HSV professional Mario Vuskovic may not resume his profession as a professional footballer for the time being. The DFB sports court bans him for epo doping.

Professional footballer Mario Vuskovic of the second-division team Hamburger SV has been banned for two years for epo-doping. This was decided by the Sports Court of the German Football Association (DFB) under the chairmanship of Stephan Oberholz, as the DFB announced on Thursday. The 21-year-old Croatian has always denied the doping allegation and can appeal to the DFB Federal Court within a week. The proceedings had developed into a fundamental dispute over the Epo analysis.

Vuskovic’s preliminary ban will be credited, so that the ban will run retroactively from 15 November 2022. The sentence is below the maximum ban of four years. “The defence had not been able to provide evidence of a false doping finding,” the DFB statement said.

“As a result of the proceedings, the DFB sports court is convinced with sufficient certainty that the analyses of the A and B samples of the player’s urine in the laboratory in Kreischa revealed the presence of erythropetin, or EPO for short, which is foreign to the body,” Oberholz was quoted as saying. “This is a banned so-called ‘non-specific substance’, which constitutes a punishable violation of the DFB’s anti-doping regulations.”

In a sample taken on 16 September, the centre-back had been found to contain the foreign substance erythropoietin (Epo). In December, the result was confirmed by the findings of the B sample. In November, Vuskovic was provisionally suspended by the DFB.

After three days of proceedings, the sports court had initially not seen itself in a position to reach a verdict. Therefore, after the third day of proceedings on 17 March, chairman Oberholz had announced “a written decision within the next two weeks at the latest”. This has now been communicated to Vuskovic and HSV. Prior to his announcement, Oberholz had unsuccessfully sought an amicable solution between the DFB Control Committee and the Vuskovic side.

The decision of the sports court in the fundamental dispute about the Epo analysis is also a victory for the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada). Four experts engaged by HSV had unanimously challenged the positive finding of the Wada-accredited analysis laboratory in Kreischa as “false-positive”. Laboratory director Sven Voss, on the other hand, assured that Vuskovic’s sample looked “exactly like a positive sample should look”.

Chief prosecutor Anton Nachreiner had echoed the view. “I consider this doping accusation to be proven without any problems,” he had said in his closing statement. At the same time, he had pleaded for lighter sentences “for a 21-year-old young man who may have made a mistake once and before one would ruin a probably very successful career”. Vuskovic’s lawyer Joachim Rain had seen no reason for a conviction: “We are asking for acquittal because Mario Vuskovic did not dope.”

One of the points of contention in the trial: The Wada’s Epo analysis method, which has been used for over 20 years. It has been questioned time and again. The SAR-PAGE method is used to check by eye whether there is a negative or positive result. Almost all other doping substances are detected by a mass spectrometric method.

In view of the dispute between the experts, Oberholz had appointed Jean-Francois Naud as an independent expert. The Canadian, however, sits with Voss in the Wada working group on epo. The sports court had rejected a motion by Vuskovic’s lawyers to recuse themselves.

Naud had refused Oberholz’s order to analyse a C-sample after the usual A- and B-sample from a urine volume of 43 millilitres, as this contradicts the Wada rules. For the judge, a third analysis result would have facilitated a verdict. According to the DFB, Naud, the Epo expert, had confirmed the assessment of the laboratory in Kreischa in his report.

Vuskovic had been loaned by HSV from Hajduk Split for 1.2 million euros in 2021 and signed permanently for three million euros last summer. Until his suspension, he was a fixture in Hamburg’s defence. He is considered an investment in the future by HSV.