Comparison of drug use among footballers with the popluation at large

 

 

• Why Arsenal don’t tackle more and why Tottenham are fouled so much
• The real reasons why Arsenal have run into difficulty this season

By Tony Attwood

Something like ten years ago Untold started charting the transfer rumours relating to Arsenal that surfaced after the end of the season.  We continued the exploration on to the end of the summer transfer window and then did the measurement.  We found that 98% of the transfers turned out not to happen – an astonishing error level.

We thought that publishing those figures might restrain the purveyors of fake transfer tales and it did to a small extent – although the increase in accuracy level took four years to emerge and was so small that it could easily be put down to natural fluctuation.  Which is to say if you keep making up stories then eventually some of them are going to turn out to be true by pure chance.

But now we find that a small trend that started a few years ago, which has meant a small number of the more serious online football services have noted the level of fake transfer news, has grown.  It’s still a tiny percentage and fake news still dominates massively, but at least there is a chance that more and more supporters will realise that most of the transfer tales are simply fantasies so that the media concerned have something to publish without anyone actually having to do any work at all.

And I mention this today not just because I have spotted a few more sites mentioning the phrase “fake transfer news” or at least a variation of it, but also because there was a tiny bit of football transfer news in the last couple of days in that the Premier League transfer window will, it appears, open 1 June rather than 10 June as seemed to be the date mentioned previously.

Also, we have a post from NordicBet which has specifically looked at the sort of fake news in football that we have been mentioning from time to time across the years.  

A lot of the stories they have noted turned out to be drug tests, where the scribbler has got ultra excited about a player taking a drugs test and with major talk about tthe player being likely to be banned if proven guilty, when in fact all that was taking place was a routine drugs tet.   In fact the NY Times reported that they had put in a Freedom of Information request with the independent antidoping agnency UKAD and that came up with the news that two players tested positive for a banned substance during the 606 tests carried out immediately after games in the Premier and Football Leagues last season.  

So the real news was that last season the rate of doping in the Premier and Football League was one third of one percent (0.3%).  Now by way of comparison, the Office of National Statistics reported in December 2023 on drug misuse in the population at large and found that in the year ending March 2023, an estimated 9.5% of people aged 16 to 59 years reported using an illegal drug in the last 12 months.

Put another way the drug misuse by the population at large was running at 31 times the level of drug misuse among professional footballers.   

There is, in short, a story, but scurrilous and unscrupulous newspaper reporters and editors have created the opposite of the story.

Football turns out to be one of the areas of work with a very low level of drug abuse – far, far, far lower than in the population at large.

So the question then arises, why would any newspaper reporter highlight that there is drug abuse in football?   The answer is twofold.  One is for sensationalism and the other is because of the sheer utter laziness of many journalists.   

And this is the problem with football.  It is not just that there is fake news – it is that football is dominated with fake news.   Fake news about drug taking, fake news about injuries, fake news about transfers.   So when you read about “Karim Benzema’s Alleged Doping Scandal”, what the actual story was that the player took a routine drugs test, as happens to players all the time.   He was clean, and there was no allegation.  Eden Hazard and Erling Haaland got the same treatment.

We get the same news of course with injuries – potential “career-ending” injuries particularly – which are nothing of the kind, the player rests for a day and then is back in training.  You might remember Marcus Rashford’s “Season-Ending Injury”.  There it wasn’t that the injury was less than “season-ending”.  There wasn’t even an injury.  

And the problem is that these stories come so constantly that most of us now just pass them by, and given that the correction is either never reported or reported much later in very small type, by which time we are on to another story. 

So it goes on.   Transfers, doping… the stories are fantasies, and generally come from what are known as “unreliable sources”.  A lot of these tales make use of general bias among football journalists who believe that (for example) “all Brazilian players are on drugs”.   Someone offers a story in return for a modest reward, the journalist desperate for a piece to give to his editor picks it up.  By the time the denial comes out, everyone has lost interest because another tale is out there.

Often the only source revealed for such a story is “inside information” as was the case with “Mykhailo Mudryk’s notorious positive drug test last year.   That one has remained famous because there was nothing at all to support the tale.  It came out of nowhere, and it wasn’t that he was suspected but found innocent – the whole story a fantasy.   

But it is not just drugs it is also injury-related – especially for “career-ending” injuries to famous players (Neymar for example).    And newspapers the blogs get away with it because there are now so many of these that readers start to believe that there is something dodgy going on just because there are so many stories.  OK this player isn’t guilty of doping, but surely one of the hundred or so other players mentioned in the last couple of weeks is going to be.

Besides which the fact that only two or three percent of all transfer rumours turn out to be true, shows the journalists that they really don’t have to do any work at all.  They can repeat the rumours, get the story published or broadcast, and move onto the next tale, without doing any work at all.

On the positive side of things clubs are now much more used to this.  Nonsense transfer rumours are ignored, players accused of drug taking are given a test and cleared and those with season-ending or career-ending injuries are photographed on the training pitch.   (Although that often results in an accusation of a fake picture from three weeks ago covering up the truth).

But there is a problem:   Although most stories are untrue, the story that most of these reports are untrue is drowned out by another 20 reports of drug abuse, injury, falling out with the manager, transfer, arrest, problems in a personal relationship, or anything you want to make up.

And this is because there is no actual football news most of the time.  Except the ongoing scandal of PGMOL and the referees, the media won’t touch that.

Now that is the question. Why?   There is the big referee story there and we cover it regularly about how the treatment of different clubs by different referees varies.   But no one wants to run that, except us.   Why is that?