Soccer/News Feature: Daniel Taylor on how soccer's stars have swapped kiss-and-tells for hardcore thuggery

Guess the footballer: he wears a diamond earring, earns more in a week than most people get in a year and, already a millionaire, has money to burn. Literally. He is also an imbecile.

A few years back he was playing for his country in eastern Europe and on the morning of the match, went for a walk in the city where the team were staying. It was the sort of place where the poverty hits you between the eyes, pollution clogs the air and crumbling tower blocks rise from the ground like broken old teeth. A young woman was begging in the street, and her little boy reached out his hand. The footballer took out his wallet, pulled out a handful of local banknotes and, laughing, set fire to the lot.

Another one: which footballer, a veteran of seven clubs and more than 450 appearances, is well known to the police because of his links to prominent members of Derby County's hooligan firm, the Derby Lunatic Fringe?

Or which Premiership star, in his days with Lazio's youth team, used to appear regularly "on the front line" with their Irriducibili ultras, once kicking a Padova fan senseless for the crime of wearing a scarf showing his club's colours? Easy, that last one. Paolo di Canio does, after all, admit in his autobiography how his mob used to "scour the stadium for the right people to jump" and how in one battle against Atalanta's firm he was five yards away when the Bergamo chief of police was stabbed.

All of this, of course, shows what we already knew, that a culture of irresponsibility, excess and occasional violence among footballers is nothing new. So why, after years of stories of players punching and puking their way through pubs and clubs, does it feel as though player misbehaviour has plummeted to new levels of depravity?

According to Gordon Taylor, the chief executive of the Professional Footballers' Association, the modern-day player is "no worse than before" but the headlines certainly are. Not to mention the anecdotes. According to a close associate of one England international, the player paid a considerable sum last summer to an underage girl to prevent what was essentially a story of statutory rape being made public.

Whereas we used to read about kiss-and-tells, infidelity with grasping lap-dancers and maybe the occasional punch-up, now we are fed stories of depravity, racism and rioting. The latest case, where eight Premiership stars are alleged to have raped a 17-year-old schoolgirl at the Grosvenor House Hotel in London eight nights ago, threatens to bring to court an even more grotesque trial than that of Jonathan Woodgate, Lee Bowyer and associates after Sarfraz Najeib, then a 19-year-old student, was beaten unconscious and left for dead, broken-boned and with a lump of flesh bitten out of his cheek.

George Best makes the point in his latest autobiography that there are as many alcoholic sportswriters as there are footballers, but that is hardly an excuse and besides, Best's liaisons with various Miss Worlds seem now part of an altogether more innocent age. As players' salaries have rocketed so has their media profile and, as a result, their self-regard. The evidence of successive scandals seems to suggest a dislocation from the constraints of normal behaviour among leading players.

Tabloid editors long ago appreciated the sales that can be put on by a good football scandal, but in recent times they have been spoiled for choice, whether it be bog-standard sleaze (Kieron Dyer, Dwight Yorke, etc.), x-rated Christmas parties (Liverpool, West Ham) or more serious offences such as drink-driving (James Beattie, Seth Johnson, Eirik Bakke, Rio Ferdinand), drugs (Mark Bosnich, Paul Merson), wife-beating (Paul Gascoigne) and girlfriend-beating (Stan Collymore).

"It feels like footballers are the new pop stars," says Mickey Thomas, the one-time Manchester United and Wales midfielder. "I mean, who cares about a pop star drinking lots and taking drugs? It's old news. People want to read about footballers now. You do something wrong and there are going to be big headlines, and they're just getting bigger all the time."

Thomas speaks from a position of authority, having been a bit of a rascal himself, most notoriously because of an 18-month prison sentence in 1992 after he was found selling counterfeit ten pound notes to Wrexham's youth-team players.

However, Thomas defends the excesses of the current generation, whose wealth, he says, makes them vulnerable to exploitation.

"Players these days have got fame, a brand-new car, a big house, and it all comes very quickly. There are a lot of hangers-on in football and people who want to make money out of you. It's a big earner for someone to sell a story about a footballer."

Olivier Bernard, the Newcastle defender, will understand that last sentiment. Earlier this year a 16-year-old made rape allegations against him and it took three months for the police to throw out her claims.

"It was difficult for me to understand," he said. "It was a girl trying to make money out of me because of who I was. Her friends said she was devastated when Bernard was cleared). She tried to get money out of me but she could not win. It was all just a story, one big story."

The experience has changed him profoundly. "When I go out, things are very different now. I do not really speak to girls. I just stick with my own friends. I prefer being with people who I have known for a long time. I'm much quieter now."

At least one more high-profile case is looming, when Newcastle's Craig Bellamy appears in court on Tuesday accused of racially abusing a nightclub doorman in Cardiff.

And how to legislate for what Jody Morris, then of Chelsea, is reputed to have told the staff at the Wellington club in London, as revealed in the court case that eventually saw him and John Terry cleared of assault charges? "Do you know how much I earn? I earn more in a day than you earn in a week. Do you know who we are? We could get you sacked."

Thomas says more managers should adopt Alex Ferguson's "hardline" mentality with their young players. Yet Ferguson may not be the best example - during his publican days in Govan his premises were a marketplace for the sale of goods he describes as having made "an unofficial exit" from the docks.