Soccer and Doping? Don't Ask, Don't Tell.

By MUSA OKWONGA

The New York Times, June 25, 2018

Like the consumers of fast-food chicken nuggets, football fans may be less than comfortable knowing how our fun is made.

The World Cup continues to thrill, with exhilarating wins by England, Germany, Belgium and Colombia, and an equally exciting draw between Japan and Senegal. Away from the field, though, an old controversy has once again rumbled into view: doping.

The Mail on Sunday, a British newspaper, reported over the weekend that a Russian player, Ruslan Kambolov, who was excluded from his country’s World Cup squad because of injury, had tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs 18 months ago. And according to the paper, it gets worse: Both the Russian authorities and FIFA kept this information quiet.

FIFA has swiftly rejected this version of events, stating that “insufficient evidence was found to assert an antidoping rule violation by any footballer.” But in some ways, it doesn’t matter. Even before FIFA’s denial, the story attracted little scandal. Among football fans these days, reports of doping are generally met with a shrug.

Why? Well, for one thing, drug use isn’t new to football. In a 2013 interview, Johnny Rep, who starred for Ajax and Holland in the 1970s, said that it was common to take amphetamines before matches. More recently, there were allegations that Spanish players had enhanced their performance by receiving artificially oxygenated blood. FIFA itself has expelled players from the World Cup for drug use: Willie Johnston of Scotland in 1978 and most infamously Argentina’s Diego Maradona in 1994.

Given all of that, and the steady stream of doping stories across professional sports in recent years, many fans may at this point have anger fatigue. On some level, maybe we’ve just accepted that drug use is an inevitable part of elite sports.

It’s not hard to reach this conclusion. Football, for one, is astonishingly competitive, and it’s getting faster all the time. The margins for success are getting smaller and smaller. As Amit Katwala has noted, “In 2006, when Germany finished third in the World Cup, their players spent an average of 2.9 seconds on the ball each time they had it. By 2014, when they won, that had fallen to just 0.9 seconds.” In other words, footballers at the highest level now have much less time to pass the ball before they are tackled.

What’s more, the sheer number of games that teams must play means that there is an extraordinary toll taken on players’ endurance. Each infinitesimal advantage counts, and unfathomable amounts of money and prestige are at stake. It’s hardly surprising that the pressure to seek illegal advantage, through artificially increasing stamina, may at times feel overwhelming.

And yet it sometimes seems that football and its fans have a “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy in place when it comes to doping. Like the consumers of delicious fast-food chicken nuggets, we may be less than comfortable knowing how our meal has been produced.

There may come a time when authorities take a more pragmatic view, assume that doping has become an inescapable part of the game, and seek not to outlaw it but to regulate it. Until then, though, it looks as if we may have to maintain the veil of innocence around the beautiful game, even as it continues to unravel.

Mr. Okwonga is a writer, poet and football fanatic. He has published two books on the sport.