RIATH AL-SAMARRAI: If you think football is clean you’re DELUDED. Mud doesn’t stick like in other sports – just ask Pep – but Neville and Keane’s claims shouldn’t come as a surprise
Pep Guardiola is a pretty big name in football and for a while he was also quite a big part of the discussions in anti-doping circles.
In a moment we will see what Gary Neville and Roy Keane expressed in their suspicions of Italian opposition in their matches for Manchester United in the mid-2000s. But first we must address the popular misconception that football and performance-enhancing drugs have a less complicated relationship than other parts of the athletics world.
We will emphasize here that a failed test in sport does not necessarily mean cheating, but the broader point is that a failed test in football, proven or not, does not carry the same reputational stigma as elsewhere. Not even close.
Guardiola certainly did not and his case was particularly interesting. He tested positive twice for the steroid nandrolone in 2001, while playing for Brescia in Italy.
One of the consequences of that story was that he was given a seven-month suspended prison sentence, but he maintained his innocence, challenged the findings, lost an appeal based on a contamination defense, and was subsequently acquitted by the court in 2009. of any misconduct.
Ex-Man United stars Gary Neville and Roy Keane claim some of the teams they faced were not ‘clean’
Neville and Keane’s comments highlight that football has a strange relationship with doping, with a failed test not carrying the same reputational stigma as elsewhere.
Pep Guardiola tested positive twice for the steroid nandrolone while at Brescia in 2001, but mud doesn’t stick in football like it does in other sports. He maintained his innocence the entire time
The details of his postponement were fascinating: during this long trial, Guardiola’s defense shaped itself into an argument derived in part from “unstable urine” and whether such old samples could be trusted or even retested. It was determined that they could not.
Today we’re talking about one of the best managers ever, not about the stability of his urine sample. When was the last time you heard about one of those episodes?
None of this is intended to challenge his innocence, but it does illustrate that mud doesn’t stick in football. There are no longer whispers in the corners about Guardiola, which, rightly or wrongly, is not a luxury that you have in other sports.
Sir Mo Farah or Sir Bradley Wiggins have never tested positive, but they are dogged by innuendo because of the events and associations in their careers.
Much more so than Dutch stars Edgar Davids, Frank de Boer and Jaap Stam, who all gave bad samples and handed out suspensions that were reduced after their accidental ingestion arguments were accepted. It is perhaps because a doping error in football rarely sticks, or because the noise around such cases has been simplified and muted, that the idea that the game has no doping problem has taken hold.
I put that to a prominent figure in the anti-doping community shortly after Paul Pogba tested positive for testosterone last year, and he laughed very much at such an idea. The general argument is that it is a skill-based game. Gary Lineker went there a few years ago and said: ‘Doping isn’t really a problem in football. Doping does not make players play better.’ He later accepted that as naive, which he had been, because football is so much more than a skill-based game.
It’s a recovery game. It’s about being in shape to go again and it’s about being able to run faster for longer, which Neville and Keane noted during their encounters with Italian teams.
“I would walk away and I would be absolutely devastated and I remember it,” Keane recalled on their Stick to Football podcast. “When I look at the players I’ve played against, some Italian teams, it looks like they haven’t even played a game yet.”
Neville added: ‘Now when you look back at what happened next in cycling and other sports, and at the doctors, you think: ‘Wait a minute.’
‘We thought at the time – and we were fit, we weren’t drinkers – that something was wrong. One time we came off the field against an Italian team and thought, “That’s not right.”
“I know some guys in the mid-2000s who thought the exact same thing.”
Keane and Neville reflected on their specific suspicions when playing against Italian teams
Paul Pogba’s case at Juventus is yet to be heard after he tested positive for testosterone
Why that would be a wild surprise is anyone’s guess. Neither Keane nor Neville named names or clubs, but it is public record that Juventus doctor Riccardo Agricola was sentenced to 22 months in prison in 2004 after being found guilty of supplying a performance-enhancing drug.
The trial examined the club’s practices from 1994 to 1998, during which they were three times Italian champions and European champions in 1996, and a time when then Roma manager Zdenek Zeman said Italian football had to ‘come out of the pharmacy’ .
It would be easy to talk about an Italian sports culture, where so much doping has taken place, but we can also look closer to home.
A Mail on Sunday report by Edmund Willison reveals that at least 15 Premier League footballers failed drugs tests between 2015 and 2020 and none were banned.
Twelve of them tested positive for banned performance-enhancing drugs.
It could be that football has a bigger problem than it wants to acknowledge. Or that every positive result is an accident. Maybe, but you wouldn’t bet on a bottle of unstable urine in any other sport, so why this one?