IS FOOTBALL IGNORING A DRUGS PROBLEM OR IS POGBA A LONE CHEAT?

THE general tone of the reaction to Paul Pogba’s four-year doping ban has been to lament a wasted talent.

And if you believe Pogba should have gone on to have a career that could be celebrated in the way we celebrate Lionel Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo, that is fair enough.

But if, as seems very possible, he never makes it onto a professional football field again, Pogba has still enjoyed a career to be proud of.

I know we don’t count them on these blinkered shores but four Serie A winners’ medals mean something, as does a World Cup winners’ medal.

Pogba was named in the Serie A team of the year on three occasions and the PFA team of the year for 2018-19. Yes, it is sad that he never consistently scaled the heights that the likes of Messi or Ronaldo did but his career has been good and lucrative.

It is not a tragedy. Pogba, in his statement, says he is heartbroken but, for the outsider, it is no heart-breaker.

A heart-breaker is when a player’s career is cut short by injury – Pogba is a drug cheat.

He is also a brilliant football player – often unfairly maligned – and a very likeable character but the real significance of his doping suspension has been largely missed.

This is one of the world’s top footballers taking a performanceenhancing substance.

In his appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, he will say it was taken unwittingly but he is responsible for what goes in his body, hence the charge and ban. But the question that Pogba’s ban should prompt is not the one that asks where it has gone all wrong for the 30-year-old multi-millionaire but the one that asks who else is on it.

Is Pogba an outlier or does football have a drugs problem that is not being properly tackled? Or even wilfully ignored?

Figures in sports such as cycling and athletics – where drugs issues have been a plague for so many years – look at football and wonder how come there are so few ‘convicted’ offenders.

After all, the physical demands in football have never been greater and, with its non-stop pressing, there has never been such an emphasis on relentless athleticism in the game.

In other words, why wouldn’t footballers be tempted to go down the pharmaceutical route? Football might claim its drug testing is as rigorous as it is in cycling and athletics but no-one thinks that is the case.

One of the slightly odd things about the Pogba case is that the sample that tested positive was taken after a game – and getting caught by an ‘in-game’ test is seen by doping cheats as being naive.

Perhaps football does not have a doping problem. Perhaps professional footballers are mostly horrified by the idea of performanceenhancing drugs. Perhaps Pogba is the exception to the rule.

Or, perhaps Pogba is the unlucky one.

Perhaps Pogba’s offence is symptomatic of a problem the game does not want to believe exists.