Guardiola, City … And A Brief History Of Doping Around The World.
It all comes back to cycling.
In 2004, a Spanish cyclist named Jesús Manzano gave an interview to the media in which he laid out numerous allegations of doping involving his own team and others.
One of the men most heavily implicated in this scandal was a doctor named Eufemiano Fuentes.
Within two years, he was standing trial for his part in one of the most dreadful scandals in a sport which has had more of them than you can count. Amongst the evidence seized during the investigation into his actions were dozens of “blood bags” containing plasma from athletes who he had treated in the course of his wide-ranging experiments.
The focus of all the attention was on cycling.
The tendrils reaching into other sports were never fully examined.
A verdict on some of those other sports is awaited by WADA to this day, but Manzano himself implicated footballers as being involved … and he named two clubs in particular.
They were Barcelona and Real Madrid.
You can see why Spanish authorities aren’t terribly interested in getting to the bottom of that.
During the period being covered by the investigations, a certain Pepe Guardiola was at Barcelona, as a player. He left in 2001, to play for Brescia, and it was shortly afterwards that he tested positive for nandrolone, a banned substance.
He was not the only player who was connected to Barcelona at the time who had; seven months before, our old friend Frank De Boer had also scored a positive test for the same drug.
The doctor who had worked with both players was Ramon Segura; he gave evidence in the Guardiola case where he claimed that he had given both players the substance by accident … this was a defence the player didn’t even bother to use.
The other members of his medical team claimed that nandrolone could occur naturally in the blood at low levels … and when the case was finally resolved – and Guardiola cleared – that, indeed, was the finding of the courts.
But Segura, who had been willing to take that whopper to a tribunal with him, actually ended up back at Barcelona when Guardiola was appointed manager there.
Over the course of that spell, Pepe built the most successful football team ever to play the game.
He went from there to Bayern Munich, where he worked with “Healing Hans” and his medical team who had helped build that club into such perennial winners winning the Bundesliga with any other club had proved more difficult than winning the SPL with a club outside Celtic Park.
It seems likely that Guardiola has been at the centre of the doping culture since he was a player, in all its various guises, and what he learned in Italy, Spain and Germany, about the “science” of performance enhancements he brought to Manchester City with him … and almost since the day and hour he got there, his club has been at the centre of allegations.
Take Dr Andrew Johnson, who worked with their youth academy.
In 2018 he was reported to the UK doping agency for putting fraudulent information on a TUE form for a player at Bury, where he was also working. TUE stands for therapeutic use exemption; literally, it’s a “legit” reason why a sports doctor might prescribe a banned substance to a player. The form in question allowed an un-named footballer at that club to use a banned substance, believed to be testosterone, on “medical grounds”.
In 2017, Manchester City were accused of having violated the testing regulations three times in five months, and also ignored a legal letter which was sent to them weeks before the final offence.
These cases revealed just some of the way that a club like City can manipulate the system to avoid “random” testing … in one case a player missed a test because his hotel address was no longer correct. In another, reserve players were not tested because the club didn’t inform the testing agency that they had been given the day off training. In the third case, the club failed to inform testers about a first team training session that they had added to the schedule.
For these breaches, they were fined a modest £35,000. It’s chump change when you consider the costs of losing a top footballer or footballers to a positive drug test for months.
Then, in 2019, there was the strange case of Riyad Mahrez, who the FA specifically chose for a drug test after he’d had an unspecified operation to clear up a “breathing issue.”
We have no way of knowing, either, whether City players were amongst the 13 cases which the English FA covered up between 2012-2016, on the grounds that the players had used “recreational drugs” and should get “counselling and rehabilitation” instead of punishment.
Don’t forget, that English football had a doctor linked to a high-profile doping case – Rob Chakraverty – at the very heart of the FA itself … he’s now at Wolves.
What do we know – what do we really know – about football’s relationship with doping?
Well, we know from an article by Miguel Delaney that it’s alleged that Everton’s 1963 league title winning team were all on Benzedrine, Drinamyl and other substances.
That Stanley Matthews used to dope before games.
We know that Inter Milan’s team of the 1960’s – yes, the one we beat in Lisbon – were using amphetamines which their notorious manager got antsy about providing in pill form and started diluting into the coffee; they even had a name for it. “Il Caffe Herrera.”
And we know now that Celtic were victims in the Champions Cup in 1970, because Feynoord were doping all the way through that campaign, with up to eight players at a time on performance enhancing drugs during that run.
How do we know that?
Because Rinus Israel, their captain, admitted it years later, when it was too late to do any damned thing about it.
To pretend it doesn’t happen now is crazy.
And since caffeine fell off the banned list in 2004, as Azzalin pointed out in his paper on the subject, its use has exploded across sports in general and cycling and football in particular.
Which brings us full circle to Germany, where they’ve elevated its use to an art form, and finally to Anfield and Jurgen Klopp and from there, at last, to Ibrox itself.