AN ITALIAN judge is investigating the suspicious death of 70 football stars amid fears that drugs their clubs gave them may have triggered their fatal illnesses.

Raffaele Guariniello, a magistrate in Turin, is probing the unusually high incidence of cancer, leukaemia and a rare disease of the nervous system among players who have appeared for top clubs such as Juventus, Roma and Milan.

'Out of 400 deaths since 1960, we are investigating 70 suspicious ones,' said Guariniello, who is researching the records of 24,000 professional Italian players between 1960 and 1996. 'Many more players are dying of these diseases than members of the public.' The judge believes the consumption of 'doping-style substances' by players, with or without their knowledge, is a possible explanation. He began interviewing former players, trainers and relatives in 1999, after several widows approached him for help.

Fears have been raised that footballers in Britain could be suffering from similar diseases. 'If it is true that there's a proved link between drug misuse and football, it would have implications for our efforts to keep sport here drug-free,' said Michele Verroken, the anti-doping chief of the UK Sports Council, who is writing to the football authorities drawing attention to the evidence emerging in Italy.

Verroken said there were parallels between the diseases afflicting Italian players and those suffered by athletes in East Germany, who were secretly drugged by the communist authorities. It is not clear what the levels of knowledge about possible side-effects of these drugs were.

'Stasi files released after the event showed the very dangerous health dangers to sportsmen who take drugs. We learnt that the regimes of steroid administration caused severe health problems - including, it appears, premature death - among runners, swimmers and other athletes in the Seventies and Eighties.'

A number of top British and Irish players, such as Ian Rush, Liam Brady, Graeme Souness and Paul Ince, spent part of their careers in Italy in the Eighties and Nineties. There is no suggestion that any British or Irish player has ever, even unwittingly, encountered any drug use or suffered diseases such as those emerging in Italy.

However, the fate of Gianluca Signorini, a defender with Roma, Genoa and Parma, is among those which has aroused Guariniello's suspicion. After giving Italy some of its most spectacular footballing moments of the Nineties, the defender was totally paralysed by a rare terminal disease.

'I would like to get up and run with you, but I can't,' the wheelchair-bound hero told 30,000 devastated fans at a tribute match in May 2001, in a message read out by his daughter Benedetta. 'I would like to shout songs of joy with you, but I can't. I would like this to be a dream from which I will wake up, but it isn't.'

Horrified Italians still mourn Signorini, who died of the rare amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), or 'Lou Gehrig's disease', in November last year, aged 42. His case raises fresh suspicions that the country's leading clubs may have literally driven some of their best players to death over the past 40 years by over-working them and pumping them with drugs.

Although Signorini blamed his condition on 'destiny', he listed all the drugs he had been given. 'They injected me with a lot of Voltaren for the ongoing pains in the shin and Neoton and Esafosfina directly into the veins before the matches,' he told Italy's Panorama magazine.

Others, such as former Inter player Sandro Mazzola, have reportedly testified to Guariniello about the use of amphetamines, high-risk radiotherapy and 'heavy' painkillers.

'There is a dramatic difference,' Guariniello told The Observer . 'The risk of liver and colon tumours is twice as high as it is among normal members of the public. For Gehrig disease, we expected perhaps one case, because the probability was 0.61. Instead we found 45 cases of the disease, and 13 of them are already dead.'

Gehrig's, which attacks the nervous system and the spinal cord, was named after an American baseball hero, the first major sportsman to die of the disease, and is extremely rare.

Guariniello's investigation is investigating any link between the high death rates among young players and standards of practice in Italy's biggest clubs. Research has linked leukaemia to the use of growth hormones and liver tumours can be caused by anabolic steroids, he said. But in the case of ALS, there is as yet, no scientific explanation.

Guariniello believes the 45 ALS cases, which include the former Sampdoria player Guido Vincenzi and AC Milan's Giorgio Rognoni, who died of ALS in 1986 at 40, could in some way be related to a combination of intensive physical activity combined with leg injuries.

'We are now identifying all the players who have died for these reasons to see who might be responsible. It is emerging that there are some clubs where there have been many more deaths than in others,' said Guariniello. .

A Torino player now suffering from ALS told the judge about pressure from clubs: 'They made me play when I was already ill. But the club convinced me not to stop. They said I had a future.'

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