THE AFL does not reveal the full breakdown of the 500 drug tests carried out on its behalf each year, but it claims all players are tested on entering the league system and at least once over a two-year period thereafter.

Others subject to target testing, according to an AFL spokesperson, are the top three in each club's best-and-fairest award, all AFL medallists and all players put on the long-term injury list. All-Australian selections not falling into one of the other categories also are target-tested.

Although the Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority can target-test individual players in the same manner it does Olympic athletes, most testing is done through the clubs. The knock-on-the-door test well known to Craig Mottram, Jana Rawlinson and Grant Hackett is a comparative rarity in football.

Because of the greater number of players on AFL lists — approximately 650 across the 16 clubs — individual players are not tested with anything like the frequency of Olympic athletes. An informed source at one club said it had been subject to about 25 individual drug tests this year — evenly split between in-competition and out-of-competition. Allowing for the targeted tests, this seems about the likely figure at most clubs.

The AFL conducts about twice as many tests for illicit drugs as performance-enhancing drugs. The tests are undertaken by a private pathology company.

ASADA does conduct out-of-competition tests at training camps, notably when testers turned up at the Collingwood high-altitude camp in Arizona. The scope of ASADA's testing of players was outlined in a statement on the AFL website last week.