THE FOOTBALL World Cup and the Olympic games have long vied for the title of the world’s biggest sporting event. The marquee competitions for many of the planet’s most popular athletes are watched by nearly half of humanity, and generate more revenue than the annual GDP of one-quarter of the world’s countries (roughly $9bn for the 2016 Olympics in Brazil, and a projected $6bn for the current World Cup in Russia). Yet with so much on the line, there seems to be a vast gap in how willingly competitors in the two events use performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs).

During the past decade, more than 200 athletes have failed doping tests at the Olympics. An anonymous survey of competitors at the 2011 World Athletics Championships suggested that at least 30% of them had used banned substances in the previous year. By contrast, the last time a player at the World Cup was caught using PEDs was in 1994, when Diego Maradona, Argentina’s biggest star, tested positive for five variants of ephedrine, a prohibited stimulant. Every footballer at the current tournament has been tested at least once this year by FIFA, which collected 2,761 samples between January and kick-off on June 14th, an increase from 1,249 in the same period leading up to the competition in 2014. One player at the World Cup did fail a drugs test in 2017—Paolo Guerrerro, Peru’s captain, who returned a positive sample for cocaine—but he was allowed to play anyway.

There are two possible causes for the discrepancy between the Olympics and the World Cup. One is that football really is an extraordinarily clean sport. The other is that footballers cheat just as much as athletes do in other sports, but that the game’s anti-doping system is so flawed that it fails to catch any of them.

Football does have some aspects that could make it less susceptible to doping than, say, sprinting. For a start, it is a team sport in which most of the coaching and nutrition is organised by clubs, whereas many Olympians train by themselves. That means that more people have to be sworn to silence for a scheme to work, which raises the chance of a whistle-blower. In the end, Lance Armstrong was exposed by his former teammates, rather than testing.

Another possible explanation for football’s apparent cleanliness is its reliance on finesse rather than physicality. Lionel Messi has become one of the greatest goal-scorers of all time while covering less distance per game than any other elite forward. Andrea Petroczi, a scientist at Kingston University in London, reckons football is “a lot less vulnerable than sports where performance is individually measured in centimetres, kilograms or seconds”.

Nonetheless, the average outfield player still has to roam at least 10km across the pitch each match, with perhaps only three days to recover before the next one. After beating Colombia on penalties on July 3rd Gareth Southgate, England’s manager, described the dressing room as looking like a scene from “M*A*S*H”, a television show about the Korean War, with his players enfeebled by cramp and fatigue. The physical demands are not a great as weightlifting or marathon running, but big enough that doping could make a difference. “The drugs and methods work just as well in football as in all other sports,” says Richard Pound, a former president of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA). (Mr Messi himself was treated legally with growth hormone from the ages of 10 to 14, after being diagnosed with a deficiency of it.)

Missing penalties

Nor have the supposed difficulties of getting an entire team to cheat prevented a long history of scandals at clubs in Europe’s elite leagues. In the Netherlands several players have confessed to using amphetamines when playing their clubs’ famously energetic brand of “total football” during the 1970s; at the time, no ban existed for those drugs. In Germany, Harald Schumacher, a goalkeeper, published an autobiography in 1987 in which he claimed that there was widespread use of performance-enhancing pills in the Bundesliga. He was never selected for the national team again.

In France Jean-Jacques Eydelie, a former player, has alleged that he and several teammates at Marseille received mysterious injections before winning the European Cup in 1993 (a claim that many of them, including Didier Deschamps, France’s current manager, have denied). In Italy Ricardo Agricola, a club doctor for Juventus, was found guilty in 2004 of providing EPO, a drug notoriously popular among cheating cyclists, to footballers in the 1990s. His sentence, which was based on evidence that suggested abnormal levels of haemoglobin in the players’ blood, was overturned on appeal a year later. Among Juventus’s stars at the time was Zinedine Zidane, who said that he had only received legal injections of vitamins. Another infamous case in Italian football was that of Pep Guardiola, now Manchester City’s manager, who was banned after testing positive for nandrolone, a prohibited steroid, while playing for Brescia in 2001. Mr Guardiola successfully appealed the verdict in 2007, after a court accepted that his sample could have become contaminated.

In Spain Iñaki Badiola, a former president of Spain’s Real Sociedad, claimed in 2013 that between 2001 and 2007 the club had made unrecorded annual payments of roughly €300,000 ($350,000) for medicines provided by Eufemiano Fuentes, a doctor who was jailed in 2013 for administering EPO and other steroids to cyclists. Mr Fuentes’ sentence was later overturned, since there was no Spanish law against doping when he was first arrested in 2006. Real Sociedad, which finished second in La Liga in 2003, has denied Mr Badiola’s claims. Mr Fuentes has also offered to sell information about how he “prepared a team to play in the Champions League”, though he denies having told a cellmate that “Spain would not have won the European Championship or the World Cup” if he had revealed all of his clients.

In England, the Sunday Times recorded Mark Bonar, a doctor, admitting in 2016 that he had supplied banned substances to professional football players, including some at Arsenal, Chelsea and Leicester City. The clubs disputed his claims. In 2004 Arsène Wenger, Arsenal’s manager, had expressed concern that some of his signings had been doped by their previous employers: “We have had some players come to us at Arsenal from other clubs abroad and their red blood cell count has been abnormally high.” He also suggested that some of the players may have been administered illegal substances without knowing it. Mr Wenger has been a particularly outspoken cynic about corruption in football, arguing that there is “a real tsunami” of it in the sport.

Though not one of these allegations eventually led to a player being found guilty, it is hard to escape the overall impression that doping has marred the domestic game. Indeed, a longitudinal study of 879 anonymous footballers funded by UEFA, the sport’s governing body in Europe, found that 7.7% of them provided atypical levels of testosterone in their urine samples between 2008 and 2013. The study included no “B samples”—additional tests that anti-dopers generally use to confirm their findings from the “A samples”. However, it did encourage UEFA and FIFA to adopt “biological passports” in 2014, which track changes in the composition of an athlete’s blood and urine over time.

Dodgy shots

Mr Pound, the former WADA president, still believes that the system is so bad at finding cheats that “only the stupid ones get caught during competition.” A successful doping programme, he explains, is “such that you can prepare in advance, but be clean on competition days and still have the performance-enhancing benefit.” Doping footballers, he says, can also use “micro-dosing”: the practice of taking an amount that is too small for tests to detect but can still bring significant benefits over time.

Those flaws are exacerbated by complacency among the testers. From March 2016 to March 2017, there was no valid drug testing at all in Spanish football because the country’s national anti-doping agency was deemed non-compliant with WADA’s rules. Both FIFA and UEFA declined to help, as they said it was beyond their remit. In England, the Football Association has given three clubs in the Premier League—Bournemouth, West Ham and Manchester City—only small sanctions for failing to provide accurate information about players’ whereabouts for random tests. Manchester City broke the rules three times in five months, but received a fine of just £35,000.

Since dwindling enthusiasm among fans would harm revenues for football’s administrative bodies, there is little incentive for them to sharpen up. Mr Pound argues that “the anti-doping testing programs in football are woefully short of robust and there is no organisational interest in finding positive cases, either by testing or by investigation.”

That accusation has been directed at FIFA by Jim Walden, a lawyer representing Grigory Rodchenkov, the doctor-turned-whistle-blower who exposed Russia’s state-sponsored doping programme. Mr Rodchenkov has said that he recognises one of the players in the current Russian team—which despite low expectations, has made it to the quarter-finals—from the scheme, though he has not identified him publicly. FIFA has been investigating 34 footballers that were named in the McLaren report, an inquiry into Russian doping that relied heavily on Mr Rodchenkov’s evidence. But it has cleared the national squad to compete, after finding insufficient evidence of cheating (though it is still examining Russian players at lower levels). Mr Walden laments that FIFA is merely “sweeping Russia's doping fraud under the carpet”.

Mr Rodchenkov himself is confident that no player will fail a test during the World Cup, since “the most complicated and wrong things are done before major events.” And as the tournament heads to its denouement, Mr Pound has “no confidence at all” that the lack of positive tests indicates that it is clean. It is unlikely than any other national team has conducted a state-sponsored doping scheme as extensive as Russia’s. At the same time, it is highly improbable that every single player at the tournament has been PED-free for his entire career. Mr Wenger has said that it is difficult “to believe that you have 740 players in the World Cup and you come out with zero problems”, given the high stakes. “We are at the level where people are ready to do anything to win.”