A few years back, a Premier League club found themselves in a moral dilemma because one of their academy players was creating problems behind the scenes. The boy was talented enough to have a chance of a successful career. But his behaviour was erratic and showed no sign of improvement. It went on long enough for psychiatric reports to be ordered and the prognosis was that he had a disorder – possibly ADHD – that needed medication.
The problem for the club was that some of the drugs were prohibited, meaning that if he took them he could not continue as a footballer and would have to be cut free. That left the club with two choices: go with the medical opinion or try to find another way and, in effect, ignore the professional advice.
They went for the second option, arguing that he was better in their care than out of it, and no doubt there will be plenty who agree they had little alternative. Equally, it isn’t too difficult to understand why others might feel uncomfortable that a football club with a teenage boy in their care should be effectively tearing up prescriptions that way. The club wanted to keep it quiet but when other authorities heard about it there were questions about whether the boy was being cared for properly. For the club, admitting they were denying a player important medication was not easy.
Not every case is that complicated, but it is an example of the kind of issues that confront clubs when it comes to football’s anti-doping regulations. It is complicated at the best of times and the advice generally goes by one simple rule: don’t even take a headache pill without checking. Players are given advice cards, designed to fit into wallets so they can always be carried around. Booklets are sent to parents. There are 24/7 helplines. Go to any training ground and the Football Association’s posters will be on the walls. One is for a pot of muscle supplements called “Mega Contaminated” to point out the dangers of buying without knowledge. Another shows a shirt hanging from a dressing-room peg, with “4 Years” emblazoned on the back – a reminder that from this season breaking the rules can lead to a four-year ban.
Paddy Kenny’s nine-month ban, having been found with ephedrine in his system, originated from buying a cough medicine. Kolo Touré’s six‑month suspension came from taking his wife’s dieting pills and a less-publicised case – though probably the most serious of all of those in football – is that of the Fleetwood Town player Gerard Kinsella, who allowed his cousin, a taxi driver, to give him two injections to relieve the pain of a shoulder injury, without properly investigating what was being pumped into his system. It turned out to be nandrolone, an anabolic steroid, and Kinsella was banned for two years.
What there has never been in England is the classic case of a player being caught deliberately trying to beat the system with performance-enhancing drugs. But it would be naive to think that kind of cheating cannot happen – and maybe it already is. There is too much wealth in the industry, too much to gain and too many players for too few places, to think football isn’t vulnerable in the same way as other sports, and it is certainly worth paying attention when someone within the profession is candid enough to admit that, yes, he does fear that is what is coming next.
Stephen Hunt has seen, close up, the pressures that exist in football and how difficult it is for a young player to make the grade. He has spent 17 years as a professional, winning 39 caps for Republic of Ireland in the process, with spells at Brentford, Reading, Wolves, Hull and Ipswich. He also writes a column for the Irish Independent and in the last one he noted the contrast between what it was like when he was starting his own career and what it is like in today’s sport, how much harder the younger pros work in the gym these days to get an edge and, of course, the vast sums of money that can be made from even a moderate career.
“This got me thinking and it got me worrying. There is such pressure to succeed these days that I don’t know how much further it can go. Well, I do. That’s what I’m worried about,” Hunt wrote. “I worry that things will change. That players will decide they’ve done the gym work like everyone else, but they still need more. They still need something to make them stand out. We’ve seen in cycling, athletics, rugby and other sports where that can take you. Football isn’t a special case.”
If any of this sounds like scaremongering, it is worth trying to imagine the pressures for, say, a player aged 17 to 20 when everything is so tantalisingly close but there is still the fear of failure and all the normal issues such as injuries, loss of form and – don’t underestimate this one – the footballer’s insecurity.
Kinsella’s story is the case in point. He was once just a normal football-obsessed kid – “chasing a dream” is how he remembers it – in the same Everton youth team as Ross Barkley. Yet his body failed him and, looking through the FA’s paperwork into the case, it doesn’t need a genius to draw a link to the line detailing how a “woeful catalogue of serious injuries has emasculated his short career”.
David Moyes released him at Everton after three injury-ravaged years as a professional. Plymouth gave Kinsella a chance to resurrect his career but a knee injury ended with his contract being terminated. Kinsella did not have a club throughout the entire 2011-12 season and, at the age of 20, was suffering from depression. Then the same demoralising grind of injury and rehabilitation kicked in at Fleetwood. He dislocated his shoulder, for a fifth time, and feared it needed a third operation and another long layoff. Kinsella saw his career slipping away: the glamour, the riches, the lifestyle. At the FA hearing he described what happened next as “desperation and stupidity”. Undoubtedly, the desperation came first.
There was a bit of that as well from Touré. He was 30 when he was banned, an experienced pro who had appeared in an anti-doping film, but he had a problem controlling his weight and the doctors who saw him as part of the FA’s disciplinary hearing concluded he was “obsessed” with a “misplaced perception that he was fat”. Touré played for Manchester City, one of six centre-halves competing for two positions, and in football it can be a big deal being a few pounds overweight, particularly at a club with so much competition for places, with the newspapers jammed full of stories about the next best thing who might be signing.
Touré’s thinking was so badly blurred he took the pills, containing bendroflumethiazide, without making the relevant checks and relying on fourth-hand information. The FA’s report details how he simply “asked his wife to ask her friend, who asked a receptionist, who asked a doctor”.Touré was so desperate to get an edge he “repeatedly, and for some time, took medication contained in a medicine bottle labelled only [with] a white sticky label on which was printed ‘water tablets x21’. Frankly, they could have been anything.”
These are rare cases but it is certainly startling that a recent study, commissioned by Uefa, showed that 68 out of 879 players competing in the Champions League, the Europa League and two European Championships, from 2008 to 2013, gave urine tests that indicated possible steroid abuse, and that would have triggered a full investigation under new rules brought in this month.
Hunt’s point is this: how far will the modern-day player go to get an edge? And it is a relevant question when it is harder than ever to make the grade. There is more money in the game than ever before and, in turn, a culture where there are far too many mums and dads, and all sorts of other relatives, banking on it setting them up for life. Agents, too. Their industry is no longer regulated and it is not hugely encouraging, to say the least, that a senior FA executive privately described the business recently as turning into “the wild west”.
Those agents – and I’ve spoken to one or two in recent weeks who come across as wannabe gangsters – are increasingly scouring academies to get the players as early as possible, sometimes at primary school age. They stand to make a great deal if these players eventually make it; alternatively, they stand to lose out if the opposite happens. Who knows how far they will go to help ensure they get their payday and how impressionable some of these kids, chasing the dream, might be?
If anyone needs Sir Alex’s media training call, then it’s José
Sir Alex Ferguson has apparently developed a strange habit in retirement, whereby he watches other managers’ press conferences and then rings them up if he feels, perhaps, they should have said something different or their body language was wrong. “I love it,” he explains. “But there are times when I’m watching and I’ll think: ‘Ach, don’t say that.’”
Alan Pardew – a manager Ferguson rates highly – took one call when he was in his last few months at Newcastle United telling him he needed to start showing his abrasive side and “be Alan Pardew again”.
Nigel Pearson was another one Ferguson dialled, the advice being that he looked too relaxed at a time when Leicester City were stranded at the bottom of the league. Pearson was reminded that the club’s supporters probably wanted to see the manager was concerned. From that point onwards, Ferguson says, Pearson changed his demeanour.
Whether it was good advice, bearing in mind Pearson’s infamous attack on an “ostrich” journalist and subsequent apology, is another matter. It is certainly amazing, however, to see the hold Ferguson still has over many managers.
One member of the League Managers Association reminds me that the organisation once shifted its meeting to Manchester United’s training ground purely so that Ferguson could attend (Ferguson then left early, apparently, to go to see Peterborough, then managed by his son Darren, play).
But would Ferguson ring José Mourinho? Probably not, but if anyone can get through to Chelsea’s manager it would be appreciated if they gave it a go. Mourinho press conferences are starting to border on tedious and a man with his charisma and qualities should never be in that position.
Bundesliga all too easy for Bayern
Robert Lewandowski’s five-goal haul against Wolfsburg, all in the space of nine minutes and featuring the fastest hat-trick in Bundesliga history, was a remarkable demonstration of centre-forward play. Yet what does it say for German football that the top team can thrash the side in third that way? Bayern won the league by 19 points last season and 25 the year before that. After seven games this season, they have an immaculate record of wins, with 23 goals scored and only three conceded. We all know what happens from this point onwards. The Bundesliga has many things going for it but the most important aspect – a real sense of competition – is not one.
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