The spokesman for England’s professional soccer players has spoken out against tough new doping rules for the Premier League, claiming that they will constitute an invasion of privacy.
The English FA has signed up to the World Anti-Doping Association code, and from July next year a pool of up to 30 players must be available for testing for an hour every day. Players will face an automatic one-year ban if they miss three tests in 18 months. But Gordon Taylor, chief executive of the Professional Footballers’ Association, says “to invade the privacy of a player’s home would be a step too far.
“If we complain about anything to do with drug testing,” said Taylor, “people think we might have something to hide, but football’s record is extremely good and there has been a virtual absence of performance-enhancing drugs for decades.”
Taylor said the players’ association wanted to co-operate, but soccer “should not be treated in the same way as individual sports that have a problem with drugs, such as [track & field], cycling and weightlifting. For most of the year, the whereabouts of players is always known — either at their training ground or matches.” For that reason, it was not necessary to come to players’ homes to administer drug tests.
A spokesman for UK Sport, the body which will administer the tests, said, “We recognize that it can be an inconvenience because the top players travel so much, but we are not trying to make their lives difficult. We are there to help them.” But the Mail also quoted Michelle Verroken, the former director of UK Sport’s anti-doping unit, as saying the system “is not the way forward” because “it does not take much to get round the tests. It is not the most effective system and there could be privacy implications. The rule may not be the best way of catching cheats, but a way of catching those who can’t fill in a form or remember what they have written on it.”