Football and doping

[Foot Long Hot Dog]

Drugs in football compared to athletics is comparing apples with pears.

If football has an issue with drugs it's virtually confined to recreational as opposed to performance enhancing.
Roids could be in there somewhere I suppose, but drugs are largely inert in terms of football, as they can't effect the prime factor which is obviously the ability you have in your feet.

 

[Ashtonian]

Well if Pienaar is on drugs then they are not exactly performance enhancing!
TBH, I have seen guys playing amateur football passing around a few pills before a game. Not sure what they were but you'd imagine with the money and pressure involved there would be a big temptation to use drugs to a) speed recovery and b) provide more endurance.
I've never heard of drugs testing in football, has anyone?
Here in Oz, there have been major scandals with Rugby League and AFL clubs caught systematically running performance enhancement programs.

Aye there is spot tests apparantly done behind the scenes. Rio Ferninand was famously banned for not attending one a fair while back.

I don't think there is a huge clamp down on the matter, and i would assume from leaked stories over the years that it can be dealt with in house wothout the word getting out, ala my theory of why peinnar seems to vanish off the radar over his time here.

 

[Jacko93]

The one that always makes me wonder is when players are off for 3 month, 6 months, for what is essentially a small inconsequential injury.

Basically, what I'm saying is, I'm almost certain that Jack Wilshere is on the beak. He likely has a line just to get himself up to have a cup of English breakfast tea.

 

[The Esk]

Albert Dunlop once said Everton won the league in 1962-63 with the help of Benzedrine. They were regularly distributed in the dressing room and most of the players were taking them plus they could have as many as they liked. All I'm trying to say is that its gone on for a long time in sport.

From the Liverpool Echo - pretty damming headline given that Albert Dunlop was considered an unreliable witness and the allegations were completely denied by theBoard at the time.

How Everton won the league on performance enhancing pills: the sordid tale of drugs and football

It is not a new problem.

And Everton have been implicated - and apparently found out - in the past.

Perhaps the most shocking instance was in the 1960s, when the Sunday People newspaper “exposed” Everton’s title-winning team of 1962/63 as being driven by amphetamine use - and more specifically Benzedrine.

Quote marks are used because the People’s whistle blower, Everton goalkeeper Albert Dunlop, was later claimed to have been an unreliable witness and driven by payment for his story dangled in front of him by the Sunday newspaper.

But at the time the story was sensational.

Written by People journalist Michael Gibbert and published in 1964, it claimed amphetamine use among Everton players in the 1961/62 season and during their championship-winning season of 1962/63.

Players were reported to have taken the drug Driamyl, popularly known as Purple Hearts, and Benzendrine, before games for performance and recreationally at parties in the evening after games.

Dunlop, nearing the end of his playing career, said: “I cannot remember how they first came to be offered to us. But they were distributed in the dressing rooms. We didn’t have to take them but most of the players did.

"The tablets were mostly white but once or twice they were yellow. They were used through the 1961/62 season and the championship season which followed it.

“Drug-taking had previously been virtually unnamed in the club. But once it had started we could have as many tablets as we liked. On match days they were handed out to most players as a matter of course. Soon some of the players could not do without the drug.”


http://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/spor...s/how-everton-won-league-performance-10426058

 

[JimmyJeffers]

It would be difficult to imagine any sort of institutional steroid abuse within a specific club as so many players and staff are involved there most likely would be a whistle blower at some point. However, it is surprising that no premier league player has been found to be using performance enhancing drugs. The amounts of money and adulation on offer must surely cause temptation. A mate of mine who used steroids reckoned that athletics was rife with steroid abuse and athletes were only caught when the 'blockers' they took, didn't work. Mind he was full of it and had a head like a swollen thumb

 

[jal123]

Barcelona have been involved with them Spanish doctors who got busted in the cycling scandals for donkeys years. Every one of them lot was smacked off their tits on epo hgh and mkat.

 

[toffeejack]

resurrected 6 years to the day.

The Ferdinand incident was dodgy as sin, i always thought the sentence was leniant.

I remember reading an amazing fictional childrens? book about the mixing of drugs with football to create super players. I remember it used premier league clubs and merged them together.

was a pretty great book, but never remember the name.

Football is iffy in many ways, the fact no premier league player has been found to contain performance enhancers either suggests it's been covered up or nowhere enough testing is carried out.

 

[Username]

Of course there are drugs in football.....

Onto him in the background nailing a sly thumb there aswell!

 

[Caolam]

One man's drug is another man's supplement.