Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger wants better drugs testing in football and has called for blood tests to be taken as a matter of routine.
Wenger has been
on doping to the Football Association after comments he made in French newspaper L’Equipe.
The Frenchman said: “I am open to talking to the FA of course. I want deeper, better tests because what we test is superficial.
“We have to tackle these problems.”
Dinamo Zagreb midfielder Arijan Ademi
following September’s Champions League win over Arsenal.
Wenger, 66, said in L’Equipe that he had “never injected my players to make them better” but there had been teams he had faced not “in that frame of mind”.
Speaking before Saturday’s Premier League match with West Brom, Wenger said it was naive to think that football did not have the same issues with doping as other sports.
He said: “You see the doping problem has suddenly turned up in track and field as well, we have a problem in cycling and then [to] think that we in football are immune because they are football players is absolutely wrong.
“When people are caught they [should be] punished and the clubs punished as well. Because it’s a little bit unreasonable to think just because we are football we have no problems with it.”
Wenger also wants blood tests introduced, as urine samples are insufficient and inefficient in his view.
“Today, when you play away in the Champions League, most of the time we lose two hours when there is a doping control because people cannot fulfil the [urine] tests,” he added.
“With a little blood test it takes a minute and you can test for much more.
“It’s simple. Why can we not do it? In the other sports they do it.”
