Cathal Dennehy: No appetite to uncover truth of drugs in soccer

After all, every quote of his gets dissected, reused and recycled to feed the never-ending news cycle of the Premier League.

But for a man who’s covered, analysed and critiqued to saturation point, the one thing very few seem to mention is his past.

And no, not his time at Bayern Munich or Barcelona. But what happened in 2001. While playing for Italian club Brescia, Guardiola failed two drugs tests – two weeks apart – for a banned steroid, nandrolone.

He initially claimed it was due to contamination, which didn’t wash given the supplements he was using tested negative for nandrolone.

“A machine says I have taken nandrolone but I know I did not,” he said. “Before Piacenza I only took the multivitamins that Dr. Ramón Segura, my trusted physiologist, has prepared for me for six or seven years. I am innocent and I’m going to prove it.” 

Guardiola left Barcelona several months before his positive tests, but his supplements were still overseen by Segura, who worked at the club.

Given doping was criminalised in Italy, Guardiola was charged with criminal offences and during the trial he claimed a medical condition had caused his positive tests.

That was also rejected, with Guardiola convicted and given a seven-month suspended prison sentence and fined €9,000. But that ruling was later reversed on a technicality, a decision Italy’s anti-doping authorities disagreed with.

How did he get off? As anti-doping journalist Edmund Willison wrote: “In 2005, WADA scientists discovered that a phenomenon called ‘unstable urine’ could lead to positive tests for low levels of nandrolone.

In very rare cases, the scientists found that this could be caused by a chemical reaction that took place in urine vials during storage.

“In order to avoid any future ‘false’ positives, WADA amended its laboratory operating guidelines and instructed all accredited labs to perform ‘stability tests’ on urine samples that returned positive results for nandrolone between the levels of 2 and 10ng/ml.

The levels found in Guardiola’s two ‘A’ samples were 9ng/ml and 5ng/ml. If a sample was deemed ‘stable’ protocols would continue as normal. If a sample was found to be ‘unstable’ the nandrolone positive was voided.” 

But four years after the positive tests, they could no longer test for instability as no urine samples remained. As such, the judge ruled in Guardiola’s favour, overturning his criminal conviction.

In 2009, using the same defence, Guardiola successfully appealed his four-month doping suspension. But many remained sceptical.

David Howman, then Director General of the World Anti-Doping Agency, said the likelihood of a urine sample being unstable was “very rare” and the chance of it causing a positive test for nandrolone was between one in 1,000 and one in 10,000.

These days, Howman is the chair of the Athletics Integrity Unit (AIU) and at the World Championships last year, he took aim at soccer’s attitude to anti-doping.

“FIFA run a programme where they tick the boxes in terms of in-competition testing; it’s out of competition testing they find quite difficult. I can’t say more than that at present, or I shouldn’t say more than that.” 

Being entrenched in athletics, I can say with confidence the sport has never had a better anti-doping system and is cleaner now than it’s been for a long time (which isn’t to say it’s clean).

The chief reason is the work Howman and Brett Clothier have done at the AIU, which has taken a ruthless, intelligence-led policy to root out cheats.

Set against that, soccer’s anti-doping system is farcical. Gary Lineker once said doping is “not really an issue” in the sport as “no amount of drugs will help you pass, dribble or shoot”, though obviously Diego Maradona, Kolo Touré, Edgar Davids, Jaap Stam, Samir Nasri and Paul Pogba didn’t get the memo.

There’s a reason players train speed, strength and endurance, which are all influenced by doping, just like the ability to execute skills under fatigue or to recover quickly from injury.

Back in 2016, Irish doctor Mark Bonar, who’s based in London, was filmed undercover by the Sunday Times saying he’d treated 150 sportspeople – including Premier League footballers, boxers, cyclists and tennis players – with banned substances.

Bonar claimed to work with players from Arsenal, Chelsea, Leicester City and Birmingham City, which the clubs denied. Bonar was struck off the medical register following an investigation, yet his sporting clients were never revealed.

But if some players are doping, where are the positive tests? Well, this goes back to Howman’s point about soccer finding out of competition testing “difficult”.

On average, a Premier League player is tested about twice a year, a laughable number given the money in the sport.

Back in 2005, a group of researchers tried to gauge how prevalent drug use was among professional footballers in England, sending questionnaires to almost 3000 of them. Just under a quarter responded.

One third of those had not been tested for drugs in the preceding two years and 60% felt they were unlikely to be tested in the next year; 6% indicated they knew players who used performance-enhancing drugs, 45% said they knew players who used recreational drugs.

The findings, published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, included a call to arms. “Footballers are tested for drugs less often than many other elite athletes. This needs to be addressed.” 

But in truth it hasn’t been, with players who earn hundreds of thousands a week still tested far less than also-ran athletes in Olympic sports. But perhaps soccer is right to turn a blind eye. If you never dig up the floor, you live blissfully unaware of the dirt below. And those with a sketchy past tend to have it whitewashed from history.

During all of Antonio Conte’s years in the Premier League, how often did you hear about the testimony of Dr Giuseppe D’Onofrio, a haematologist who said in Italian court it was “practically certain” that Conte – who has never failed a drugs test – used EPO during his playing days at Juventus.

It's probably as often as you heard Guardiola’s nandrolone case referenced, or how often it’s mentioned that during his first year at Man City, the club was fined £35,000 by the FA after racking up three violations of their anti-doping whereabouts rules.

A sum like that to a club so rich? It’s like me or you getting fined a single cent if we’re caught speeding. Where’s the disincentive?

On the Stick to Football podcast earlier this year, two of the sport’s most respected voices, Gary Neville and Roy Keane, said they believed they played against doped teams during their career.

“I came off the pitch against an Italian team and thought: ‘That’s not right,’” said Neville.

But they, like us, will likely never truly know the extent of it. Not when there was, and is, almost no appetite to uncover it.