LONDON — Pele once called it the "beautiful game." Soccer is anything but nowadays.
The world's most popular sport used to be about who scored the most goals, thrilled the fans and won the top titles. Now international soccer is plagued by cheats, drugs, hooliganism, racism, embarrassing blow outs and most recently, tragedy.
In South Africa on April 11, 43 fans were killed in a stampede at a soccer game, the third time in less than a year that fans died at overcrowded stadiums in Africa.
Keith Cooper, spokesman for FIFA, soccer's world governing body, acknowledged the sport has seen better days. He said the problems are "diverting attention away from what we should be watching."
"Sadly the trend is in the wrong direction," he said.
"Any activity as widespread and diverse as football involving so many people in so many countries is bound to throw up a few situations, some of them less comfortable than others."
Most of the problems result from the sport's own popularity.
FIFA boasts that about 240 million people play soccer and, to satisfy that huge interest, television has flooded the market with live games from every country.
But soccer has made TV pay a high price for that coverage. The boom has led to spiraling salaries and transfer fees.
Some teams that can't keep pace have turned to cheating. Across Europe, clubs import players from central and South America, using false passports to get around European Union labor laws that try to keep them out.
In Italy, prosecutors are investigating at least two dozen foreign players for alleged passport violations.
The transfer market has also opened the way for coaches to demand large financial kickbacks from players' agents for making the deals go through.
Arsenal coach George Graham was fired in 1996 and suspended from the game for a year in a transfer-payments scandal. Similar cases have emerged recently in other countries, notably Croatia.
Bribery and match-fixing cases made headlines in 1995 when former Liverpool goalkeeper Bruce Grobbelaar and three other stars went on trial in England, accused of accepting cash to throw games.
Although they were eventually acquitted, Grobbelaar was suspended for six months after admitting he broke Football Association rules by forecasting results for a gambling syndicate.
