English football invests just 0.04 per cent of its revenues on catching drug cheats, Telegraph Sport can reveal, after an exclusive survey exposed “unacceptably” low levels of funding across Britain’s biggest sports.
English football invests just 0.04 per cent of its revenues on catching drug cheats, Telegraph Sport can reveal, after an exclusive survey exposed “unacceptably” low levels of funding across Britain’s biggest sports.
A first-of-its-kind study of Britain’s anti-doping landscape revealed that English rugby and cricket also have low levels of investment: the Rugby Football Union and the English and Wales Cricket Board spend just 0.07 per cent and 0.06 per cent of revenues on this area respectively.
But Freedom of Information requests sent to UK Anti-Doping, which carries out the vast majority of doping controls in Britain, showed that football undercuts both as soon as the Premier League’s £3.65bn in revenues is included. An FOI request revealed: “The total financial contribution made by the Premier League to Ukad in the financial years [from 2021-25] is nil (£0).”
The figures have sparked alarm within the sports administration community, and among other high-risk sports that have already raised their level of anti-doping investment – up to 17.3 per cent of revenues, in the case of the world-leading International Cycling Union (UCI) – in response to past scandals.
“It’s unacceptable that a sport like football doesn’t participate more in anti-doping,” said the Labour MP Clive Efford, a former member of the Government’s Culture, Media and Sport Committee, “It’s as if they’d prefer to pretend it couldn’t happen.”
In a statement, the Football Association maintained that doping in English football remains “rare”. Since 2015, 16 Premier League players have failed drug tests but only one player – former England international Jake Livermore, after a positive test for cocaine – has been sanctioned. The recent case involving Chelsea’s Mykhailo Mudryk, who has been charged with a doping offence after testing positive for the banned substance meldonium, is yet to be concluded and therefore does not figure in Telegraph Sport’s data.
Brian Cookson, the former president of both British Cycling and the UCI, led the crackdown on drugs in the wake of the Lance Armstrong scandal. He told Telegraph Sport: “What does surprise and disappoint me is, even today with all that we know about the prevalence of doping across sport, how little some very large professional sports spend on anti-doping.”
Cookson also suggested that “some sports are keener than others to acknowledge this problem [of doping in elite sport]”, before adding that “sadly it does seem to me that the media continue to hold some sports to different standards of scrutiny on this vital issue”.
The Premier League insists that anti-doping efforts are not its responsibility, and should be left to the FA, the body that regulates the sport in this country.
Yet other sports employ a mixed-contribution model in which leagues and event organisers help to pay for anti-doping safeguards. For example, the Label Road Race Program, which includes the world’s top eight marathons, finances the Athletics Integrity Unit (AIU) to conduct additional drug testing at its events and there is nothing to stop the Premier League from increasing the FA-provided budget for football.
Speaking to Telegraph Sport, Travis Tygart – who heads the United States Anti-Doping Agency – warned that a lax approach to integrity issues risks further scandals of the kind that have already tarnished cycling and athletics.
“First, I would say if you value clean and fair sport, it’s all of our responsibility,” Tygart said. “So no one should be passing the buck.
“What you see from this survey is that a hard lesson can be a motivator. When the reality of the culture gets exposed like it did in cycling, and track and field, those sports double down their efforts – and good on them. But it begs the question, is clean competition just an illusion in other sports, and particularly those that aren’t devoting many resources to anti-doping safeguards? I’ve heard a sportsperson in the United States say, ‘We want to do enough testing to give the perception that we have clean sport.’”
With regard to football’s lightly funded anti-doping defences, Tygart compared its status as the leading global sport to the National Football League’s primacy within American sports.
“The NFL should have the best anti-doping programme in the world, bar none,” Tygart said. “They have the resources, obviously, to invest in it. And around the world, soccer – as we know it in the US – should similarly aspire to have the most effective programme in the world.
“If they don’t, you hope it doesn’t take a scandal for them to invest those resources, because that would be devastating. But I always say that a corrupt culture – if it exists – is eventually going to come out, whether it’s through law enforcement, through anti-doping tests, or through an athlete who wants to cleanse their soul on their deathbed.”
The FA delegates anti-doping work to Ukad, which it supplies with an annual contribution of £1.55m to support these efforts. In fairness, English football – while hardly a big spender in this area – is still more proactive than its European peers. The FA’s expenditure is more than twice as high as the £714,000 that the German Football Association contributes to the National Anti-Doping Agency of Germany, while the equivalent bodies in France and Spain contribute nothing at all, according to the country’s anti-doping agencies.
But while the FA’s investment may compare favourably with other nations, the picture changes when you consider the whole structure of English football. The Premier League is an extremely wealthy global entity that reported turnover of £3.65bn in 2023-24, and we have used that figure for our statistics – even though the total revenue of the Premier League clubs added up to more than £6bn. The nearest European competitor would be German football, but it still lags far behind.
To understand which organisations are taking the threat of doping more seriously around the world, the Telegraph gathered data from 13 different international sporting bodies, focusing on sports subject to the watchdog regulations of the World Anti-Doping Agency, known as the “Code”. In the global picture, the UCI leads the way by spending 17.3 per cent of its £42.1m annual revenue on its anti-doping programme.
The UCI says that riders, race organisers, and teams pay a levy to finance the fight against doping and the federation uses this revenue to fund the International Testing Agency, which operates the sport’s anti-doping programme.
Meanwhile, World Athletics assigns almost £6m of its £40m income (15 per cent) to the AIU to implement anti-doping in the sport. In 2023, the AIU collected another £3m from other sources including the aforementioned Label Road Race Program – which includes contributions from the world’s leading marathons, athletes and their representatives, and shoe companies such as Adidas, Nike, Asics and On – plus fees recouped from Russia and Kenya.
Athletics spends a total of almost £9m on anti-doping, which is the largest net amount worldwide, followed by tennis and cycling.
Last month, the AIU provisionally suspended the marathon world record holder Ruth Chepng’etich, from Kenya, in perhaps the most high-profile doping case in the sport in recent years.
The International Equestrian Federation also scores highly, although its figures are complicated by the fact that a large portion of its £4.1m budget includes spending on animal welfare.
Near the bottom of this list are basketball and hockey, two sports which spend less than one per cent of revenues on anti-doping safeguards. As for modern pentathlon, the governing body said costs for in-competition testing are borne by the local provider.
Some international sporting governing bodies have set up their own independent agencies to apply the full set of anti-doping tools – which include not only testing but also education and “intelligence and investigation” (I&I).
These include the AIU – which was founded by Lord Coe in 2017 – and the equivalent International Tennis Integrity Agency, which was founded in 2021. In an echo of other scandal-hit sports, tennis increased its anti-corruption defences dramatically after an influential Buzzfeed report was published in 2016, investigating widespread match-fixing allegations at the lower levels of the game.
Otherwise, the mechanics of anti-doping investment usually flow through individual national organisations such as Ukad.
Ukad operates a national anti-doping programme, funded by the government, which is charged with conducting controls in all Olympic and major sports, including football and cricket.
The ECB is understood to be confident in its anti-doping contributions as the sport is “historically low risk”, and it also invests about £130,000 per year into recreational drug testing and player-welfare programmes.
Ruling bodies refuse to reveal anti-doping budgets
Concerningly, Telegraph Sport’s survey found several high-profile global sports federations declining to reveal their spending on anti-doping efforts, despite repeated attempts to contact them. These bodies included Fifa, World Rugby and World Triathlon. In an alarming lack of transparency, a total of 19 federations did not provide the financial figures requested despite two follow-up inquiries, echoing fears from Cookson and Tygart that some sports care only about a perception of clean competition.
Within English sport, none of the major three team sports was prepared to reveal how much they forwarded to Ukad, which meant Telegraph Sport used FOI requests to gather the data.
Between them, these three national governing bodies contributed £1.9m to Ukad, an organisation that received £9.1m from the government in the most recently reported financial year (2023-24) and recorded total expenditure of £11.7m. Ukad runs about 9,000 tests per annum in a variety of sports, while also maintaining programmes in education and I&I.
Nearly 33 per cent of those recorded between April 2024 and March 2025 were within the top five tiers of English football, though the 2,865 tests equates to an average of approximately one per player, per season, across the Premier League, Football League and National League.
In comparison, just 677 tests were carried out in the same period within English rugby union, and 356 under the ECB. Neither football nor cricket currently have any players serving anti-doping bans.
The same cannot be said for rugby, with four players currently serving bans under the authority of the RFU and a further 10 players – the highest of any UK governing body – from the Welsh Rugby Union, with another high-profile suspension arising in France after British and Irish Lions scrum-half Rhys Webb was banned for four years in 2023. Another rugby player based in Scotland is also serving a suspension from playing rugby, while boxing and rugby league have alarmingly high numbers of active anti-doping sanctions.
English athletes may encounter testing in other contexts. Those who participate in international tournaments, such as World Triathlon events or the Rugby World Cup, may be tested on these occasions by international federations.
In a statement, Wada said that it “always encourages federations, event owners and governing bodies to invest more resources in clean sport. The importance of maintaining a robust anti-doping programme for the integrity and positive public image of a national or international sporting event cannot be overstated. For reasons of independence, harmonisation and consistency, those resources should be channelled through the relevant national anti-doping organisation or international federation.”
The FA said: “The use of performance-enhancing or recreational drugs in English football is rare. However, we take anti-doping extremely seriously. We are fully compliant with the National Anti-Doping Policy of the UK Government’s Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport; fund one of world sport’s leading anti-doping programmes; and input into targeted, researched and intelligence-led drug testing that is directed by UK Anti-Doping. We also operate our own dedicated social drugs programme to safeguard the physical and mental well-being of footballers; and to uphold the values and ethics of the sport.”
Additional reporting by Tom Morgan.
Category: General Sports
