A Few Thoughts on Drugs in Soccer

Try as I might to focus on the Champions League, the tail end of the European seasons and the return of Major League Soccer, it’s hard to avoid the baseball headlines. The latest chapters of the Steroid Era are being written throughout this offseason and it only makes me wonder, where are performance-enhacing drug headlines in soccer?

They are less frequent, but they are, unfortunately, around.

The drugs, of course, are different. There is little need for muscle-building steroids in a game that revolves around running for 90 minutes. What you will find are stimulants — like ephedrine, which saw Argentine captain Diego Maradona kicked out of the 1994 World Cup — and products that help muscles recover and increase stamina, like creatine and nandrolone. We’ll ignore for now the use of recreational drugs. (A positive test for cocaine, for instance, cost Romanian striker Adrian Mutu the prime of his career.)

Still, so few players seem to get caught. There were of course the high-profile suspensions of Dutch stars Edgar Davids, Jaap Stam, and Frank DeBoer who tested positive for nandrolone in 2002. But I am hard pressed to think of any other major bans in the last few years. No true patterns of drug use in soccer emerge either, except perhaps the fact that they seem to crop up in Serie A more than elsewhere. (Juventus, in particular, developed a nasty reputation for injecting players with a host of supplements.)

It would be easy to say that if there is no smoke, there probably is no fire. But my suspicion, given the climate in every other major sport, is that the smoke is just being kept out of sight and choking the game from the inside. So is FIFA, the game’s world governing body, to blame?

Doping controls were first introduced at FIFA competitions in 1970, but until this year, it still counted on practices intiated in 1999. FIFA stated that at every competition it sanctioned, two players from each team would be randomly selected for testing. Assuming that a World Cup features 32 teams with 22-player squads, that means that roughly 9 percent of the 702 players are being tested.

Is that enough? I’m really not sure.

But all that could be about to change. Last year, FIFA finally adopted the World Anti-Doping Association’s new stricter code and implemented it last month. Talk of baseball’s steroid era really only began when testing was introduced and highlighted the problem. With tougher testing in soccer, could we be about to enter the beautiful game’s drug era? And would it be a bad thing if players’ habits were finally thrown under the microscope?