Italian football player Gianluca Vialli died in a hospital in London on January 6, at the age of 58, of pancreatic cancer, which he was diagnosed with in 2017. A few days ago, on December 16, the Serbian player Sinisa MihajlovicPlaying for several transalpine clubs, he died at the age of 53 from leukemia, which he had been battling since July 2019. Two seemingly isolated deaths that had nothing to do with each other.

But following the death of the former forward of Cremonese, Sampdoria, Juventus and Chelsea, a few remarks by Dino Baggio resurfaced a doomed topic in Italian football: the consequences of drug use that were never classified as doping. Baggio’s words draw attention back to calcium: “I’m afraid for myself, something happens to too many football players: diseases, deaths… We didn’t drink weird stuff, that was normal stuff. But over time you have to see if the body knows how to expel them or if they stay inside you. Many people talked about the grass in the fields and their products… Luca left our lives too soon. It would be necessary to research the substances and supplements we took at that time. It was definitely not doping because anti-doping never sanctioned me. But these were drugs that were different things from the substances used today.”

Days later, Romanian Florin Raducioiu, former player of Espanyol, as well as Bari, Verona, Brescia and Milan, admitted in an interview with Sport Report that he was consuming both the substance and the drug at the same time: “They gave us a pink liquid in it. dropper I also took some medicines.I will call the doctor who took us to Brescia to find out more about the medicines I take in Milan, Brescia or Verona. We didn’t know what we were getting. They always told us it was vitamins, glucose. On the eve of the games, they always gave us droppers with pink liquid inside. I remember perfectly. We bought other things in Milan, it was more a matter of pills.”

Walter Sabatini, who was a football player in the 1980s and later a sports director at various clubs, also joined this movement: “The doubts are consistent and even justified. When I was 20, doctors gave injections and we didn’t know what they were injecting us. Before each game, they gave me two injections just in time without asking any questions. We never knew what we were drinking.”

This debate raises suspicions over decades of heavy drug use in Italian football. “Dino Baggio’s remarks after the deaths of Mihajlovic and Vialli have brought back this issue, which has always caused a lot of anxiety in Italy. Ever since the Guariniello investigation or the ELA cases,” warns Filippo Ricci, correspondent for La Gazzetta dello Sport in Madrid. . It is an issue of particular sensitivity in Fiorentina, in Italy,” he said.

Guariniello explores

In November 2002, the premature death of former football player Gianluca Signorini at the age of 42 rang alarm bells. The cause of death is ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis), a degenerative disease also known as Gehrig’s disease. Encouraged by the protests of the widows of some former football players who had previously died, it raised suspicions that led to an investigation by Turin prosecutor Raffaele Guariniello. The prosecutor filed a lawsuit, christened “Las Viudas del Calcio”, about the early deaths of Italian football players in the 70s, 80s and 90s. The data collected was devastating: at least 400 football players from Series A and B died between 1960 and 1996, with 70 of those deaths from three diseases: cancer, leukemia and ALS. The last one was particularly striking because Gehrig’s disease affects only 0.01% of the population. However, it went up to 2.7% among the football players of those years.

The most paradigmatic case was the case of Fiorentina, in which four players from the 70s (Beatrice, Longoni, Saltutti and Ferrante) died and five players fell ill with rarer diseases.. Pino Longoni’s widow lamented that the death of her husband and friends was doping-related. Longoni, a Fiorentina player from 1969 to 1970, died at the age of 63 from a degenerative disease that narrowed the arteries in his brain. Beatrice died of leukemia in 1987 at the age of 39, Saltutti died of a heart attack in 2003 at the age of 56, and Ferrante died of tonsil cancer in 2004 at the age of 59.

The Fiorentina doctors admitted to giving their players medication with ‘Corteza’ to stimulate hormone production and increase muscle mass, and ‘Micoren’, a heart tonic that increases resistance to fatigue. Fabio Capello publicly admitted that they had consumed the latter: “Even in the national team, we all drank ‘Micoren’. But then it was not classified as doping.” Today both are doping substances. Prosecutor Guariniello’s investigation was finally closed on charges of “drug overuse” but could never be directly related to the practice of doping.

Asked about the current selective topic, Roberto Mancini The name, who lived those years as a football player, was content to answer the following question: “Latest statements about football and the health of football players? I have no idea, you should take careful steps on this. You have to be careful what you say.”

As Ricci points out, “the debate behind Dino Baggio’s remarks lasted only three days on the front pages of the media. It was shut down,” explained a warning, “although it was not just the calcium environment but a concern that was plaguing Italian society.” It was fast and it was not spoken again. It is painful to talk because everyone knew about Mihajlovic and Vialli, and also, despite the death toll, a definitive conclusion was never reached. Behind all this, the question arises: Italy is asking Was it necessary to stuff young boys of exceptional physical condition with drugs to increase their resilience? Silence echoes again in Italian calcium as the shadow of doping hovers around the deaths of two other football players.