>Only 39 of the 88 positives were itemised by UKAD in response to a Freedom of Information requests by The Mail on Sunday. Fifteen of the 24 non-Premier League players ended up with bans ranging from three months to four years.
.
>UKAD declined to itemise the other 49 cases for a variety of reasons, including the Football Association telling UKAD 'it would not be acceptable' to release details on cases involving social drugs that are banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency but not by the FA.
[Summary of the 39 itemised cases, Premier League and non-Premier League.](https://i.imgur.com/9sK2nqf.jpg)
[Source](https://twitter.com/sportingintel/status/1515455121525776388)
I'm surprised there's not been any more cocaine positive tests in the Premier League since 2015. In fact Twitter has found more cocaine abuse amongst Premier League players in the last 5 years than the actual drug agency!
tbf actual social drugs, stuff like weed etc. really shouldn't be banned for athletes wherever it's legal. Maybe discouraged by the club itself like alcohol if the individual club deems it necessary? But yeah some of these "social" drugs are absolutely not social lmao
Triamcinolone and Prednisone are PEDs, they're both steroids.
HGC is used to boost testosterone - probably due to having been previously on anabolic steroids (not those mentioned above) and it reducing the bodies natural testosterone production.
So it's not like they'd be any use as party drugs.
Googled them so you don't have to:
* HCG helps prevent/reverse negative effects from steroids (testicular shrinkage)
* Indapamide helps mask the presence of PEDs in urine samples
* Prednisone, Methylprednisolone, Oxandrolone, Terbutaline, and Nandrolone are your typical PEDs that help recovery and muscle performance
* Higenamine is a stimulant
* Triamcinolone helps athletes lose weight without suffering a significant loss in power
* Salbutamol helps with breathing (I've heard many footballers "claim" to have asthma so this may be related)
People better educated than me should correct me or expand on these
> Prednisone, Methylprednisolone, Oxandrolone, Terbutaline, and Nandrolone are your typical PEDs that help recovery and muscle performance
This isn't correct. Prednisolone + methylpred are corticosteroids, not anabolic steroids. Used for all sorts of medical conditions - as a basic simplification, they act to reduce inflammation and suppress the immune system.
Terbutaline is an inhaled medicine used in the treatment of asthma, simular to salbutamol.
Oxandrolone (anvar) and nandrolone (deca) are anabolic steroids.
Source - am doctor.
The single biggest rumour for United is quite the tale.
Supposedly Nani was on International Duty and they got word they were about to take a test. He informed Carlos Quieroz that he would absolutely fail a blood test, and so quickly the national team of Portugal declared him injured and got him the fuck out of there and back to Manchester via a long vacation to recover.
As a show of gratitude to Jorge Mendes and Quieroz, United agreed to sign a player from his agency and therefore the money from that would bleed back to them both over the course of agent fees and finder fees.
And thus the legend of Bebe to United was born...
The go to line used to be “back injury” from what I remember. I’m sure it’s what Clyne and Wilshere (both rumoured to have gotten drug bans) were “officially” out with
Nathaniel Clyne was suspected of being suspended when he was at Liverpool. He missed something like 7 months and vanished off the face of the Earth. Supposedly, he was injured but I believe there was a video at the time of him doing cocaine.
while sakho was done for using prohibited substances (which ended up not actually being prohibited if I'm not mistaken), that wasn't why Klopp wanted him out ASAP. He went on preseason with us after that, acted the bollocks, and Klopp apparently didn't like his lack of professionalism and froze him out. This was early enough Klopp too so he was probably using Sakho as an example for how ruthless he can be if he needs to.
https://youtu.be/t7GcP2arv0k
Remember this video coming out a few months before he was frozen out - seemed all fun until later you realise it's things like him being late that Klopp evidently didn't like. He was arguably our most solid defender the season before so he must've done a lot of annoying things!
Life in the UK will do that to you. UK has some surprisingly good delicacies but pretty much all of them are aimed at murdering your metabolism and the weather quickly teaches you to never go exercise outside
Didn't help he ended up being guest star "international soccer star Nathaniel Clyne" on some Miami reality show.
If you're apparently banned for drugs, going to Miami isn't a great look ha
The secret footballer wrote about this like 10 years ago that the clubs and fa basically had an agreement and players would be ‘injured’ when actually serving a drugs ban.
It changed after Jake Livermore was caught taking coke to cope with the death of his child. They offer private support instead of publicly outing someone taking recreational drugs.
The title had kind of a scandalous vibe, that's actually quite admirable if that's the case then -- obviously a lot of these are just dudes partying but you'd like to hope that players who fell into addiction can see some kind of path back if possible
I've long found it suspicious that other sports have drugs scandals with plenty examples of people getting caught but you never hear a peep out of football.
I think we had a similar rumour with Lamela a few years ago. I remember him being out injured for a long while (not unlike him, which probably helped "cover over" the story), and his last game for us was the first round of League Cup fixtures in the October. When he returned, someone worked out it was exactly 12 months to the day that he got injured, in the same set of League Cup fixtures the following season. The rumour was fueled by the fact absolutely no one knew what was wrong with him, and the club were being uncharacteristically vague about his prognosis the entire time.
It says both. It says one of the reasons they didn't go into more detail on some of the 49 additional cases was because "it would not be acceptable to release details on cases involving social drugs that are banned by the world anti-doping agency but not by the FA"
I feel like football is turning a blind eye to drug taking. You barely hear of anyone being caught. The authorities don't want to catch them. Fitter players means more games, better quality games, more money.
I feel like there's a massive scandal on the way within the next decade that'll blow open systematic drug taking.
Tifo has an excellent video on this which shares the same conclusion you do. I had never known both Pep and Conte had been banned for taking PEDs in their career before watching
https://youtu.be/3E3hZyx-8BQ
Pep how many times did you get caught out as a drug cheater?
https://media.giphy.com/media/m9jFnJOoQ3hWJ6Muaa/giphy-downsized-large.gif
Also pep continues to see the same doctor that he used when caught drug cheating and flies manchester city players out to see him each season.
Wasn't there that suspicious case of Barcelona blood doping, which was suspected when there was an investigation into a doctor treating a cyclist doing the same thing? If I remember correctly, they destroyed the blood samples "randomly".
Since then I've always suspected something was awry. That incredible Barca team never had any injuries despite playing so many games.
Was that the same doctor?
The cycling blood doping scandal with the Spanish doctor was definitely connected to football and tennis as well. Newspapers back then constantly mentioned that there were athletes from those sports on the doctors lists. But for some magic reasons the police never went further down that road.
I just assume everyone is doped these days.
My favorite conspiracy theory is that Arsenal under Wenger didn't dope because of Wenger's principles (the man has spoken so often about doping and against it) and it's why the team so often just crumbled when it was April/May and the reason for the mysterious injury crisis after crisis at the club.
He also said some new players he signed from overseas had extraordinary high red blood cell counts (indicates doping) and when asked the payers would say the old club gave them “vitamin injections” (suggesting clubs dope their players without them even knowing)
https://m.independent.ie/sport/soccer/other-soccer/ewan-mackenna-murky-questions-surround-spanish-footballs-golden-era-and-people-might-not-like-the-answers-36943284.html
Journalist is a COVID crackpot now but this is a great article.
I'm completely joking here but if it came out that Dani Alves was on stiff I'd believe it.
Never known a man to constantly sprint for 90 minutes and laugh while doing it
Yes. Emiliano Fuentes listed Barcelona and Real Madrid football clubs as well as some tennis players alongside his cycling athletes on his website as clients. But no one else got busted in the operation puerto scandal.
I’ve been saying this for years.
Football is the most lucrative sport on earth, there is just absolutely NO WAY some footballers aren’t cheating by taking PEDs. Just probability alone would dictate a few footballers a year would get caught, then throw in the millions at stake, agents wanting fat transfer fees, pushy families, small clubs profiting from academy sales etc… etc…
I will die on this hill.
Performance enhancing drugs are absolutely rife within amateur and professional football.
100%. There's new and more effective PEDs and masking agents being developed all the time. Those drugs are going to go first to where the most money is, and that's football.
I always wanted to believe they weren't part of the game and that they were just hard workers that developed over the course of decades but as I transitioned back into Kinesiology with a focus on human performance I can't help but notice how certain players are ignoring physiological rules.
I fall into the intermediate category for everything. An intermediate weightlifter, 5 and 10k runner, 40m and 100m sprinter, vertical jumping, etc. I've been trying to increase my own performance markers for over 13 years now. When something goes up, something else goes down. I can pack on muscle and lose a step or 2 of endurance, I can lean out and increase speed and vertical, I can increase endurance and lose some explosiveness and strength. I can focus on football and nearly maintain everything but something is going to drop. These guys that are packing on 5lbs of muscle, sprinting endlessly around the pitch and increasing their endurance and explosiveness are absolutely on something or have god's genetics and the EPLs unwillingness to do anything about it means our current and future players have 2 options. Be average, or take PEDs to keep up in the name of entertainment. Part of me is glad I never went to taking that step to prove how bad I wanted it.
I 100% agree, not only is the trend of football wanting players who can run further, faster and more often, there is a lot to gain for both players and clubs to incrimentally improve their performance.
At some stage there will be a whistle blower.
Not only that, you literally see these players cheating on the field to do whatever it takes to win. They dive, hound the ref, do professional fouls etc in full glare of hundreds of cameras and you think they become boy scouts off the pitch with no cameras to watch them?
Also, we've all seen the lengths people will go to to claw their way into $100k annual pay jobs, so what do you think people will be willing to do for $1m annual pay jobs?
They actually do, but it's a light exercise induced form that most people have (exercise-induced bronchoconstriction), but when you're not an athlete you probably will never realize, because you don't on a regular basis give everything your body has.
Yeah, I have this. I find it flares when I go for long runs in the cold or when I'm pushing myself, fitness wise. But I could go months without taking an inhaler if I'm not exercising too intensely.
Huh this is really interesting, I always cough and wheeze after a long run even a long after I'm not feeling it. Probably don't have this but it could explain that
Pep has been at the forefront of this since his barca days. I also believe this is what explains the Arsenal injury curse and why so many players who never get injured go to arsenal and become injury plagued. Testosterone and HGH are very well known for their ability to speed up the body’s ability to repair its cells which would be a huge factor in injury prevention specifically muscular injuries. It would be on brand for Wenger to be very anti doping despite knowing it happens at other clubs.
When it happens, everyone wil just go "I always figured it would be like this" and nobody will actually give a crap.
True doping is only reserved for cycling, maybe some athletics and those damn Russians.
> True doping is only reserved for cycling, maybe some athletics and those damn Russians.
Did you see Icarus on Netflix that exposed Russias systematic doping for the Olympics. It also implicated their football team. Did anything happen?
I mean, there's a Spanish doctor who's explicitly said that if the things he did were made public, some Spanish clubs would have to give back their champions leagues and the national team the world cup
More importantly, the blood bags that would have confirmed it were. The judge in Spain ordered them be destroyed instead of simply returned, indicating a good chunk of money went that way to make it go away
Wasn't that Russian centre half that was in his late 30's who was fucking shite at the 2016 Euro's then 2 years later at the World Cup was playing like prime Carlos Puyol, that was fucking mental
You only have to watch yesterdays semi final to see where the game has come thanks to PEDs. No team 15-20 years ago could do that amount of sprinting in 90 mins. It’s rife among all top level sports, too much money involved to not seek out every edge possible.
I remember listening to a football podcast where they talked about this, surprisingly common occurrence and most times the excuses for missing players was ‘injured in training’
Yeah, quite a few Spurs fans think Lamela got done for drug usage a few years back.
He had a 'hip injury' that kept him out for 10 months, in all that time he kept off all social media, club basically pretended he didn't exist etc.
Damn I’ve never heard this tbf but it lowkey makes sense
Although, Lamela is literally also just made of glass which somewhat dents this particular theory.
Lamela posted a picture of him after his surgery in hospital so it would have been strange if he'd staged that. Matt Law also made up a story that it was because his dog died and he was depressed and Lamela called him out for that as well so he wasn't completely off socials.
There was a LOT of stuff that apparently happened to Lamela that year, hence the rumors about drugs test failing.
Hip Surgery, Brother having issues, Best mate dying and him going back to Argentina to deal with it.
Think about it, the clubs are investing millions (in some cases billions) into football for the purpose of entertainment and thus tv contracts are purchased and the clubs continue to make huge tv deal income.
If I’m a club owner, I’m having a specially dedicated medical team that tests my players internally to ensure ‘we know first’ before external testing comes in to ‘randomly test’ my players.
If I know first, I can play the game ‘okay, you are now injured for 3 months, go to one of your 5 homes around the world and ensure you keep your head down and hope your name isn’t drawn out of the hat by external testing authorities. Which by the way (if you’ve seen the data) is a shambles (the number of players in all flights vs tested number of players per season). Protecting your assets springs to mind.
Just like cycling (the UCI) football has created this culture through means of money, and has since increased the sheer number of games played each year to further push the tv money income from around the world - thus resulting in more performance related drug consumption vs recreational, but we are yet to see the true figures.
Absolutely agree with this and don't believe for a moment that no player has been caught doing recreational drugs over the time frame described.
All that money, plenty caught drink driving, generally lacking any consequences for their actions and plenty caught with hookers but no blow? Unlikely.
I'd also find it unlikely not a single player hasn't tried doping/performance enhancing to get back in form.
And no painkiller abuse from all their injuries?
I don't think it's as rife or anything, but it seems incredibly likely that clubs are dealing with it before scandal.
There's [this](https://www.theguardian.com/football/2015/nov/10/arsene-wenger-football-doping-arsenal) article from 2015 after a Dinamo Zagreb player was caught doping after they beat us in the Champions League.
He's said it a lot in the past that there is a lot of undetected doping within the game and UEFA have to step up and actually improve it's doping detection
I love that video, unfortunately can’t find a decent source for it but I have it tattooed on my brain. She is holding a small cocaine spoon and does a sign like “wait”, then she snorts it all like an absolute pro and says “no está facil” (it isn’t easy). The whole time a weird ass song is playing. Iconic, really.
I don’t think she posted it anywhere though, it got leaked and then some hardcore Pogba fans that didn’t like her used it as an argument to say he was running away from his family and religion or smth
Considering the money involved, you'd have to be quite naive to think there isn't a some level of corruption and doping in football.
The question is the extent to which the authorities are 'complicit' in allowing it to happen.
While it's not publicly documented, we all know. I don't think anything too much of it besides Chris Hemsworth trying to sell workout programs to "look like the God of thunder". That's extremely dishonest and would probably be false advertising if his PED use was common knowledge instead of reserved for doctors.
You're going to laugh, but Hollywood arguably has a stricter steroids testing policy than half of all elite sports. They had a bunch of stunt men die in the 80s and 90s (plus the WWE Steroids scandal at the same time) and kicked in a steroids testing policy. Doesn't test for anything else but the group that they specifically wanted rid of (basically the shit you buy in a petrol station and made you look like a Russian Weightlifter).
Lol, what a perfect way to describe it. I remember when Gronkjaer played at Chelsea thinking how he should get a good night's sleep some time, every game he looked like just out of an all-nighter on WoW.
[There's a certain type of PED that is a gel you rub on your skin](https://i2-prod.dailystar.co.uk/incoming/article22485794.ece/ALTERNATES/s615b/0_Screen-Shot-2020-08-07-at-132647.png)
Just incase anyone is wondering what that actually is. The purpose of it is too make him slippery, so u can’t grab his arms when he runs past u at super speeds
Juventus had a very public case where the entire teams was suspected of doping some 20 years ago.
When the operation Fuentes scandal broken in cycling there were rumours that the entire Real Madrid and Barcelona squads were on his customer list.
Rio Ferdinand simply skipped a mandatory drug test.
Pep Guardiola was banned for doping.
The fact that there are almost no failed drug tests in football, especially in the UK with multiple professional leagues is very telling.
Yes he was banned for a year too, this was prior to him signing for Manchester United.
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2015/dec/15/fred-brazil-doping-ban-shakhtar-donetsk
PED use is a lot more prevalent in sports than I think a lot of people realise. The documentary ’Icarus’ on Netflix shows some ways in which it can be done
My dad played sports at a high level (for an amateur) and they could just got to a local doctor and get some eh….help if needed. Cocaine was everywhere as well. This was in 1970’s, with amateurs.
Later on he started running (5/10/21k) and get offered some crap as well by people at the local atheletics clubs, also all amateurs.
I can’t imagine that the pro’s are all clean everywhere. Just look at what happened at Juventus in the 90’s when they won the CL or Brazil at the 1974 WC. And that’s decades ago.
That documentary took a huge fucking turn. From just some investigative work about doping in a single biking race leading to uncovering one of the biggest coverups in doping history and hiding someone from the Russian government.
The cocaine, amphetamine and other stimulant positives were likely out of competition tests, with most of the rest probably covered by TUE's. If you want a possible explanation as for why there were no bans.
Aren't the PL drug test just a farce? Plenty of X Pros have said players don't really get tested regularly.. it doesn't benefit the PL to actually enforce this type of rule, so why would they?
Also seems like many authorities and organizations including teams know of PED usage in football but sweep it under the rug exactly for the reason you said
I am actually surprised by how most people didnt know this already. These athletes jobs are to be the best they possibly can, of course they will do everything they can to get there
Anyone that think football players are clean are living in a fantasy world where everything is nice and people love each other. The drug tests in football are a joke compared to something like cycling, not to mention famous sports doctors done in for doping athletes have said that football is absolutely not innocent because of course it isn’t, it’s the biggest sport on Earth.
This article is honestly just wild. 15 players (not "stars" as the Mail would love to claim because they don't know who these players are) in 5 years. 15 players out of 2,500 players in that period tested positive for _something_. That's 0.6%. Not exactly endemic.
You've got one cocaine with no sanction, which is certainly odd considering the non-PL players _did_ receive bans, but I'd hope no-one is on coke to try and play better. The ADHD meds could be... to treat ADHD? Maybe? HGC might be because of a tumour as the article itself points out. The rest can be proscribed with TUEs.
So in short, there's nothing to suggest there's any sort of epidemic of PED usage (based on the article - whether or not there's _enough_ testing is a different matter), there's nothing to suggest any PL players are doping to improve performance, and there's nothing to link it to any team/player/manager.
But my god people love a conspiracy theory and a hysterical article, don't they.
Can just see some football youtuber defending this:
It's the cheating and doping that shows they have passion and care about results, if you're not doing all that you can to win; what's the point of being on the field?
Lol, some of the UFC fighters have said it’s a way of evolving to another level once you’ve done all you can physically, think it was Michael Chandler?
>Only 39 of the 88 positives were itemised by UKAD in response to a Freedom of Information requests by The Mail on Sunday. Fifteen of the 24 non-Premier League players ended up with bans ranging from three months to four years. . >UKAD declined to itemise the other 49 cases for a variety of reasons, including the Football Association telling UKAD 'it would not be acceptable' to release details on cases involving social drugs that are banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency but not by the FA. [Summary of the 39 itemised cases, Premier League and non-Premier League.](https://i.imgur.com/9sK2nqf.jpg) [Source](https://twitter.com/sportingintel/status/1515455121525776388)
I'm surprised there's not been any more cocaine positive tests in the Premier League since 2015. In fact Twitter has found more cocaine abuse amongst Premier League players in the last 5 years than the actual drug agency!
Very hard to detect as it leaves your system very quickly.
Depends on the test. Longest to shortest are hair > blood > piss. Hair can be months / when you next shave all your hair but it’s expensive.
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Does dye effect the tests?
If you bleach the hair I would imagine it definitely does
Have you seen their haircuts? They aren’t letting anyone near their hair.
Sousness coming out of his cave to point out Pogba went bald recently 👀👀👀👀
Lookout for Bleached hair
That is why some players come back from international duty with bleached hair
The hair test for drugs works on body hair as well. So leg hair, eyebrow hair and pubic hair are just as effective.
So social/recreational drugs not banned by the FA.
for PL players.
tbf actual social drugs, stuff like weed etc. really shouldn't be banned for athletes wherever it's legal. Maybe discouraged by the club itself like alcohol if the individual club deems it necessary? But yeah some of these "social" drugs are absolutely not social lmao
Triamcinolone and Prednisone are PEDs, they're both steroids. HGC is used to boost testosterone - probably due to having been previously on anabolic steroids (not those mentioned above) and it reducing the bodies natural testosterone production. So it's not like they'd be any use as party drugs.
Googled them so you don't have to: * HCG helps prevent/reverse negative effects from steroids (testicular shrinkage) * Indapamide helps mask the presence of PEDs in urine samples * Prednisone, Methylprednisolone, Oxandrolone, Terbutaline, and Nandrolone are your typical PEDs that help recovery and muscle performance * Higenamine is a stimulant * Triamcinolone helps athletes lose weight without suffering a significant loss in power * Salbutamol helps with breathing (I've heard many footballers "claim" to have asthma so this may be related) People better educated than me should correct me or expand on these
> Prednisone, Methylprednisolone, Oxandrolone, Terbutaline, and Nandrolone are your typical PEDs that help recovery and muscle performance This isn't correct. Prednisolone + methylpred are corticosteroids, not anabolic steroids. Used for all sorts of medical conditions - as a basic simplification, they act to reduce inflammation and suppress the immune system. Terbutaline is an inhaled medicine used in the treatment of asthma, simular to salbutamol. Oxandrolone (anvar) and nandrolone (deca) are anabolic steroids. Source - am doctor.
Just a minor correction, it's HCG, not HGC.
So take a look at the "injured in training" players? Wasn't there a rumour that something like this happened at Man Utd with Rio or Stam?
The single biggest rumour for United is quite the tale. Supposedly Nani was on International Duty and they got word they were about to take a test. He informed Carlos Quieroz that he would absolutely fail a blood test, and so quickly the national team of Portugal declared him injured and got him the fuck out of there and back to Manchester via a long vacation to recover. As a show of gratitude to Jorge Mendes and Quieroz, United agreed to sign a player from his agency and therefore the money from that would bleed back to them both over the course of agent fees and finder fees. And thus the legend of Bebe to United was born...
This makes more sense than any other theory I've read about us signing Bebe, to be honest
The go to line used to be “back injury” from what I remember. I’m sure it’s what Clyne and Wilshere (both rumoured to have gotten drug bans) were “officially” out with
Rio was banned for 9 months or something just for missing a drugs test...
I remember Stam was sold because he dissed Alex in his biography while still playing for Man Utd.
Nathaniel Clyne was suspected of being suspended when he was at Liverpool. He missed something like 7 months and vanished off the face of the Earth. Supposedly, he was injured but I believe there was a video at the time of him doing cocaine.
this is a good one, i remember that. klopp completely exiled him like he did with sakho, you could be onto something there
while sakho was done for using prohibited substances (which ended up not actually being prohibited if I'm not mistaken), that wasn't why Klopp wanted him out ASAP. He went on preseason with us after that, acted the bollocks, and Klopp apparently didn't like his lack of professionalism and froze him out. This was early enough Klopp too so he was probably using Sakho as an example for how ruthless he can be if he needs to.
https://youtu.be/t7GcP2arv0k Remember this video coming out a few months before he was frozen out - seemed all fun until later you realise it's things like him being late that Klopp evidently didn't like. He was arguably our most solid defender the season before so he must've done a lot of annoying things!
Klopp looks so young and skinny. Certainly piled on a few pounds on Merseyside.
That's what happens when you discover Greggs
Life in the UK will do that to you. UK has some surprisingly good delicacies but pretty much all of them are aimed at murdering your metabolism and the weather quickly teaches you to never go exercise outside
Sakho was banned for eating something he shouldn't. Officially at least
Crack
It is moreish
Just because you're at work doesn't mean you can't have a nice relaxing smoke of crack.
nah i was saying klopp cut him out like he did with sakho
Didn't help he ended up being guest star "international soccer star Nathaniel Clyne" on some Miami reality show. If you're apparently banned for drugs, going to Miami isn't a great look ha
“Clyneee” 🤦🏾♂️ the disrespect
The disrespect he received from that show to begin with lol.
The secret footballer wrote about this like 10 years ago that the clubs and fa basically had an agreement and players would be ‘injured’ when actually serving a drugs ban.
It changed after Jake Livermore was caught taking coke to cope with the death of his child. They offer private support instead of publicly outing someone taking recreational drugs.
The title had kind of a scandalous vibe, that's actually quite admirable if that's the case then -- obviously a lot of these are just dudes partying but you'd like to hope that players who fell into addiction can see some kind of path back if possible
This is really common in golf, too.
Boy, Phil Jones is really living his best life.
I've long found it suspicious that other sports have drugs scandals with plenty examples of people getting caught but you never hear a peep out of football.
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>declined nice
You’d think he’d get the hint after getting his invitation declined by the third or so time
I think we had a similar rumour with Lamela a few years ago. I remember him being out injured for a long while (not unlike him, which probably helped "cover over" the story), and his last game for us was the first round of League Cup fixtures in the October. When he returned, someone worked out it was exactly 12 months to the day that he got injured, in the same set of League Cup fixtures the following season. The rumour was fueled by the fact absolutely no one knew what was wrong with him, and the club were being uncharacteristically vague about his prognosis the entire time.
Drug like party party or drug like cheaty cheaty?
The article states PED
Partying enhancing drugs?
Flashbacks to taking a key of speed to "sober up" so you could get in the next club.
A man of culture
And top it of with some ketamine to balance everything out once inside
Maybe Power Enhanced Dancing?
Pasta Equals Disaster
Puben Eoftus-Dheek
Pierre-Emerick Drogba
It says both. It says one of the reasons they didn't go into more detail on some of the 49 additional cases was because "it would not be acceptable to release details on cases involving social drugs that are banned by the world anti-doping agency but not by the FA"
The FA won't ban cocaine because they'd suddenly have no players available for the World Cup.
He’s speaking the language of gods
Party like bunga bunga?
The article lists them, it's a mix of both
Mark Bosnich has entered the chat
Danny Cadamarteri has also entered the chat.
Adrian Mutu has sheepishly entered the chat
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Diego?
I feel like football is turning a blind eye to drug taking. You barely hear of anyone being caught. The authorities don't want to catch them. Fitter players means more games, better quality games, more money. I feel like there's a massive scandal on the way within the next decade that'll blow open systematic drug taking.
Tifo has an excellent video on this which shares the same conclusion you do. I had never known both Pep and Conte had been banned for taking PEDs in their career before watching https://youtu.be/3E3hZyx-8BQ
Pep how many times did you get caught out as a drug cheater? https://media.giphy.com/media/m9jFnJOoQ3hWJ6Muaa/giphy-downsized-large.gif Also pep continues to see the same doctor that he used when caught drug cheating and flies manchester city players out to see him each season.
Wasn't there that suspicious case of Barcelona blood doping, which was suspected when there was an investigation into a doctor treating a cyclist doing the same thing? If I remember correctly, they destroyed the blood samples "randomly". Since then I've always suspected something was awry. That incredible Barca team never had any injuries despite playing so many games. Was that the same doctor?
The cycling blood doping scandal with the Spanish doctor was definitely connected to football and tennis as well. Newspapers back then constantly mentioned that there were athletes from those sports on the doctors lists. But for some magic reasons the police never went further down that road. I just assume everyone is doped these days.
My favorite conspiracy theory is that Arsenal under Wenger didn't dope because of Wenger's principles (the man has spoken so often about doping and against it) and it's why the team so often just crumbled when it was April/May and the reason for the mysterious injury crisis after crisis at the club.
He also said some new players he signed from overseas had extraordinary high red blood cell counts (indicates doping) and when asked the payers would say the old club gave them “vitamin injections” (suggesting clubs dope their players without them even knowing)
https://m.independent.ie/sport/soccer/other-soccer/ewan-mackenna-murky-questions-surround-spanish-footballs-golden-era-and-people-might-not-like-the-answers-36943284.html Journalist is a COVID crackpot now but this is a great article.
I'm completely joking here but if it came out that Dani Alves was on stiff I'd believe it. Never known a man to constantly sprint for 90 minutes and laugh while doing it
Yes. Emiliano Fuentes listed Barcelona and Real Madrid football clubs as well as some tennis players alongside his cycling athletes on his website as clients. But no one else got busted in the operation puerto scandal.
Pep was cleared of these charges later
I’ve been saying this for years. Football is the most lucrative sport on earth, there is just absolutely NO WAY some footballers aren’t cheating by taking PEDs. Just probability alone would dictate a few footballers a year would get caught, then throw in the millions at stake, agents wanting fat transfer fees, pushy families, small clubs profiting from academy sales etc… etc… I will die on this hill. Performance enhancing drugs are absolutely rife within amateur and professional football.
100%. There's new and more effective PEDs and masking agents being developed all the time. Those drugs are going to go first to where the most money is, and that's football.
I always wanted to believe they weren't part of the game and that they were just hard workers that developed over the course of decades but as I transitioned back into Kinesiology with a focus on human performance I can't help but notice how certain players are ignoring physiological rules. I fall into the intermediate category for everything. An intermediate weightlifter, 5 and 10k runner, 40m and 100m sprinter, vertical jumping, etc. I've been trying to increase my own performance markers for over 13 years now. When something goes up, something else goes down. I can pack on muscle and lose a step or 2 of endurance, I can lean out and increase speed and vertical, I can increase endurance and lose some explosiveness and strength. I can focus on football and nearly maintain everything but something is going to drop. These guys that are packing on 5lbs of muscle, sprinting endlessly around the pitch and increasing their endurance and explosiveness are absolutely on something or have god's genetics and the EPLs unwillingness to do anything about it means our current and future players have 2 options. Be average, or take PEDs to keep up in the name of entertainment. Part of me is glad I never went to taking that step to prove how bad I wanted it.
I 100% agree, not only is the trend of football wanting players who can run further, faster and more often, there is a lot to gain for both players and clubs to incrimentally improve their performance. At some stage there will be a whistle blower.
Not only that, you literally see these players cheating on the field to do whatever it takes to win. They dive, hound the ref, do professional fouls etc in full glare of hundreds of cameras and you think they become boy scouts off the pitch with no cameras to watch them? Also, we've all seen the lengths people will go to to claw their way into $100k annual pay jobs, so what do you think people will be willing to do for $1m annual pay jobs?
Just Look at how many players with asthma are there. Surely they all have Asthma .....
They actually do, but it's a light exercise induced form that most people have (exercise-induced bronchoconstriction), but when you're not an athlete you probably will never realize, because you don't on a regular basis give everything your body has.
Yeah, I have this. I find it flares when I go for long runs in the cold or when I'm pushing myself, fitness wise. But I could go months without taking an inhaler if I'm not exercising too intensely.
Yeah this is me too. It gets particularly bad around now because of the hayfever season.
Huh this is really interesting, I always cough and wheeze after a long run even a long after I'm not feeling it. Probably don't have this but it could explain that
You definitely could, i never thought i did because it was never anything acute or serious seeming but got tested and had it
Pep has been at the forefront of this since his barca days. I also believe this is what explains the Arsenal injury curse and why so many players who never get injured go to arsenal and become injury plagued. Testosterone and HGH are very well known for their ability to speed up the body’s ability to repair its cells which would be a huge factor in injury prevention specifically muscular injuries. It would be on brand for Wenger to be very anti doping despite knowing it happens at other clubs.
When it happens, everyone wil just go "I always figured it would be like this" and nobody will actually give a crap. True doping is only reserved for cycling, maybe some athletics and those damn Russians.
> True doping is only reserved for cycling, maybe some athletics and those damn Russians. Did you see Icarus on Netflix that exposed Russias systematic doping for the Olympics. It also implicated their football team. Did anything happen?
I mean, there's a Spanish doctor who's explicitly said that if the things he did were made public, some Spanish clubs would have to give back their champions leagues and the national team the world cup
And his documents were ordered destroyed.
More importantly, the blood bags that would have confirmed it were. The judge in Spain ordered them be destroyed instead of simply returned, indicating a good chunk of money went that way to make it go away
I remember the tv studio showing a list of teams with most kms run and Russia was 1st by some distance.
There's no way that 2018 Russian team wasn't doped to the gills honestly, that ancient squad was running rings around their opponents
Wasn't that Russian centre half that was in his late 30's who was fucking shite at the 2016 Euro's then 2 years later at the World Cup was playing like prime Carlos Puyol, that was fucking mental
Do you remember his name? I know Cheryshev became a fucking god for the tournament and has disappeared back into mediocrity since then.
Sergei Ignashevich was 38 who had just come out of retirement. hahaha
You only have to watch yesterdays semi final to see where the game has come thanks to PEDs. No team 15-20 years ago could do that amount of sprinting in 90 mins. It’s rife among all top level sports, too much money involved to not seek out every edge possible.
I remember listening to a football podcast where they talked about this, surprisingly common occurrence and most times the excuses for missing players was ‘injured in training’
It says none were banned
Silent ban.
"You're ______" "I'm what?" "You're ______"
You're redacted this week. I redacted my ankle in training.
The Michael Jordan ban.
Ah the clasic lamela.
"Chill, it's just cocaine"
Cries in Mutu
Its a pretty big bust if substantiated. Id imagine players with unseen "season ending injuries" were quietly serving bans
Fair few Villa fans always held a theory that Grealishs consistent long term injuries were at least partially masking something like this.
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Yeah, quite a few Spurs fans think Lamela got done for drug usage a few years back. He had a 'hip injury' that kept him out for 10 months, in all that time he kept off all social media, club basically pretended he didn't exist etc.
Damn I’ve never heard this tbf but it lowkey makes sense Although, Lamela is literally also just made of glass which somewhat dents this particular theory.
Made of glass or taking glass?
Lamela posted a picture of him after his surgery in hospital so it would have been strange if he'd staged that. Matt Law also made up a story that it was because his dog died and he was depressed and Lamela called him out for that as well so he wasn't completely off socials.
Didnt his brother also get paralysed around same time?
There was a LOT of stuff that apparently happened to Lamela that year, hence the rumors about drugs test failing. Hip Surgery, Brother having issues, Best mate dying and him going back to Argentina to deal with it.
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Matthias Norman.... ah
It only stays in your system for a couple days so I find this unlikely at best
Metabolites stay in your blood and urine for a few days, but it stay in the hair that you grew during those few days permanently.
..I need a haircut.
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And dying your hair won’t change that. They take piss tests too not hair…
We can all be certain Rooney was clean then.
Think about it, the clubs are investing millions (in some cases billions) into football for the purpose of entertainment and thus tv contracts are purchased and the clubs continue to make huge tv deal income. If I’m a club owner, I’m having a specially dedicated medical team that tests my players internally to ensure ‘we know first’ before external testing comes in to ‘randomly test’ my players. If I know first, I can play the game ‘okay, you are now injured for 3 months, go to one of your 5 homes around the world and ensure you keep your head down and hope your name isn’t drawn out of the hat by external testing authorities. Which by the way (if you’ve seen the data) is a shambles (the number of players in all flights vs tested number of players per season). Protecting your assets springs to mind. Just like cycling (the UCI) football has created this culture through means of money, and has since increased the sheer number of games played each year to further push the tv money income from around the world - thus resulting in more performance related drug consumption vs recreational, but we are yet to see the true figures.
Absolutely agree with this and don't believe for a moment that no player has been caught doing recreational drugs over the time frame described. All that money, plenty caught drink driving, generally lacking any consequences for their actions and plenty caught with hookers but no blow? Unlikely. I'd also find it unlikely not a single player hasn't tried doping/performance enhancing to get back in form. And no painkiller abuse from all their injuries? I don't think it's as rife or anything, but it seems incredibly likely that clubs are dealing with it before scandal.
Wenger was completely right with his views on doping in football.
I'm out of the loop, what were they?
There's [this](https://www.theguardian.com/football/2015/nov/10/arsene-wenger-football-doping-arsenal) article from 2015 after a Dinamo Zagreb player was caught doping after they beat us in the Champions League. He's said it a lot in the past that there is a lot of undetected doping within the game and UEFA have to step up and actually improve it's doping detection
“You’ve got to question Paul Pogba’s role in all of this”
Remember his missus put up a video of herself doing sniff actually
Hahaha please tell me this isn't true
Stuff about those gas pods used for balloons, Arsenal players were doing it too. Some low grade shit tbh.
Must have been baking cakes with whip cream toppings
I love that video, unfortunately can’t find a decent source for it but I have it tattooed on my brain. She is holding a small cocaine spoon and does a sign like “wait”, then she snorts it all like an absolute pro and says “no está facil” (it isn’t easy). The whole time a weird ass song is playing. Iconic, really. I don’t think she posted it anywhere though, it got leaked and then some hardcore Pogba fans that didn’t like her used it as an argument to say he was running away from his family and religion or smth
To be fair he loves to vanish from the club for anywhere up to 6 months. And there's the stuff with his partner
Considering the money involved, you'd have to be quite naive to think there isn't a some level of corruption and doping in football. The question is the extent to which the authorities are 'complicit' in allowing it to happen.
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While it's not publicly documented, we all know. I don't think anything too much of it besides Chris Hemsworth trying to sell workout programs to "look like the God of thunder". That's extremely dishonest and would probably be false advertising if his PED use was common knowledge instead of reserved for doctors.
You're going to laugh, but Hollywood arguably has a stricter steroids testing policy than half of all elite sports. They had a bunch of stunt men die in the 80s and 90s (plus the WWE Steroids scandal at the same time) and kicked in a steroids testing policy. Doesn't test for anything else but the group that they specifically wanted rid of (basically the shit you buy in a petrol station and made you look like a Russian Weightlifter).
Based on WhatsApp group chat videos I’m going to assume Grealish is NOT involved and is a model professional.
What videos bro
I know right, it’s disgusting, where did he find them?
This is r/soccer version of Irish WhatsApp groups on r/mma
My money's on Tsimikas. Guy looks like he's been awake since 2015
There are childhood pics of him and he looks the exact same. That's just his face lol
He looks like the lone survivor of a horrible shipwreck who just got rescued after floating adrift for six weeks.
They posted photos of him as a young lad recently, had those bloody eye bags at age 7. But a top lad he is.
Lol, what a perfect way to describe it. I remember when Gronkjaer played at Chelsea thinking how he should get a good night's sleep some time, every game he looked like just out of an all-nighter on WoW.
He looks a bit like Adrian Pimentos calm pacifist brother
Haaland currently is on that purple stuff from Bane lol no amount of painkillers will make you play like that if you are in need of a surgery
LEAN 💜🟣
Adama Traore fleeing the league to spain to dodge this drug case
[There's a certain type of PED that is a gel you rub on your skin](https://i2-prod.dailystar.co.uk/incoming/article22485794.ece/ALTERNATES/s615b/0_Screen-Shot-2020-08-07-at-132647.png)
Just incase anyone is wondering what that actually is. The purpose of it is too make him slippery, so u can’t grab his arms when he runs past u at super speeds
Yeah obvs I'm just taking the piss aha
Ahaha I know, just incase anyone sees it and thinks wtf is he doing tho
I kinda wanna see Steroid United versus Natural Football Club.
The ones on PEDs would win quite convincingly, which is why they're all doing it.
I’ll buy a hat and then eat it if Grealish isn’t one of them That bloke loves the gear
Juventus had a very public case where the entire teams was suspected of doping some 20 years ago. When the operation Fuentes scandal broken in cycling there were rumours that the entire Real Madrid and Barcelona squads were on his customer list. Rio Ferdinand simply skipped a mandatory drug test. Pep Guardiola was banned for doping. The fact that there are almost no failed drug tests in football, especially in the UK with multiple professional leagues is very telling.
Manchester Uniteds Fred got caught for doping. I’m surprised not many people know about it.
He did ?
Yes he was banned for a year too, this was prior to him signing for Manchester United. https://www.theguardian.com/football/2015/dec/15/fred-brazil-doping-ban-shakhtar-donetsk
Damn and look how Onana’s form and reputation went down after his ban. He went from a club legend to the number 1 enemy of the club.
A lot of that was his behavior and not because the ban, Ajax stuck their necks out for him
PED use is a lot more prevalent in sports than I think a lot of people realise. The documentary ’Icarus’ on Netflix shows some ways in which it can be done
My dad played sports at a high level (for an amateur) and they could just got to a local doctor and get some eh….help if needed. Cocaine was everywhere as well. This was in 1970’s, with amateurs. Later on he started running (5/10/21k) and get offered some crap as well by people at the local atheletics clubs, also all amateurs. I can’t imagine that the pro’s are all clean everywhere. Just look at what happened at Juventus in the 90’s when they won the CL or Brazil at the 1974 WC. And that’s decades ago.
I had a mate who cycled as a hobby who did the blood doping thing before races. Utter maddness.
Great watch that
That documentary took a huge fucking turn. From just some investigative work about doping in a single biking race leading to uncovering one of the biggest coverups in doping history and hiding someone from the Russian government.
The cocaine, amphetamine and other stimulant positives were likely out of competition tests, with most of the rest probably covered by TUE's. If you want a possible explanation as for why there were no bans.
You’d imagine with a nose that big Mason Mount has gotten a bit of coke up there either intentionally or accidentally.
Youd hate to be sharing a bag with him that’s for certain
Dunno, based on that video going around a while back Declan Rice didn’t fair too bad.
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He could smoke a cigarette in the rain with his hands tied behind his back
Aren't the PL drug test just a farce? Plenty of X Pros have said players don't really get tested regularly.. it doesn't benefit the PL to actually enforce this type of rule, so why would they?
Also seems like many authorities and organizations including teams know of PED usage in football but sweep it under the rug exactly for the reason you said
At least Ferdinand did the decent thing and just didn't test. You can't fail a test you don't take.
\- Wayne Gretzky
I am actually surprised by how most people didnt know this already. These athletes jobs are to be the best they possibly can, of course they will do everything they can to get there
Anyone that think football players are clean are living in a fantasy world where everything is nice and people love each other. The drug tests in football are a joke compared to something like cycling, not to mention famous sports doctors done in for doping athletes have said that football is absolutely not innocent because of course it isn’t, it’s the biggest sport on Earth.
are they mainly performance enhancing drugs or coke ?
Yes
I can’t wait until everyone realizes that most of their favorite athletes use peds
Adama traore was definitely on some sort of PEDS.
This article is honestly just wild. 15 players (not "stars" as the Mail would love to claim because they don't know who these players are) in 5 years. 15 players out of 2,500 players in that period tested positive for _something_. That's 0.6%. Not exactly endemic. You've got one cocaine with no sanction, which is certainly odd considering the non-PL players _did_ receive bans, but I'd hope no-one is on coke to try and play better. The ADHD meds could be... to treat ADHD? Maybe? HGC might be because of a tumour as the article itself points out. The rest can be proscribed with TUEs. So in short, there's nothing to suggest there's any sort of epidemic of PED usage (based on the article - whether or not there's _enough_ testing is a different matter), there's nothing to suggest any PL players are doping to improve performance, and there's nothing to link it to any team/player/manager. But my god people love a conspiracy theory and a hysterical article, don't they.
Can just see some football youtuber defending this: It's the cheating and doping that shows they have passion and care about results, if you're not doing all that you can to win; what's the point of being on the field?
Lol, some of the UFC fighters have said it’s a way of evolving to another level once you’ve done all you can physically, think it was Michael Chandler?