Doping is not widespread in Russian football: FIFA

FIFA defended Russia's right to host the World Cup amid a series of doping scandals, saying Tuesday that there is no sign of "widespread" drug use in Russian football.

Russia has been stripped of dozens of Olympic medals for doping and cover-ups, including tampering with samples. Football is among the sports where positive tests were apparently covered up, according to a World Anti-Doping Agency investigation last year. "From the information we have, we cannot talk about widespread doping in football in Russia," FIFA general secretary Fatma Samoura said Tuesday, three days before FIFA hosts the World Cup draw at the Kremlin.

All World Cup samples will be shipped out of Russia to a laboratory in Lausanne, Switzerland, on the day they are collected, Samoura said.

Documents from a WADA investigation last year said arrangements were in place to protect players from Russia's 2014 World Cup squad if they were to test positive in the country before the tournament. The documents don't directly accuse Russia's World Cup squad of doping, but they do include records of alleged drug use among players from youth national teams.

Russian Deputy Sports Minister Vitaly Mutko said the national team didn't play well enough to be suspected of using performance-enhancing drugs. Russia didn't win a match at the last World Cup, and haven't gone beyond the group stage of any tournament since 2008. "If we play like that while doped, then how would we do without?" Mutko said. "It's absolute stupidity." Samoura and Mutko were speaking as FIFA presented the official poster for next year's World Cup finals, unveiling a vintage design of Soviet goalkeeping great Lev Yashin in flight. Inspired by the constructivist art movement, the poster shows Yashin, wearing a knee brace and his signature cap, leaping across to get a hand on an oversized ball featuring Russia's landmass seen from space.