The doping industry is well established in the world of football and has been for decades. Pretending the contray is blindness. I doubt it is as pervasive as it is in a discipline like cycling, but it is still there nonetheless.
An Italian magistrate, Guariniello, is currently investigating on what is referred to as "suspect deaths", i.e. deaths of ex football players who were still young and who died of cancers or other illnesses (ex : the Goerig disease as in the case of ex Genoa captain Signorini) which could be attributed to their taking drugs.
There has always been a climate of "omertà" (i.e. no one is willing to discuss the issue) about doping in the football world, but recently some ex players have started to talk, like for instance this ex Inter player from the 60's who revealed some weeks ago that doctors used to give him pills before a game.
In Juventus' case, the reaction that followed Zeman's suspicions a few years ago is quite revealing. Zeman simply stated the obvious back then by saying that there is no way that a player can accumulate so much muscular mass in such a short period of time, no matter how hard he exercises. He was notably referring to Vialli and Del Piero, who indeed became incredibly fitter in a matter of two seasons or so. Suddenly Agricola, who until then was hailed for his radical training methods, became a suspect.
Instead of addressing Zeman's points, the Juve players and staff diminished him and humiliated him. Some players like Vieri eventually admitted that they were injected creatine, which is quite a controversial product, as it is legal in Italy but illegal in France for instance, and whose effects on the body in the long term remain unknown.
The hypocrisy (or was it plain stupidity?) of some players on the matter has been flabbergasting. The fact that doctors put a spike into their vein before a game seemed perfectly normal to them. They remind me of those cyclists who said they always take a little machine with them at the Tour de France that measures the hematocrite rate in their blood : "my machine says I have enough red corpuscles, so that means Im clean!"
As expected however, the obscure forces that govern the Football world silenced Zeman the prophet of doom, and his career as a serie A coach ended very quickly afterwards.
Guariniello carried on with his inquiry though, and it seems he has accumulated quite a lot of disturbing material to this day, especially as regards Juventus.
Whatever the outcome of his inquiy is, it is high time that the Football world stopped burying its head in the sand, or one of these days we will wake up and hear the news of a serie A superstar who died of a heart attack in a hotel in Rimini.