Gary Neville and Roy Keane didn't name names. But doping in football is a matter of fact, so I will...
The positive tests that prove football has always had a problem - and the ex-pro whose study suggests that up to 30% of his former colleagues were doping
Gary Neville and Roy Keane revived the issue of doping in football last week when they spoke on their ‘Stick to Football’ podcast about playing unnamed Italian teams they suspected were on performance-enhancing drugs.
Neville specified this was in the mid-Noughties. In that period United played Juventus (2002-03, winning twice), Milan (2004-05, losing twice), Roma in the 2006-07 Champions League quarter-final (a 7-1 win and a 2-1 loss), then Milan in the semi-finals the same season (a 3-2 win and 3-0 loss).
Keane said he felt suspicious about a “couple of teams” from Italy, without specifying which ones. This perhaps brings into play numerous encounters with Juventus in the 1990s, at a time when that club was heavily linked to doping. Manchester United played them in the Champions League group stage in 1996-97 and again in 1997-98 and also in the 1998-99 semi-final.
Antonio Conte was Juventus’s captain during this time, with a leading haematologist, Dr Giuseppe D’Onofrio, later testifying in court that he was “practically certain” that Conte, a Juve player from 1991 to 2004, had used EPO at Juventus, with the stated reason it was medication for anaemia.
“I would be walking off and I’d be absolutely shattered and I remember it,” Keane said. “I’d be looking at players I played against, a couple of Italian teams, and they look like they’ve not even played a match.”
Neville said: “When you look back now at what came afterwards, in cycling and other sports, and doctors, you think, ‘Hang on’.
“We thought at the time — and we were fit, we weren’t drinkers — there’s something not right. We came off the pitch against an Italian team once and thought, ‘That’s not right’. I know a couple of the lads who thought exactly the same.”
Conte never failed a doping test, but Juventus were mired in doping allegations for years. He revealed later that he’d taken anti-depressants at Juve, and had IV drips containing what he was told was vitamins, but didn’t know for sure.
Dr D'Onofrio claimed it was “practically certain” that Conte and fellow midfielder Alessio Taccinardi had taken EPO for anaemia, and that it was “very probable” that seven other players – Alessandro Birindelli, Alessandro Del Piero, Didier Deschamps, Dimas, Paolo Montero, Gianluca Pessotto and Moreno Torricelli – had used EPO.
Italian football was plagued with doping allegations from the mid 90s onwards. In 1998, a French doctor living in Italy, Jerome Malza, told 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.
English football wasn’t immune from suspicion in the early Noughties. In 2004, the Arsenal manager 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.”
He added: “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.”
There is a long and varied list of doping cases in football, whether they were seen as nefarious or not when they happened. Arsenal were using “pep pills” in the 1920s, and Stanley Mathews used amphetamines in 1946, as did Manchester United’s Albert Scanlon and Harry Gregg in the 1950s. In 1963, the British government harboured concerns there were British dopers in cycling, athletics and football.
More recently, Pep Guardiola, while playing for Brescia in Italy, failed two drug tests in late 2001, testing positive for the banned steroid nandrolone. He received 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 true, and then claimed he had a medical condition causing the anomalous result, which was initially not accepted until that decision was reversed on a technicality, a decision Italy’s anti-doping authorities disagreed with.
Abel Xavier, who played for Liverpool, Everton and the Portuguese national team among others, served an 18-month ban after he tested positive for the anabolic steroid Dianabol in 2005, while playing for Middlesbrough.
Former Manchester United and AC Milan centre-half Jaap Stam served a four-month ban for testing positive for nandrolone while playing for Lazio, as did another legendary Dutch player: Edgar Davids, while he was at Juventus.
Samir Nasri 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. He was playing for Sevilla, on loan from Manchester City, at the time of his test.
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.
Russian international teams of recent times have been implicated in the wider, multi-sport state-sponsored doping and cover-ups scandal. In June 2017, I revealed that Russia’s 2014 World Cup squad were identified by investigators as beneficiaries of that plot. That didn’t mean they were all on drugs, but they had banked clean urine in case they tested positive, a highly irregular move common among Russian cheats of the era.
Then during the 2018 World Cup, names of Russian internationals who had failed doping tests but not been punished emerged.
Back in 2013, I broke the story of Russia’s state-sponsored doping programme, where a corrupt lab boss, Grigory Rodchenkov, was at the heart of the scandal. He later fled in fear of his life, and his story was told in the Oscar-winning documentary, Icarus.
I’ve interviewed Rodchenkov a few times since he went into a Witness Protection Programme in the USA, where he will almost certainly remain for life. He told me about various doping doctors he had known down the years, including Sergey Pukhov, a former head of medicine at Russia’s most successful football club of the past decade, Zenit St Petersburg. Rodchenkov told me Pukhov had “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.”
I asked Zenit and Puknov for comment and they never replied.
I have no doubt that doping in football persists – for three reasons.
First, banned drugs work for footballers. Those falling under the anabolic steroid umbrella include stanozolol, nandrolone and metandienone, the latter commonly sold under the brand name Dianabol. 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.
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. Intravenous (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.
Second, drug testing is relatively rare and often a complete waste of time. Conventional urine tests catch perhaps one in 20 cheats, and if you’re smart about when you take drugs, they can be clear of your system by testing time.
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.
Third, I spent a long time talking to a former footballer-turned-academic last year in an interview that is seeing the light of day for the first time here (my editor at the Mail on Sunday wasn’t interested in it at the time, which is fair enough).
The person in question is a German-Moroccan attacking midfielder called Lofti El Bousidi, who began his career in the Mainz reserves in Germany in the late 1990s and ended it 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 researching and writing his thesis on doping a few years ago.
He had hundreds of contacts in the game and asked them on a confidential basis about their experiences of doping. He had 124 responses from players he knew across Germany, Spain and Sweden and concluded that between 14% and 30% of players had doped in the previous year, with the rates lowest in Sweden and highest in Germany and Spain.
“I didn’t realise this kind of study had never been done before,” El Bousidi told me. “It’s a sensitive subject, so I know perhaps it wasn’t easy to do, but I’d been a pro who had contacts and they had confidence in me.
“I asked the players who said they had doped what they used, and steroids was the main type of doping. Some took it by themselves. A lot of the players said they had trust in their clubs and took whatever was given to them.
“Close to zero of the players actually knew in any detail what was forbidden in football. When I fed back the results, it made some players aware of what was happening around them. Injuries that recovered too quickly.
“When the chance of getting caught and punished is so low, there isn’t an incentive not to take drugs that will help you.
“Football did not receive my work well overall. My [supervising] professor in Mainz wanted to do a larger follow-up study with a bigger cohort of players and involving all sorts of ethics committee approvals. But he said ‘Lofti, while it’s a nice idea, you’ll have a lot of problems’. He was right. I approached various teams to broaden my work and they all said no. It’s difficult. No team wants to get implicated in doping.”
As recently as 2022, Ed Willison and I worked together on cases of doping in English football between 2015 and 2020, cataloguing positive drugs tests and what happened next. Ed, who recently co-authored this piece with me, wrote up the findings for the MoS.
We found at least 15 Premier League footballers failed drugs tests between 2015 and 2020 and none of them were given any kind of ban. I summarised some of what we founds in graphic below.
Neville and Keane are only now speaking about suspicions they had nearly 25 years ago. Wait until 2050 and somebody will reveal what they know about drugs in football in 2024.
It’s a grim read, especially the players that aren’t even aware they’re taking them! What was the real story of Rio’s missed drug testing back in the day? I remember it being a big story at the time.