Today creatine is sold in supermarkets, taken by millions of people who have never set foot in a stadium, and recommended by virtually every sports nutritionist. Anyone who followed football in the late 1990s remembers something very different: a word that conjured dark changing rooms, players suddenly putting on muscle, and courtrooms. That shift in image is one of the more curious stories in recent football history, because the substance is the same and its legal status has never changed.
Creatine arrived in elite sport in the early 1990s. In 1992, a study by British and Swedish physiologists showed that taking it orally increased muscle phosphocreatine stores, the fuel burned in the first seconds of a maximal effort. That same summer, at the Barcelona Games, sprinter Linford Christie, gold medallist in the 100 metres, admitted he used it. From there it spread through athletics and quickly reached football, which was undergoing a huge physical acceleration, with more matches, more intensity and greater muscular demands.
The trouble came in Italy. In July 1998, Zdeněk Zeman, then Roma manager, said in an interview with L'Espresso that football needed to get out of the pharmacy, and pointed to the sudden increase in muscle mass of two Juventus players, Gianluca Vialli and Alessandro Del Piero. The Turin public prosecutor's office opened an investigation into the club's medical practices during those years, which eventually put team doctor Riccardo Agricola and chief executive Antonio Giraudo in the dock.
What was really being investigated was not creatine. The heart of the accusation was the possible administration of EPO and the widespread use of drugs without medical justification on healthy footballers. But at trial, as the players took the stand one by one, creatine was what came up most. It was legal and there was no reason to deny it, so several players acknowledged taking it openly. Del Piero recalled being given several tablets before a match, and others described being given it even at half-time. The legal substance ended up as the public face of the scandal, while what was really at stake was far harder to prove.
The case took nearly a decade to close. In 2004, Agricola was convicted at first instance and sentenced to one year and ten months for sporting fraud. In 2005 he was acquitted on appeal. In 2007, Italy's Supreme Court found that the acts could in principle constitute sporting fraud, but the offence had already passed the statute of limitations. Nobody was convicted because of creatine, but it became associated with one of the darkest episodes in Italian football history.
That association had consequences beyond Italy. In 2001, the French food safety agency issued an alert about its possible risks that led to restrictions on its sale in the country. Those fears did not hold up, and in 2006 it was freely available again. Meanwhile, creatine never appeared on the list of prohibited substances of the International Olympic Committee, the World Anti-Doping Agency or FIFA. Throughout all those years it was legal in sport and suspect in the court of public opinion.
Rehabilitation came through the accumulation of studies. Over the following two decades, hundreds of trials ruled out the fears surrounding it, from alleged kidney damage to the notion that it acted as an anabolic agent. In 2018, the International Olympic Committee's consensus statement on supplements placed it among the few with solid evidence of performance enhancement. And in 2020 UEFA published an expert statement on nutrition in football which, while insisting that food comes first, acknowledges that creatine and caffeine are the supplements with the strongest scientific backing, and includes guidelines for its use.
What is striking is that the basic science was already there from 1992. The creatine being examined in the Turin courtroom worked in exactly the same way as the creatine UEFA recommends today. What changed was the context: once the cloud of suspicion from the Juventus case slowly dissolved, what remained was a cheap, legal supplement with abundant evidence in its favour.
And where there is a product like that, business follows. In September 2024, Barcelona signed a global agreement with BioTechUSA, a sports supplement brand, to supply its men's and women's first teams and collaborate on research. Pedri has been an individual ambassador for the brand since 2025. What was being explained in a courtroom at the end of the 1990s is today announced with first-team players. Behind it all lies a highly concentrated industry: the vast majority of the creatine consumed worldwide is manufactured in China, and the leading producer outside Asia is the German company Alzchem, with its Creapure brand.
The normalisation also has its small print. Anti-doping laboratories have spent years warning that some supplements may be contaminated with prohibited substances not listed on the label, and in elite sport the player is always responsible for a positive test. That is why clubs work with brands that certify their products. The fact that creatine is safe does not mean that every tub of it is.
The story of creatine in football shows that a substance can spend years bearing the blame for a scandal that was never really about it. The science did not need to change, nor did the law. It was enough for football to stop looking at it through the lens of the Juventus case.
