead of peeing into the sample bottle, he filled it with the clean urine from the container he had been given. It is a ruse that could not succeed these days, with testers observing a sportsman giving his sample.
Ferlaino’s revelations are an admission that the club were party to the crime and, worse still, he admits that Napoli indulged Maradona’s cocaine abuse to the extent that their star player was free to snort from Sunday evening to Wednesday – even through the peak years of his career, when he became a world champion. With the doctors establishing that cocaine washes through the system in 48 hours, this unwritten rule was devised to give Napoli’s party animal plenty of slack.
From Sunday evening until Wednesday, Diego was free to do whatever he wanted to do, just like other players at Napoli at the time, particularly the youngsters, Ferlaino said. A few of them were involved, too. Come Thursday, he had to be clean. Do you get the picture? […]
Ferlaino admits that the club would also manipulate the random drawing of players for testing, simply erasing Maradona’s 10 if it was selected. For six years in Naples, such techniques kept Maradona out of trouble. I was more careful about cocaine than about wetting my bed, he once said, although he could not evade the testers for ever.
The Scotsman.com was quick to find additional evidence of doping and steroid use in soccer (“Richard Bath: WADA testing may inject doubt into assertion that football is clean,” November 23).
In the mid-90s, Juventus club doctor Riccardo Agricola was found guilty of administering drugs to players after Turin prosecutors tapped the phones of players and doctors. In 1998, a spot check found that an incredible 24 players from Parma had high red blood cell counts, six of them at a level that, had they been Tour de France cyclists, would have seen them immediately banned. EPO, the synthetic hormone banned in sport, was widely fingered as the cause.
Nor do you have to delve quite so far back. In 2001, Juve’s Edgar Davids failed a second test for the banned steroid nandrolone, making him the eighth Italian-based player caught that season. Nor was it just in Serie A; Harald Schumacher’s autobiography Kick-Off saw him kicked out of German football after he alleged widespread drug use in the Bundesliga, while across in La Liga, Barcelona’s Frank de Boer submitted a positive sample containing traces of nandrolone.
In 2001, the Italian Olympic Committee (CONI) announced that eight soccer players had nandrolone positive drug tests (“Davids faces two-year ban for drug use,” May 16, 2001).
A widespread doping scandal first hit Italian football when former AS Roma coach Zdenek Zeman declared at the beginning of the 1998 season that many top players took banned substances.
[Edgar] Davids is the eighth player in Italy this season to test positive for nandrolone.
New York Red Bull players in Major League Soccer (MLS) have had their own recent doping violations as well (“Major League Soccer Players Test Positive for Anabolic Steroids After Using Dietary Supplement,” October 26).
Two professional soccer players tested positive for the banned performance enhancing substances androstatriendione (ATD) and metabolites of the anabolic steroid boldenone according to the MLS. Red Bulls Jon Conway and Jeff Parke were suspended and fined ten percent of their respective salaries for violating the MLS substance abuse and behavioral health policy (SABH).
There are reasonable arguments against the introduction of WADA code in private sporting leagues, but the absence of steroid use in an elite level sport is not defensible.
Some people continue to cling to the myth of drug-free sports. USA Swimming tried to claim that swimmers don’t use steroids; the NFL tried to claim that football players don’t use steroids; and now soccer officials want us to believe that soccer players don’t use steroids?
About the author
Millard writes about anabolic steroids and performance enhancing drugs and their use and impact in sport and society. He discusses the medical and non-medical uses of anabolic-androgenic steroids while advocating a harm reduction approach to steroid education.
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