The physical requirements for success in international football have been developing rapidly.
You have to be quick.
You must be strong.
You need to recover in a short time.
A hyper-commercial business thins the match calendar to the limit, and the burden on the players is constantly highlighted.
With all this as a backdrop, it would not have been surprising if some players chose illegal shortcuts.
In a number of sports, extensive experience suggests that some cheat when the opportunity presents itself.
But seen in the context of how widespread the world’s most popular sport is, it is surprising how few doping cases actually come up in football.
Does it mean that football is so pure – and thus an attitudinal role model for sports that are more known for doping problems?
Or is the test regime too weak and the cheaters too cunning?
It is impossible to say anything for sure about that. But it is surprising that the numbers are as low as they actually are.
Now the International Football Association has published the “Anti-doping report 2023”. It reviews the testing regime and results in FIFA tournaments last year.
The verdict: The doping alarm went off only once. Then it turned out that the player in question had a valid medical exemption (TUE), so that there was no issue.
1,592 doping controls were carried out, in a total of seven tournaments. 2616 samples were analyzed. And football appears in these contexts to be completely free of doping. It is important to emphasize that it is also tested in other arenas, such as when Paul Pogba submitted a positive test in a Serie A match. It ended with a four-year ban.
No matter how we calculate it, the doping figures in football are consistently low. This does not mean that the branch has been completely spared.
We have had a few cases with substances that hardly improve on the pitch, most famously when Diego Maradona tested positive in the 90s. He was caught for cocaine during a Serie A match in 1991, and was later caught for doping during the World Cup in 1994.
Historically, the rumors and stories are many. The former German star goalkeeper Toni Schumacher is among those who have spoken about the phenomenon, when he called parts of the environment a walking pharmacy.
In Italy, Juventus had been through a legal marathon after a large number of drugs were found at their training facility. But now we are back in the 90s.
Other well-known cases involve Edgar Davids, Jaap Stam, Abel Xavier and André Onana, “cases” with a wide range in both content and outcome.
FIFA’s recent anti-doping report shows that the number of tests was increased last year. In the women’s world championships, testing went up by an average of 30 per cent per team. What could be a problem with the testing is that the majority of the samples were taken during competition. Advanced doping programs are often based on something illegal being taken outside the competition period, which must be out of the body and impossible to trace when a tournament begins.
In total, only 622 tests were taken out of competition under FIFA auspices last year. That number is not very high.
Football is not a discipline where you can get as direct an effect from doping as if you are cycling up a steep mountain. But it is a question of whether enough is being done in the anti-doping field so that we can trust that the sport is as clean as the figures suggest.
That in itself gives cause for some uneasiness.
