FIRST WORD
DOPING SCANDALS HAVE
HIT ALMOST EVERY SPORT.
GABY MCKAY ARGUES THAT
FOOTBALL SHOULDN’T
BELIEVE ITSELF TO BE ABOVE
SUCH SHADY PRACTICES...B
ack in February Zdenek Zeman,
the high priest of all-out attacking
football, landed himself in some hot
water. The Czech, whose Foggia
side enthralled Serie A in the early 1990s
and who helped launch the careers of
Ciro Immobile, Lorenzo Insigne and Marco
Verratti at Pescara, inti-mated that the
growth of the women’s game in Italy would
be stunted as Italian women prefer to “stay
in the kitchen”.
Zeman quickly stated that he’d been taken
out of context but it’s difficult to imagine
the quotes gave him too many sleepless
nights. This, after all, is a man with a history
of controversial comments.
His statement that football needed to “get
out of the pharmacy” led to a high-profile
trial in which Juventus club doctor Riccardo
Agricola and managing director Antonio
Giraudo were accused of sporting fraud.
The specific accusation was that they had
administered banned substances, including
EPO, to players between 1994 and 1998.
Both were eventually acquitted and Zeman
remains a hate figure for the Juventus
support to this day. The innocence of both
men – and by extension the club – has been
established in a court of law and is not in
question, but that doesn’t mean football
can be complacent on the issue of doping.
The most common argument made for
there being no doping in football is that,
unlike cycling or athletics, the sport is
primarily one of skill. Proponents of this
theory will argue that there is no drug
that can improve your first touch, or give
you the ability to strike a ball in from 30
yards. The counter-point, of course, is that
a player who isn’t tired is more likely to be
able to do those things over 90 minutes
and more.
Logically speaking, it makes little sense
for there to be no doping in football. It’s
the biggest and richest sport in the world,
in which the most gifted players can make
upward of $30m in a single season and
the biggest and most successful clubs in
the world enjoy enormous television and
merchandising revenues. There may well be
no cheating taking place, but it’s difficult to
argue that the incentive isn’t there.
It’s not as though there have never been red
flags. Ferenc Puskas suspected Germany’s
1954 World Cup-winning side of using a
stimulant given to German soldiers in World
War II. Ferruccio Mazzola wrote about
Helenio Herrera forcing his Inter players to
take amphetamines in the 1960s when they
had not yet been banned.
England’s 1998 World Cup team employed
Glenn Hoddle’s favourite doctor, a man
named Yann Rougier, for the tournament.
In his autobiography Gary Neville writes
that the doctor’s methods were “all above
board, I'm sure” but also that players felt
“a real burst of energy” after mysterious
injections from Rougier and “so many of
the players decided to go for it before that
Argentina match that there was a queue
to see the doctor”. This has since been
dismissed as Hoddle being something of a
charming maverick, but Sir Alex Ferguson
was concerned enough at the time to write
to the FA.
Perhaps those examples are too old.
How about former Scotland striker Garry
O’Connor who said the following in 2018
about his time with Lokomotiv Moscow:
“You’d get your blood taken out, then
before the game you’d get it put back in.
Take your blood out, clean it, put it back
in... you felt like you could play two 90
minutes.” O’Connor was clearly oblivious to
the notion of blood doping, and perhaps his
recollection is faulty, but it’s worth noting.
The list goes on. The Operación Puerto trial
implicating high-profile cyclists such as Jan
Ullrich and Ivan Basso in doping featured
the doctor, Eufemiano Fuentes, alleging
he’d also “treated” tennis and footballstars. Former cyclist Jesús Manzano told
reporters from France 3 that he had seen
"well-known footballers" from La Liga
visit the offices of Dr. Fuentes. In 2012
Barcelona “could not guarantee” that Luis
Garcia Del Moral, a former doctor for Lance
Armstrong’s US Postal Service cycling
team, hadn’t been used by their medical
department on “an ad-hoc basis”.
Just last year British newspaper the Daily
Mirror revealed that 11 Premier League
players had been allowed to play despite
testing positive for performance-enhancing
drugs after the FA accepted the drugs were
for medical purposes or ingested “via a
permitted route”.
It’s possible all of those players, some
of whom were granted therapeutic use
exemptions, had a legitimate reason for
taking the substances. And it’s possible that
Fuentes was lying. It’s possible O’Connor
misunderstood or misremembered. It’s
possible Del Moral was never employed by
Barcelona.
In an era of high-intensity pressing and
rapid counter-attacking though, it’s worth
asking questions. There may well be no
doping problem in football – but it’s not
something we should ever take for granted.ABOVE:
Zdenek Zeman made
allegations against
Juventus in the
1990s that were later
proven false
RIGHT:
Gary Neville wrote
about receiving
mysterious
injections while on
international dutyjuventus - ultimaTey
cleared of any
wrong-doing
THE SCANDALS OF TODAY