It was a moment that shocked the footballing world, infuriated Manchester United and almost led to a strike by the England team.
Today marks 20 years since Rio Ferdinand, then the world’s most expensive defender, was banned from football for eight months for missing a drugs test at the club’s training ground 87 days earlier, ruling him out of Euro 2004 in Portugal and severely damaging his country’s chances in the process.
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The English game has never had an incident like it since and, even now, feelings are raw. “I’ll never forgive them for the way I was treated,” said Ferdinand. “People had done worse and very similar to what I’d done and didn’t get treated like that.”
Sir Alex Ferguson, his manager, was equally livid. “My indignation endures to this day,” he wrote in his autobiography in 2013.
This is the story of that missed drugs test, a national mutiny, Ferdinand’s mum Janice being comforted by an unlikely source — and a costly trip to buy bed linen in Manchester.
The date is Tuesday, September 23, 2003, and Manchester United have just finished a morning training session.
Waiting for the players as they trooped into their Carrington headquarters were representatives of UK Sport, there to conduct a routine drugs test. Nicky Butt, Ryan Giggs and John O’Shea had been selected at random by the testers, along with Ferdinand, who had joined the club from Leeds United for a then-world record £30million in July 2002.
The players were allowed to shower after training before providing a urine sample. However, Ferdinand left before doing so.
A former United club official, who wished to remain anonymous, told The Athletic: “Rio was personable, articulate and open but notoriously quite dreamy on things like media duties, so it was entirely in character that he would forget.”
Ferdinand arrives for his FA disciplinary commission in December 2003 (Paul Barker/AFP via Getty Images)In his book, Rio: My Story, Ferdinand said: “I knew that forgetting was a pretty lame defence for my actions, but it was the truth. I never remember anything.”
He was later photographed shopping in Manchester city centre where he said he was buying bed linen. Ferdinand eventually made contact with the club later that day and offered to return and take the test but was told it was too late.
He did provide a negative test two days later. By that time, however, the damage had been done.
Two weeks after the missed test, England had an important Euro 2004 qualifier in Istanbul against Turkey.
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A point in their last group game would be enough to book Sven-Goran Eriksson’s side a place at the tournament, but it was not going to be straightforward. The home crowd were preparing a hostile atmosphere, with no away fans permitted to attend. Even the England staff members and non-selected players were made to wear unbranded coats to keep a lower profile.
But even that tension did not hog the headlines in the build-up. Instead, the media was focused purely on Ferdinand and the English Football Association’s decision to drop him from the squad for his missed drugs test.
The FA had told Manchester United that Ferdinand would not be selected for the match a week before, on Sunday, October 5. Ferdinand, Maurice Watkins, United’s lawyer and David Gill, the club’s chief executive, met with David Davies, the FA’s executive director, and FA lawyer Nic Coward at Davies’ Worcestershire home in what was later dubbed the ‘Battenberg summit’ — so-called because Davies’ wife, Susan, served the group Battenberg cake bought from the village shop.
Davies told The Athletic: “It was a sunny October afternoon and my wife took Rio for a walk in our field and then offered him tea and cake in the kitchen while I discussed the situation with David Gill and Maurice Watkins around my dining room table. I had the unfortunate job of having to tell Rio that, in the circumstances, we couldn’t take him to Turkey. He was understandably very upset about it.
“I wasn’t sure he understood the seriousness of it all. The FA’s drug programme could not be messed with. That was one of the most upsetting periods I had at the FA because I liked Rio. It was a pretty rude introduction to the politics around English football for Mark Palios (who had joined as the FA’s chief executive the previous summer).”
From left: Gary Neville, David Beckham and James Beattie train before the Turkey game in 2003 (Ross Kinnaird/Getty Images)The England squad announcement for the match was twice delayed. Publicly, this was attributed to Michael Owen struggling with an injury but, in reality, it was down to the FA’s hardline stance on Ferdinand. They decided the 24-year-old couldn’t be selected while the disciplinary process was underway.
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Eriksson was caught in a sticky position but his loyalty was to his players. Recalling the moment he found out, Eriksson said: “The FA told me, ‘You cannot use him’. As always, Ferguson phones me 7am. Every time, 7am. He said, ‘If Rio doesn’t play, the others will not play’.”
As Ferguson predicted, Ferdinand’s omission by the FA resulted in a mutiny by the England players, who were gathered at the Sopwell House hotel in Hertfordshire, led by his Manchester United team-mate Gary Neville, dubbed ‘Red Nev’ by the press.
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They said they wouldn’t play unless Ferdinand was reinstated. It was the first-ever threatened England players’ strike.
“What we’re talking about here,” a furious Neville said at the time, “is a guy who didn’t piss in a bloody bottle.”
There was extra spice as UEFA had made it clear to the FA that if England didn’t play the Turkey game, they would be kicked out of Euro 2004. There were questions at the time as to whether the FA would need to call up another 23-man squad.
Neville, who was acting as United’s representative from the Professional Footballers’ Association (PFA, the English players’ union), believed Ferdinand had been unfairly punished before he had been given the chance to explain himself. ‘Red Nev’ was branded “the most hated footballer in the country” by The Sun, then the country’s biggest-selling newspaper.
However, Palios, the FA’s new chief executive, refused to budge.
The FA’s position was that Ferdinand’s missed test counted as a strict liability offence (where you are guilty without fault). There was no mitigation unless there had been an error from the testing agency — which it was understood there was not — and the FA was conscious that, with the eyes of the world upon them, its highest-profile players needed to be seen following the rules.
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After numerous meetings, England’s players eventually backed down. Ferdinand had urged them not to boycott the match in Istanbul while Neville cited a phone call with Ferguson as his reason for not walking out.
Davies explained: “The worry was that if we had not acted, then England were going to get to Turkey with Rio and the story would break that he’d missed a drugs test and that he would be banned from playing anyway by UEFA. And we would have needed to say, ‘We knew about it all the time’. That was the other side of the coin.”
The night before leaving for Turkey, however, the players released a statement expressing their displeasure at their team-mate’s treatment — part of the deal struck with the FA to persuade them to play in Turkey. It accused the FA of “letting down” Ferdinand, the squad and Eriksson, and said the player had been entitled to confidentiality and that the governing body had “disrupted” the side.
England’s packed press conference at Istanbul’s Ritz-Carlton Hotel the day before the game was dominated by questions about Ferdinand, despite Adrian Bevington, then managing director of Club England, insisting no enquiries on the topic would be taken.
From left: Mark Palios, Paul Barber and Sven-Goran Eriksson at Sopwell House (Paul Gilham/Getty Images)“That was a very difficult week,” remembered Paul Barber, now chief executive at Brighton & Hove Albion but then England’s director of marketing and communications, in a 2020 interview. “One thing you can take from the experience is that transparency and honesty are always the best way to go. Back in 2003, it was about trying to get everyone on the plane to play a really important game.”
England did get on the plane and succeeded in their task, drawing 0-0 in front of a febrile Turkey crowd, despite David Beckham missing a penalty. The fallout from Ferdinand, however, was far from over.
Two days after the match in Istanbul, Ferdinand — along with his legal team and representatives from the PFA — attended an interview with Steve Barrow, FA head of compliance, at the Manchester headquarters of the PFA. He was then ordered to hand over his mobile phone records to the FA.
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Manchester United had thrown their weight behind Ferdinand and continued to pick the defender, while even FIFA president Sepp Blatter waded into the debate. He suggested United should be docked points for any matches they won with Ferdinand in the time since he missed the test.
On October 29, Ferdinand was charged by the FA with misconduct, for a breach of rule E26, which refers to “the failure or refusal by a player to submit to drug testing as required by a competent official”.
Ferdinand denied the charge. It was announced his hearing would take place at Bolton’s Reebok Stadium on December 18 and 19.
The evidence was heard by a three-person disciplinary panel: Barry Bright, a retired estate agent from the Kent FA, Peter Herd, the Colchester chairman and chair of the FA’s medical committee, and Frank Pattison, from the Durham FA. Ronald Thwaites QC defended Ferdinand while Mark Gay led the FA prosecution.
Those called included Ferdinand himself, Ferguson, United club doctor Michael Stone, Eyal Berkovic — a former team-mate at West Ham United who had moved to Manchester City, and who was meeting Ferdinand in the city on the day of the missed test — and Butt.
After 18 hours of deliberation, the verdict arrived: an eight-month ban for Ferdinand and a fine of £50,000 plus costs.
“The room was a blur. I thought I was going to keel over,” Ferdinand recalled.
Ultimately, the panel did not believe Ferdinand’s claim that he had simply forgotten about the drugs test and gone shopping. Stone, the club doctor, and Jason Worthington, Ferdinand’s chauffeur, also gave conflicting evidence about when Stone called the driver on the day of the missed test, which didn’t help his case. Worthington said this happened at 12.01pm, but Stone claimed it was not until 1.30pm.
United were shocked by the severity of the punishment. The previous player to miss a drugs test, Manchester City midfielder Christian Negouai, had only resulted in a £2,000 fine. That case had also proven controversial as Negouai, a practising Muslim, had been ordered to drink water to facilitate a drugs sample, despite observing Ramadan at the time.
Christian Negouai also missed a drugs test (Alex Livesey/Getty Images)Yet, as the United insider put it, “we’d feared the FA would want to make an example of us” — a belief partly fuelled by previous clashes with the governing body. United had been furious at the FA’s decision to increase Eric Cantona’s ban for kicking a Crystal Palace fan to nine months, and there had also been tension following United’s decision to withdraw from the FA Cup in 1999 to play in the first FIFA Club World Cup.
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Watkins called the sentence “savage and unprecedented” while Gill said Ferdinand had been made a “scapegoat”.
In his book, Neville wrote: “Rio had paid a high price for the case becoming such a cause celebre. He’d not been helped by his legal advice, going into the hearing with all guns blazing. Knowing the FA were out to make a stand, I told Rio he should walk in with his mum and a simple handwritten apology. But he went for the expensive barrister and was punished for it.”
“It was a very severe punishment,” Davies tells The Athletic. “And certainly that was felt not just by Manchester United but by quite a number of us inside the FA.” However, Davies said it showed the FA’s testing programme worked — no player missed a test after the saga.
Anti-doping authorities, predictably, took a different view. Dick Pound, then-president of the World Anti-Doping Agency, and John Scott, head of doping issues at testing agency UK Sport, said it was a fair sentence, with Pound suggesting Ferdinand had “dodged the bullet” in not being given the maximum punishment of a two-year ban.
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Ferdinand’s last game before the ban was a 1-0 defeat to Wolves on January 17, where he limped off injured. At that point, United were still top of the league. They ended up finishing third, 15 points behind Arsenal’s ‘Invincibles’. There was a feeling inside the club that Ferdinand’s absence effectively cost them the title.
Speaking on the High Performance Podcast in 2020, Ferdinand said: “It was hard. I proved beyond any doubt that I hadn’t taken any substances at all by doing a hair follicle test that traces back, like, 18 months or two years.”
He had to let his hair grow for this, which is the reason he got cornrows.
“I’ve never taken anything yet you get tarnished with that brush. I was bitter at first, I hated the FA, I hated all the people at England who were speaking in my face, smiled at me but then banned me,” he added.
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He said he used that bitterness as motivation to come back stronger and credited Ferguson with supporting him. The Scot recalled how Ferdinand’s mother, Janice, was crying down the phone when the verdict came.
“I told her that our high opinion of Rio would not be affected,” he wrote in his autobiography. “We knew he was innocent, we knew he had been careless and we knew he had been punished too severely.”
On January 16, Ferdinand announced he would start his ban from January 20 but would appeal the decision: that was rejected in March. He did not kick a ball — even in reserve or friendly matches — until September 20, 2004, when Liverpool visited Old Trafford.
Ferdinand celebrates Manchester United’s win over Liverpool in his 2004 comeback match (Alex Livesey/Getty Images)“We had to carry on and do the best we could without him,” Wes Brown, his former team-mate, told The Athletic. “What else could you do? He was one of our best players. The ban for eight months felt very harsh.”
Once Ferdinand was back on the field, it was like he had never been away: he played a full 90 minutes as United won 2-1, and was the last to leave the pitch. “I’m not looking back, I’m looking to the future,” he said afterwards.
He was good to his word, playing imperiously for United — and England — for years. But the memory of that missed drugs test, and the bitter acrimony that followed, was never truly forgotten.
(Top photos: Paul Barker/Bryn Lennon/Paul Gilham; all Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton)
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