The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), two powerful organizations with their own bureaucracies and hierarchies are at odds with each other when it comes to implementing drug testing policies. WADA thinks that football players should be subject and available to drug testing for the entire year not just during football season, while FIFA believes that its football players should only be available for drug testing when they are within the premises of the football stadium or the training complex.

FIFA’s representative issued a statement with the UEFA insisting that on the juridical and political level, subjecting the players to drug testing 365 days of the year shows a lack of respect for the private lives of the players, which is a fundamental element of individual liberty, and that kind of drug policy is thus questionable.

Critics of FIFA, however, find this reluctance a bit hypocritical as FIFA signed up to the WADA’s anti-doping code and therefore should subject itself to its rules and policies. After all, joining WADA is not mandatory; an organization is either in or out, and FIFA decided years ago that it will join WADA probably for reasons of finance and credibility. If it is credibility that FIFA is seeking for, then non-scheduled random drug testing of its athletes shouldn’t be a problem. The point of the anti-doping code is to catch and deter dopers in the sports world, and how can this be done successfully if the athletes know when they will be tested? If they can anticipate when they will be tested, then they can just as easily stop using steroids for those periods and use during off-seasons or training.

Contesting WADA’s policy of randomly testing players all throughout the year shows how FIFA wants to be a member of WADA only for the benefits (such as membership of the Olympics movement), perks and good PR that comes with it but without the inconvenience of needing to abide to some rules. FIFA must be really way over its head to think that WADA can exempt football from the “whereabouts” code, which is akin to granting the weightlifting community from the “testosterone” code.

One possible reason that FIFA stubbornly insists that it be exempt from this rule is the findings of a study conducted by a French anti-doping agency. The study involved testing hair samples of 138 french professional athletes, which included 32 football players. Unlike urine samples where steroid evidence can be washed out in a matter of days, hair samples are able to retain traces of drugs for a longer period. Seven football players tested positive for some forms of banned substances according to the results. This result is greater in proportion than that found in other sports such as rugby and cycling. In the past, a lot of cyclers have been notoriously known to abuse banned substances and these new numbers that put football higher than cycling in drug use is indeed a cause for alarm and suspicion.

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