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Claudio Caniggia and Diego Maradona got a year's ban for testing positive for cocaine in Italy in the early 90s, I remember. Mutu's career is hardly over. He's still young, and he made a mistake.
Mutu will get lenience for not fighting the charges. It's not admitting your problem as opposed to being caught, it's accepting that you have been caught and that you're going to get punished. Mutu is within his rights to have a second test analysed, further tests done and to go through an appeal process, but he isn't doing any of it.
Had Rio Ferdinand and Manchester United not taken the FA on and tried to blame them for the fiasco, Rio would not have had such a lengthy ban. They miscalculated their own power, there, when really Rio should have plead guilty straight away, since he definitely was guilty, and then his sentence would have been mitigated accordingly.
Cocaine is not a performance enhancing drug, so Mutu is not a cheat, just an overpaid idiot.
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