When the beautiful game turned ugly

Nick Morrison looks at how the game's image has been tarnished and asks: where did it all go wrong?

"ALL that I know most surely about morality and obligations, I owe to football," was the verdict of French writer Albert Camus. And, indeed, he's not the only one who's seen all human life encapsulated within the game. The passion, the despair, the triumph, the frustration, the joy - it all takes place within 90 minutes on a football pitch.

But looking to football for moral guidance over the last few weeks has been a less than inspiring pursuit. Scandal after scandal after scandal is threatening to engulf the game, with off-pitch behaviour overshadowing any on-field drama. Never has the national game been held in such low regard; never have its practitioners been so reviled. Remarking that footballers are more likely to be found on the front pages as the back pages has become redundant: after all, where else would they be but the front page?

Last night, the England team was in crisis, as players threatened to boycott Saturday's European Championship qualifier in Turkey over the decision to drop Rio Ferdinand, after the star missed a drugs test, apparently preoccupied with moving house. Even when you earn £100,000 a week it seems you still worry about where you packed the kettle.

But this is the mildest of the misdeeds to have besmirched the game in recent weeks. Most familiar is the tale of a 17-year-old girl who was allegedly picked up in a nightclub by a well-known footballer, taken back to a hotel room, and then gang raped by Premiership players. A week after the tale surfaced, a party organiser and friend to footballers came forward to say he had been involved, but denied the girl had been raped.

Instead, he went on to recount what had happened that night, claiming the girl had consented to a number of sexual combinations, including Premiership players, his version not sparing what is commonly called lurid detail. Last night, he was arrested after going voluntarily to a police station.

In another incident, on Tuesday night it emerged that a Leeds United player had been arrested by police investigating an alleged sexual assault on a 20-year-old girl. Last night the player was named as Jody Morris, a 24-year-old former Chelsea player, as detectives continued forensic examination of a lay-by. Also on Tuesday, Newcastle striker Craig Bellamy was fined £750 after pleading guilty to using abusive language after he was refused entry to a nightclub. Anyone looking to football to learn about morality may be woefully disappointed.

But while the last two weeks may have seen something of a flurry of these tales, they are far from unique. Stories of footballers behaving badly have been a staple diet of newspapers since Paul Gascoigne was pictured pouring beer down Paul Ince's throat before an important England game and Stan Collymore knocked then-girlfriend Ulrika Jonsson about.

Rio Ferdinand - him again - saw his holiday video much in demand on the Internet three years ago. Not for him shots of wildebeest crossing the plains, instead it featured Ferdinand, Frank Lampard and Kieron Dyer having sex with a variety of girls in a number of combinations, with the girls apparently unaware they were being filmed. Ferdinand, along with then-Leeds team-mate Michael Duberry, was also said to have groped women in a nightclub, the claims surfacing in the trial of another man, convicted of attempted rape and indecent assault.

Frank Lampard, again, and John Terry were among Chelsea players fined for behaving badly at a hotel near Heathrow Airport, offending American tourists the day after the September 11 tragedy, and Newcastle pair Jonathan Woodgate and Lee Bowyer were both accused of involvement in a vicious attack on an Asian student in Leeds. Bowyer was acquitted, but Woodgate was found guilty of affray.

Woodgate's propensity to get into trouble surfaced again last year, when he suffered a broken jaw after what was said to be "horseplay" at the Dickens Inn in Middlesbourgh, the scene of another incident earlier this year when a student claimed he had been punched in the face by the England international, although no charges were brought.

In the light of these shenanigans, Pele's call for footballers to be role models, made on a visit to the North-East on Tuesday, may have sounded somewhat futile. But while 'Footballer behaving badly' has long since lost its shock value, we should not be surprised at accounts of young men with pots of money going off the rails, says Dr Joan Harvey, chartered psychologist at Newcastle University.

"These are young men, full of testosterone, and the same young men without much money would be doing the rounds of the pubs and going out on the pull and indulging in anti-social behaviour - the sort of things you see on television about Ibiza and Faliraki," she says.

'On top of this you have £100,000 a week, as well as the adulation and prestige, so they are extremely rich and they have got all sorts of girls running after them. It is sadly unsurprising that they get into all sorts of scrapes. It is not an excuse, but it is a hideous combination."

For many of these young men, even a stable home life does not prepare them for the unreality of a footballer's life. Surrounded by hangers-on, for whom their every word has a Confucian significance, whose head would not be turned? And, of course, most of us can get drunk and make fools of ourselves knowing it's unlikely to make tomorrow's front page

Young men in their early 20s are still short of psychological and emotional maturity, and are ill equipped to handle the sudden wealth, let alone being adored or hated in equal measure. At least for David Beckham, his relationship with Victoria gave him some stability during the years when he could have followed the Lampard and Ferdinand path.

"If you are single, rich and famous, where are you going to meet the sort of person who isn't going to be a hanger-on? Not everyone can just pick out a pop star," says Dr Harvey.

But while the tales of excess are legion, this is more to do with the media obsession with scandal than with any cancer at the heart of football, according to Sunderland legend Jim Montgomery, the man whose save helped win the FA Cup for the Roker Park side in 1973.

"The number of people who are bringing the game into disrepute is very small," he says. "There are one or two well-known players, who have done it a couple of times. There are always going to be some like that in any profession: you get the Cliff Richards of the world, and the Mick Jaggers.

"They're so high-profile now. We could have done what they're doing now and we would probably have got away with it, but now wherever they go there's a photographer."

While the game's image may have taken a van Nistelroy-like tumble, he says far worse for its reputation was the brawl between Arsenal and Manchester United players last month.

"If you're talking about going out for a drink when you shouldn't be, these things have gone on for years," he adds, and the suggestion that bad behaviour is nothing new is certainly backed up by looking at the life and times of such as George Best, Stan Bowles and Peter Osgood. Even Bobby Moore was caught out drinking before an FA Cup tie, although it didn't make the papers.

But the difference now is in the amounts of money players earn. The end of the maximum wage in 1960 may have created a new breed of wealthy footballers, but that pales into insignificance when set against Ferdinand's lucre.

"The famous footballers of yesteryear didn't have all this cash, and they could look forward to ending up as publicans. They were much more ordinary and better adjusted," says Dr Harvey. "This is a fairly recent phenomenon, but if you have got someone who earns £100,000 a week at 21 just because they can kick a ball about, what do you expect?"