Arsene Wenger calls for improved rules on doping

Last week, Arsene Wenger seemed to indicate that football has a huge problem with doping. Which, to be fair, isn't a surprising revelation. His comments were strong enough that the FA asked him to explain his thoughts to them in more detail.

He did that, not only with the FA, but also today with the really awkwardly named Bein Sports. In the Bein piece, he went into more depth than we've heard him talk about these things with in the past, and it seems like Wenger is pretty firmly of the mindset that testing regimens need to improve before anything will change dramatically:

I'm not satisfied with the level of testing because I believe blood tests should be done. If you want to go into a bit more sophistication you have to do blood checks. Urine checks are superficial and not deep enough to say absolutely sure that we have no doping problem in football. I think no and I wish no but on the other hand, can you have 740 football players at a World Cup and come out with zero alert on any doping? It's a little bit surprising.

He also went into some detail about why he thinks that the current drug testing regimen is not sufficient:

what you want is that the control is better than it is done today. For example, now you have three doping tests after the game. If one of the players is doped, the result of the game is not changed. You need two to be doped to have a result of the game changed but if you test only three, it is nearly impossible that you catch a second one.

When asked whether Arsenal have a testing program of their own, though, he gave an...interesting answer:

No because we are tested by the federation who sends people to our training grounds but of course we inform the players before the season starts about all the dangers of doping and doping controls that they have to satisfy just to follow our instructions.

So I'm not sure what that means at an Arsenal level, but it sounds like something gets done? Maybe? Anyway, it's clear - and not surprising - that Wenger has put a great deal of thought into these things, and it sounds like he wants the game's authorities to do the same.