Could football clubs use genes testing to find the next David Beckham?

But it seems clubs are turning to scientists in a bid to find the next David Beckham.

According to a leading sports scientist, at least one football club has look at getting potential rising stars genes tested to separate the potential premiership players with those destined to shine only during a Sunday morning knock-about.

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Dr Henning Wackerhage, from Aberdeen University's school of medical sciences, said a professional club had made contact with him about the possibility of screening players to discover whether they have a genetic predisposition to athletic excellence.

Wackerhage told the Guardian newspaper he prepared an academic paper earlier this year highlighting experiments that had produced enhanced physical performance in mice and rats and how that related to humans.

He has since suggested that it might be possible to produce the human equivalent of a formula one car by using genetic mutations.

His research was picked up by the unnamed club, which got in touch hoping to exploit nascent gene-screening technology, already freely available in Australia, which tests athletes for a number of genes considered indicative of top-level performance.

He told the newspaper: "A football club was interested in doing genetic testing of athletes.

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"It was a genetic performance test. My advice was that there are questions of legality with an employer doing genetic tests on its employees. They wanted to conduct a test that is specific to genetics."

Wackerhage said he was not in favour of using the screening method but said the technology had potential.

He also gave a speech earlier this month suggesting that genetic modification could reduce the world record for the marathon, currently just over two hours, to 90 minutes.

"The aim of the talk was to highlight the fact of genetic research on mice and humans. It shows why there are different natural variations in sporting ability," he said.

"The mice are made to be different because their DNA is changed. Sometimes it doesn't cause disease but leads to fitter specimens, better storage of glycogens, a massive heart etc. The idea of the talk was as a thought experiment that would consider combining all the mutations to see if you got a superathlete."

In Australian, a company has developed a £47 test that claims to identify whether customers have the fast-twitch muscle function gene ACTN3, which is found in leading sprinters.