André Onana on the error that led to a nine-month ban: ‘40mg can destroy a career’

André Onana had a headache. He had landed in the small hours on a flight back from Bergamo where Ajax had drawn 2-2 with Atalanta and didn’t sleep much. When he woke, his head still hurt. Training wasn’t for a few hours, so rather than wait until he arrived at De Toekomst, Ajax’s training base, he took a paracetamol from the medicine box in the kitchen and got on with it. After the session he was called to another routine drugs test, his third in a week. He didn’t think anything of it. Not then, anyway. He could be forgiven for thinking of nothing else since.

“Football is not a game of humanity,” Onana says. He has been talking for over an hour and it is the only thing he says in English. He speaks without melodrama or rancour and with a dignity – an acceptance, even – that is disconcerting. It is also partly practised; an exercise in exigency, in self-control and survival. It was October 2020 and it could have been the end. Two days later the analysis arrived, the goalkeeper informed when he was with Cameroon: he had tested positive, one of very few footballers found guilty of doping.

An international at 20, a Europa League finalist at 21, a Champions League semi-finalist at 23, leader of a brilliant young Ajax team on course for the title, now a hugely promising career seemed on the edge of collapse. He was 24.

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It didn’t make sense. Ajax’s chief executive, Edwin van der Sar, said the penny dropped when they went to Onana’s house and looked through the box: “Then we understood.” Instead of Litacold, he had accidentally taken Lasimac, a Furosemide-based diuretic. Prescribed to his wife after giving birth, Furosemide is a banned substance. The blister packs looked the same, the pills did too – little white circles, barely 6mm in diameter. The tiniest thing, the biggest impact. “It’s incredible: 40mg can destroy a career,” he says.

That’s Onana’s version, and it is one Uefa accepted. They concluded there had been no attempt to cheat but banned him anyway, beginning in February this year. “I’m just a number,” he says. “They can’t deal case by case. I think they should but there are rules and the rules are the rules. The doctors said [Furosemide] is for water-retention and doesn’t benefit you. They recognised it was a genuine mistake but you’re responsible for everything in your body. If I buy a bottle of water that turns out to be contaminated, it’s my responsibility. If you accidentally kill someone driving, the law says …” But you didn’t kill anyone, I point out. “Yeah, but you have to be careful,” Onana replies. “There’s a ‘minster’, and he punishes you. It’s a human error.”

“Look, a few days ago something happened,” Onana adds, referencing the botched Champions League draw. “Even the biggest make mistakes.” There’s a smile but if there’s a temptation to tear into Uefa he never succumbs, even though 12 months meant missing “league, Champions League, cup, Super Cup, an Africa Nations at home”. A career derailed.

In June, the court of arbitration for sport found “no significant fault” and reduced Onana’s sentence to nine months, but the impact is felt longer. It is not just the games, or even just the football: there is something cruel, almost vindictive about it, the player as non-person, isolated and alone, the game carrying on without him. They don’t call, tell you they’ll wait, that there is a place when you get back? “No,” Onana says. “Football’s not like that. When you’re banned you can’t step foot on the [club’s training] pitch, can’t go into the dressing room. We [Ajax] were league champions. I had played 60% of the games and I wasn’t allowed to celebrate it. Some things in life don’t depend on you and you just have to be pragmatic.

“As soon as we found out, we put together a team. Seven people. It’s not easy to find a coach who’s not working. You find your psychologist, a fitness coach, a physio, a nutritionist, a place to work, live. I went to Salou. You have to focus on what’s important – the people you love and that love you – and prepare as best you can.”

He goes on: “You can’t even use the African Nations as motivation, a target, because logic says you won’t get there. Football turns its back. I was just trying to survive, come back better. Try to always see the positive side. But sometimes you can’t. As a goalkeeper it’s difficult: you go, someone else plays. There are moments you think about giving in. I was lucky: I have good people. If that happens and you’re alone you’re going to give up. You won’t have the will to go through it.

“It’s the way you’re perceived, too. It’s ‘doping’: you’re a ‘drug addict’. How are you going to explain to your parents that you’ve tested positive when you’ve never smoked or drunk?” Onana draws a label on his forehead. “How do you get rid of this here? There will still be people who think [I’m guilty]. People don’t always have time to be informed. The police stopped me in Belgium. The normal thing: ‘Documents?’ When I show my identity card, one of them recognises me. ‘Mr Onana, get out of the car.’ They check the whole car. The whole thing. I hear one say: ‘This guy takes loads of drugs.’”

Onana bursts out laughing. “That did hurt. I’m laughing now but the only reason I didn’t end up in a fight is they were policemen. If not, I’m getting out and …” Onana puts his fists up. “Where are you going with that written here?” he continues, signalling his head again. “I’ve come back but if it happens to someone less strong mentally it would be very difficult.”

Onana is strong, all right. He has had to be. Born in the tiny village of Nkol Ngok, population barely 400, he was discovered at a competition run by the Samuel Eto’o foundation in Yaoundé, joined Barcelona at 14, slept in a bedroom inside Camp Nou, went to Ajax at 18. Football, he admits, can be a solitary game, players scared. “But it’s our job. We’re here to ‘entertain’ the people. It seems [people think] we don’t have feelings sometimes.”

He tells of his fear upon reaching the Europa League final still a “kid” and the support from Van der Sar. “I couldn’t have had a better godfather,” he says. “Goalkeeper is a deceptive position. From the outside, you can’t understand how much pressure there is. An example: Stockholm, the Europa League final. Six months earlier I’d been second-team keeper, in grounds of 3,000. It’s one game. Against [Manchester] United. The repercussion. The whole world watching. I get there and tell the coach I can’t play, I don’t feel right. Van der Sar gives an interview: ‘Tell André I haven’t brought gloves, so he plays.’ I wake up and see that. That really helped me.

“We lost because we were very young. This guy is ill, that one doesn’t feel well, we’re all looking at the floor, scared. But we only lost on small details and after I said to myself: never again will I feel fear in football. That helped me handle the pressure in the years that followed.”

Which didn’t make them easy. When Ajax were denied a place in the 2019 Champions League final in the most heartbreaking of circumstances against Tottenham, he says Amsterdam felt like it was in “the second world war: no one talked, everyone cried” and he still couldn’t tell you who scored in the final. He was on a flight determined not to know. It hurt too much. “But you learn, you grow stronger.” Onana says.

In November, ban served, he played for Cameroon against Malawi and the Ivory Coast and for Ajax against Besiktas, reward for his resistance, a new start. Now he has joined Common Goal, collaborating with a project for blind orphans in his native country. “I can’t change their lives entirely but maybe I can help them be a little happier. After the year I’ve had I wanted to end with a good feeling.”

There is a sense of beginning again, cruelty overcome if never gone, opportunity ahead, that solitary work worthwhile. In the summer, he will join Internazionale and he is available for the hosts of next month’s Africa Cup of Nations. The Cas ruling gave him a chance, although inactivity means nothing is guaranteed. In his absence Remko Pasveer became Ajax’s first choice and three games is not much preparation. “The coach can always say: ‘Listen, the other guy is playing regularly, and you …’” Onana says. “If I play it’s an honour. It was strange playing again; I was nervous. But it depends what you’ve been doing for nine months. I was ready from the first day.

“Football is a ‘game’, but when there is so much at stake there’s not much humanity. Being banned is not a good thing but you learn so much, find out who really matters in your life. It helped me work on other aspects: more time to train, watch it back, make corrections. When I returned, I got on the scales, shirt off, and they said: ‘Bloody hell, you didn’t look like that when you went away.’ They’re happy for me. A lot said: ‘André, if that happened to me, I would have let myself go’. But when it gets tough you have to get even tougher.”