Prepare yourself for the big business and sporting festivals that are the European Nations football and shortly afterwards, the London Olympics. Perhaps as great as the fear of losing a competitive game is the fear of injury and missing one, in fact, possibly it is the athletes biggest fear.
Fifa's chief medical officer has said the "abuse" of painkillers is putting the careers and long-term health of international footballers in jeopardy. Dr Jiri Dvorak found that almost 40% of players at the 2010 World Cup were taking pain medication prior to every game. Experts say that painkilling medication can be particularly dangerous in professional sport. In high-intensity exercise like football, a player's kidneys are continuously working hard, making them more vulnerable to damage from strong drugs. And the risks of using nsaids are not just confined to the kidneys and liver. There are also worries over their impact on hearts. Dr Stuart Warden from the University of Indiana is an expert in the use of these drugs by athletes."There is an elevated risk of cardio vascular side-effects with almost all nsaids and the risk increases with duration of use."
"I think we can use the word abuse - because the dimension is just too much" Dr Dvorak told the BBC. Dr Dvorak believes that a major factor in the growing use of painkillers in football is the pressure on team doctors to get injured players back on the pitch quickly. "The team doctors, most of them they are under pressure between the diagnosis and the appropriate treatment between the pressure to bring the player on the pitch, if they take them too long out they might be out of a job."
Team doctors often want to help athletes return to competition, so “the tendency is to overtreat,” said Dr. Jane Ballantyne, a professor of anesthesiology and pain medicine at the University of Washington. There is evidence of a culture within professional soccer in the United Kingdom that leads players to train and play while not fully fit, and this exposes them to a high risk of re-injury. Unfortunately, players are often under pressure to play for personal reasons or as a result of pressure from their club's management and/or medical team.
Dr Hans Geyer, deputy director of the World Anti-Doping Agency said: "This is an alarming signal...What we have seen from the Fifa studies is that often athletes take the pain killers as a preventive. They take them to prevent a pain which may occur, to be totally insensitive. The problem is, if you switch off alarm systems that protect your tissues, you can have irreversible destruction of tissue." He found that athletes in many fields are taking large quantities of these drugs both in and out of competition.
Former German international player Jens Nowotny knows from his own experience that there is pressure on everyone. In his view, footballers are willing to do what ever it takes to stay on the pitch. "It's part of the job - maybe it would be better to take no pain killers, to not ignore the body' s signal to stop, but it is part of the job and we earn a lot of money - it's part of the business."
Croatian striker Ivan Klasnic who now plays for Bolton suffered kidney failure while playing for Werder Bremen in Germany in 2007. He blames team doctors at Werder Bremen saying that they failed to diagnose his problem in time and continued to prescribe painkilling medication to him which can be very damaging to kidneys.
Diego Maradona was especially prone to injuries, far more so than other players, being the target of many a defender's hard tackles. He also came to rely on drug injections to soothe the pain: the insides of his knees regularly had to be scraped to get rid of the residue from hundreds of injections of the painkiller, cortisone. Maradona was weaned on medications. In his past, doctors, mixed steroids with his food to build a frail physique into something bull-like. In his teens, he was administered more drugs. These, the appalling painkillers that sporting authorities incongruously allow, racked and distorted the ankle, the knee, the suffering back of a superstar whose multimillion-dollar transfer fees and million-dollar salary were the excuses to patch him up, to push him through nature's warning, to play him at all costs. Football bosses extracted their pound of flesh from Maradona, one way or another, the doctors obeying them rather than medical propriety, leaving Maradona a legacy of arthritic pain.
According to a 2006 report in the St. Petersburg Times, for every season a player spends on an NFL roster, his life expectancy decreases by almost three years.The average American male lives to be almost 75. According to the Times report, an NFL player, whose career lasts roughly four years on average, lives to be 55. The more years a player spends in the NFL, the more games and practices he survives, the quicker he dies. In the United States, former NFL players are now suing the league over the use of the powerful anti-inflammatory drug Toradol. They argue that the medication masked the pain of head injuries and led them to play on and suffer concussions as result. Lawsuits have been filed against the league in federal court alleging that the NFL failed to acknowledge and address neurological risks associated with the sport and then deliberately failed to tell players about the risks they faced. The players say that sometimes they were lined up in what they termed a 'cattle call' and injected with the drug whether they were injured or not. Similar concerns have been expressed in NHL, where hockey players are paid to inflict and to absorb pain and can become addicted to painkillers.
The provision of injury prevention and support services by English professional soccer clubs is inadequate compared with the levels of acute and chronic injuries suffered by players. This has important implications for the UK professional soccer industry because health and safety legislation requires employers to identify hazards and risks arising from their work activities and to provide appropriate information and training about the risks. At present, players are inadequately informed about the health risks arising from a career in professional soccer and the control measures available to reduce these risks. A study published in The British Journal of Sports Medicine reveals that the risk of injury in football may have been played down, at least at the professional level. The Center for Hazard and Risk Management at Loughborough University found that players had a 12 percent risk of injury every game. More significantly, they reported that almost a third of professional players would suffer at least one injury this season.
''The injury rate, is about 1,000 times what you'd find in industry,'' said Dr. Colin Fuller, a lecturer of health and safety management at the center and director of the study. ''It works out to every employee having a reportable injury once every three weeks, which, of course, would be completely unacceptable.''
Only a third of the injuries resulted from fouls. The rest involved legal contact between opposing players. Muscle strains were the most common injury, often resulting from improper warming up, Dr. Fuller said
As early as 1993, researchers from Sweden found that the prevalence of knee gonarthrosis in former soccer players was four times the prevalence in age-matched controls. Finnish researchers found that the odds of hospital admission for osteoarthritis (OA) of the hip, knee, or ankle were twice as high among former soccer players as among controls. Two separate British studies found that the prevalence of knee OA in retired soccer players ranged from 32% to 49%. A 1999 Danish study of 39 former elite soccer players found that, although signs of arthritis were more prevalent in the knees and ankles of 42 subjects with previous injuries to those joints than in uninjured subjects, the prevalence in 17 uninjured former athletes (26% in the knee, 18% in the ankle) was still higher than one would expect to see in the general population. A single knee trauma sustained in youth under 18 triples the chance of getting osteoarthritis later in life.
"Soccer is not a sport. It is a knee killer" said Alwin Jaeger, MD, chairman of orthopedic surgery at the University of Frankfurt in Germany, who said that soccer players accounted for one-third of the 50 former athletes with knee OA in his 2002 study.
Andreas Erm who won a bronze medal in the 50km walk in the 2003 world athletic championship received pain killers several times during the walk. His body was not able to walk 50km on this day in such a speed but he won the bronze medal because he was treated with pain killing medications! As the champion cyclist Fausto Coppi once said - "I only took drugs when i had to, which was almost always"
Football players aren't people. They're international commodities to be bought and sold, placed under contract and traded. Capitalism's goal is to turn everything into a commodity - labour power included - because when something is commodified it is assigned an exchange value and then succumbs to the logic of the market. A players monetary value quickly becomes apparent when he is up for transfer and he acquires a price-tag.
Football attracts more corporate cash than any other sport. Players mean more tickets sold, more product sponsorship and royalties, more television money. Control of "our" game has ebbed steadily away in the direction of global sports associations and global media corporations. The bottom line in businesses is to make a profit and football and sport are just that - commercial enterprises. The issues of drugs being routinely used in football , the lack of oversight, demonstrates even more clearly how players are little more than a “throw-away” commodity from which a fast buck can be made. But this isn't Fantasy Football . Players are real people. Sure, a few make plenty of money. So what. So do some movie stars. So do some rock musicians. The use of drugs to train and repair players as well as for controlling pain so one can play while injured and the physical deterioration of players after they cease playing suggests that the "noble" image of football as the "beautiful game" is much more gloss than real substance. Football probably originated from the outcome of bloody conflicts where the victors kicked the heads of the vanquished enemy around the battlefield. Some say it has remained a blood sport.
And the European Nations competition itself? Unimportant, at least in comparison to the monetary aspect. The results may be added to the record books but the revenues will always be the foremost statistic for EUFA.
As Chomsky points out "common folk" with little interest in politics demonstrate astounding knowledge about sport. "People know a tremendous amount. They know all sorts of complicated details and enter into far-reaching discussion about whether the coach made the right decision yesterday and so on. These are ordinary people, not professionals, who are applying their intelligence and analytic skills in these areas and accumulating quite a lot of knowledge and understanding....There are also experts about football, but these people don't defer to them. The people who call in talk with complete confidence. They don't care if they disagree with the coach or whoever the local expert is. They have their own opinion and they conduct intelligent discussions. I think it's an interesting phenomenon...The gas station attendant who wants to use his mind isn't going to waste his time on international affairs, because that's useless; he can't do anything about it anyhow, and he might learn unpleasant things and even get into trouble. So he might as well do it where it's fun, and not threatening -- professional football or basketball or something like that. But the skills are being used and the understanding is there and the intelligence is there."
It is a shame that this dedication and commitment is only reserved for watching 22 men run around a pitch kicking a ball rather than being put to the service of changing the world to make it a better place for everybody.
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