Over the weekend, a report publicised by The Sunday Times found that about 8% of 879 footballers competing in European club football tournaments who were tested showed elevated levels of testosterone between 2008 and 2013.
However, European football's world governing body UEFA responded by denying that drug taking is at a "significant level" in football, citing the nature of the
Football writer Philippe Auclair joined us on Off The Ball tonight to give his take on the issue and he was surprised by the figure in the report being as low as the 8 per cent mark.
"I thought that 7.7 per cent was a remarkably low level. I was expecting perhaps more," he said.
"But the fact that you're talking about urine samples, which as we know are very easy to go about and to get around, they're not really the kind of tests that give you a clear picture of how much doping there is within the sport."
He also believes that there isn't a will to expose the full extent of doping in football from certain quarters.
"I think it is so prevalent in football that it is really not in the interest of most people, give the amount of money that is at stake to actually put the finger where it hurts and to go to the people who we know have got a serious problem in that respect - and we know them," said Auclair, who compared any major revelation to a H-Bomb for football.
"Within the game, we all talk about it, we all know who we talk about but we can't say a word about it because every time it's been about to explode, something has happened or the interests of the parties are so huge that it cannot be said and the libels laws are what you know they are. It's not something which is limited to one league or one club. It is something which I'm afraid is a pernicious presence within an awful lot of the game today. Not all of the game, certainly not and not in the Premier League where the controls are stricter than elsewhere. But it is prevalent in some other areas in the world of football."
Auclair feels football's governing bodies "could do an awful lot more to look into this" and also spoke about the case of a famous player who went for three blood transfusions in an Italian clinic, which is known about in certain football quarters, but that the difficulty of getting "incontrovertible evidence" and libel laws make it difficult to bring such cases into the public sphere.
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