If football has a doping problem, do fans and media deserve some of the blame?

Updated at 15.00

“IN A DEMOCRACY, the people get the government they deserve.”

It’s always worth remembering the words of French philosopher Joseph De Maistre at a time like this.

Granted, it looks at the moment like we in Ireland might not get any government at all, and even if we do, we might wonder exactly what we have done to deserve the one we get.

But we will get the government we deserve, eventually, because of the simple fact that we will have voted for them, and all their works and empty promises.

Yet for some reason, we still feel able to castigate the various Leinster House factions, calling them muppets, chancers and self-interested schemers.

Newsflash! We vote for them! We put them there. That’s how democracy works!

Do we get the sport we deserve?

That’s another one to think about this week, particularly if you are a soccer fan. The Sunday Times report into the nefarious activities of Dr Mark Bonar turned the spotlight on the game’s nothing-to-see-here attitude to doping.

While Dr Bonar’s alleged client list included athletes from a range of sports, his claim to have jotted out illicit prescriptions for Premier League footballers received the most attention.

The notion of players from Arsenal, Chelsea, Leicester City and, er, Birmingham City shuffling furtively into a Harley Street clinic was salacious for two reasons.

Firstly, because football has maintained the Teflon-like ability to prevent the muck of doping allegations from sticking; and secondly, that people actually care about football, or at least in greater numbers than the more conspicuously drug-addled sports.

Whether you thought the Bonar story was the ravings of a fantasist, or the lid being lifted on a Pandora’s pill-box of shame, it’s been apparent for some time that football’s clean image is a mirage.

Decades-worth of allegations make that clear: from the ‘panzer chocolate’ of the 1954 West German World Cup-winning team to the EPO evidence against 1990s Juventus, right through to the claims of doctors like Eufemiano Fuentes and Luis Garcia Del Moral of involvement in doping in Spanish football.

This week has seen football once again accused of ‘omerta’ on drugs. Why does the sport refuse to deal with its doping problem? Why is it putting its head in the sand?

You may as well wonder why our politicians aren’t acting in the national interest.

Football isn’t the only industry to prove that self-regulation doesn’t work. Governing bodies and federations in less powerful and less wealthy sports have gladly abetted doping; why wouldn’t it also be the case in football?

That leaves the anti-doping agencies, the media, and the public. The UK Anti-Doping agency has an annual budget of £7 million. To put this in perspective, Cardiff City, bottom of the Premier League income table for the most recently available financial figures (2013-14 season), had revenues of £83 million.

So expecting the existing testing regime to catch drug use in football is like trying to break into Fort Knox with a pea-shooter.

The work of the Sunday Times, German TV station ARD, BBC Panorama and ProPublica in uncovering various drug stories in the last year suggests that, as with David Walsh and Paul Kimmage in the Lance Armstrong case, the media must take the lead in exposing doping in football.

But most of us in the media make little more than tokenistic contributions on this front, grabbing some reflected glory from those who do the real work, while spending much more time buttressing the vast edifice of the game’s popularity.

It makes us feel good to chair discussions on TV and radio programmes and commission pieces in print about doping in football, before moving on to talk in depth about Wayne Rooney’s goal-scoring slump or Cristiano Ronaldo’s self-esteem issues.

Michael Sohn Michael Sohn

We accuse football of refusing to address doping because of powerful vested interests, when we in the media are also one of those interests. We are like the middle-class cocaine user who gives out about the latest crime wave, unwittingly contributing to it.

As fans, it was easy for most of us to turn away from athletics and cycling in high-minded scorn at their litany of pharmaceutical fraud.

Would we be so bullish about spurning football, taking away the eyeballs and TV subscriptions that prop up the world’s biggest sport, were evidence of a massive doping culture to emerge?

Or would we behave like US fans, bored of drug scandals and blithely indifferent to the use of PEDs in their marquee sports, allowing a de facto tolerance of doping to persist?

We get the government we deserve because that’s how democracy works; we get the sport we deserve because we are the ones who help make it too big to fail, too powerful to bring down and too mutually-enriching for us to want to.

Football may be silent on doping; but the people, it seems, have spoken.

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