MILLION pound salaries are commonplace in professional football and it’s not just the players who earn princely sums. Where there is money there are agents, sport science consultants, medical staff as well as personal doctors whose best interests are wrapped up in the players’ success on and off the pitch.

Competition for places on a team can be fierce. And, when injuries occur there is also pressure to return as quickly as poss-ible. It stands to reason, therefore, that like other sportsmen, football players might be offered, and tempted, to use banned sub- stances.

Fraser Wishart, chief executive of Professional Footballers’ Association Scotland, argues that the use of recreational drugs should be treated differently to performance enhancing ones. Nevertheless, he strongly defends the current anti- doping programme.

“I don’t say that we should be complacent in football, particularly in Scottish football, of course not. But I am not aware of instances where players have failed tests for performance enhancing drugs.

“There have been a handful of instances where they have been taking cocaine, something like that. If you are part of a team it is certainly more difficult to influence the result if you like by taking performance enhancing drugs, And I think there is quite a rigorous testing programme in place in football.

“If you are a professional football player at the highest level you have to give your whereabouts for testing which can be random at any time or any day. They can turn up at your training camp as well because they know where you are.

“There are also all sorts of different competitions, they have got the Scottish domestic competitions where you can be tested at any time. If you are playing in Europe there is testing at almost every single game,in Europe and if you’re an international player exactly the same. There is a huge testing programme for football players that is perhaps not there in other sports.”

Nobody really expects elite athletes to turn up at the Olympic Games and then test positive, says David Howman, director general of the World Anti-Doping Agency. Similarly, at these football tournaments would players be foolish enough to have banned substances in their systems and run the risk of being caught?

“I don’t think we would agree with anyone who says they don’t have a problem in their sport,” Howman insists. “There is potentially a problem in every sport because people take shortcuts to achieve notoriety or fame.

“We have had that with golf. We have had it with sports like billiards and snooker. So there is no sport that is immune and there is no country that is immune. Everybody has to be on the lookout. It’s just like many other things in our society it’s a form of cheating that goes on everywhere.”

There are certainly red flags in football. Following his team’s defeat of Arsenal in the 2015 Champions League match Dynamo Zagreb midfielder Arijan Ademi was selected for a doping test which, to the surprise of many, he failed. Stanozolol, an anabolic steroid, was found in his urine sample. The Macedonian international was handed a four-year suspension which Dynamo Zagreb are appealing.

We have come to associate steroids with weightlifters and body builders rather than lean and aerobically fit athletes. But Finnish distance runner, Marrti Vainio, was stripped of his 1984 Olympic 10,000m silver medal after testing positive for Metenolone an anabolic steroid. The Finn had been using it to recover faster from hard training.

There has also been evidence of world class sprinters using the blood booster EPO (erythropoietin) which is normally associated with endurance athletes. Kelli White won the 100m and 200m gold medals at the 2003 IAAF world athletics championships but was stripped of the titles the following year after testing positive for the stimulant Modafinil – and then admitting to using EPO as a blood booster.

According to the Wada figures, 31,242 anti-doping tests were carried out in football over the 2013-14 period with just 144 adverse analytical findings. That’s a failure rate of 0.5 percent. Not bad compared to athletics and cycling. But passing doping controls, as history has told us, is no guarantee the athlete is clean.

In 2006 the Spanish doctor Dr Eufemiano Fuentes was arrested in the infamous “Operacion Puerto” and his clinic raided. Among the items seized were 186 blood bags in frozen storage belonging to athletes and presumably to be reinfused by the good doctor. Blood doping has made a comeback in recent years as scientists hone in on better methods to detect EPO.

At his trial in 2013, Fuentes was subsequently found guilty of endangering public health for his part in doping athletes. He testified that he dealt with not only professional cyclists but also athletes from other sports including football. Former clients told reporters they had seen several players from La Liga in the clinic waiting room.

Data collected through professional cycling, athletics, cross country skiing and other sports suggests that the use of EPO, growth hormone, insulin growth factor, testosterone and other substances is widespread and that athletes are circumventing testing by “micro dosing”. This means the substance is very hard to detect. Hence, the importance of the Athlete Biological Passport.

Athletics and cycling have been using the ABP to record haematological, steroid profile and endocrine modules on leading athletes since 2010. The records are maintained by Wada and if a dramatic variation is detected in the athlete’s profile it might well indicate doping. At the least it’s a reason to “target” test. Football has been lagging behind with both blood testing and the ABP.

“They are just starting that,” Howman reveals of the ABP. “Fifa started that at the World Cup in 2014 and some of the other leagues like the Champions League are progressing with it.

“The issue is that the information that is collected by one federation needs to be shared with the others and all of the football community needs to have access. Because you can have a player playing for a club for a country and four or five different champ- ionships in one year over which the doping controls rest with four or five different people. So each of those four or five needs to have that information shared.”

Wada has a software mechanism called ADAMS (Anti-Doping Administration and Management) which does just that.

Howman has heard the argument put forth by various clubs and organisations that doping in team sports is more difficult. In response, he points to the case of Essendon Football Club, which plays in the Australian Football League.

In 2014, 34 of their players received two-year suspensions for taking supplements containing Thymosin-beta 4, a substance used by body builders. It is a banned peptide which helps repair body tissue and has anabolic qualities. The players had allegedly received injections from a sport scientist without the consent of the club doctor.

The low percentage of doping cases in football notwithstanding, the former chairman of Wada, Dick Pound, has heard leaders of many sport governing bodies refuse to acknowledge they might have a problem.

“All the [North American] professional leagues told us to get lost saying ‘There is no problem in sport x. In any event we have the world’s finest anti-doping programme in sport x.’ It was total denial,” he recalls.

With many of the banned substances readily available on the internet together with and many bent pseudo some scientists willing to “help” a player take illegal shortcuts, all sports must examine their will to combat this scourge of sport.