Beautiful game, ugly players

While the World Cup has provided huge excitement and magical moments, the prestige of its biggest names has diminished as fame, narcissism and obscene riches take their toll.

Kagan McLeod for The National

A well-worn pitch in a Latin American favela, a patch of dirt in an African township, the smog-choked street of an industrial city in Asia. The location changes, but the story is always the same; a scrawny boy with a football, and a touch of magic that makes the stranger watching from the sidelines reach for his mobile phone.

Jump a dozen years into the future. The boy is now a man, made strong by a combination of good nutrition and a small army of trainers. To an audience of photographers and TV cameras he raises a shirt. On the back is his name. On the front, the crest of one of the great names of European football: Barcelona, Real Madrid, Manchester United. The transformation is complete. As the flashguns illuminate the scene, everybody smiles. The club president, the manager, the agents, the super-agents, the lawyers (his and theirs). Not quite in the picture is everything else that accompanies the lives of the world's best (and richest) footballers. The fast car (almost certainly Italian); the girlfriend (almost certainly a lingerie model or a minor pop star). Not to mention,the meaningless tattoos and a personal fortune to rival Croesus. Soon there will be sales of image rights, television commercials for fizzy drinks, pungent aftershave and expensive training shoes. A ghost-writer will produce the autobiography of a life barely lived, which will then be translated into a dozen languages. Wherever he travels in the world, small boys will chant his name and grown men will behave like small boys.

This, then, is the life of the stars of international football. Once the World Cup made them golden boys, now it is they who give the tournament its lustre. In many ways they are bigger than the occasion itself. The World Cup demands our attention every four years; these egos demand it constantly. It was not always like this. In 1958, the World Cup was held in Sweden. The unfancied Brazilian team included an anonymous teenager called Edison Arantes do Nascimento, a mouthful that had already been shortened to Pelé.

His first goal made Pelé the youngest ever World Cup scorer and took Brazil to the quarter-finals. In the semi-final against France he became the youngest player to score a hat-trick. Two more goals came in the final against Sweden that gave Brazil the first of five world championships. Such was the intensity of the occasion that Pelé passed out at the sound of the final whistle. The 1966 World Cup left Pelé almost crippled by a tackle so appalling that the Brazilian declared he would never play in the tournament again. Persuaded to change his mind, Pelé returned in 1970 to score the opening goal in the final against Italy and make two more. Afterwards, his marker, Tarcisio Burgnich, said: "I told myself before the game, he's made of skin and bones just like everyone else. But I was wrong."

Such is his fame that the Shah of Iran once waited three hours at an airport just to shake his hand. With fame came fortune - at various stages he has promoted everything from Coca-Cola and MasterCard to Viagra. But never once did he lose his dignity. There are many others: Lev Yashin, the Russian giant who is generally regarded as the greatest goalkeeper the world has seen; Franz Beckenbauer, the quiet German who captured the World Cup at his third attempt; Eusébio, the Portuguese "Black Pearl" whose nine goals in the 1966 World Cup included four against North Korea, who at one stage were leading 3-0, and who still found time to give this schoolboy an autograph during a training session in north London.

The drama's of these men's lives were lived on the pitch. Today, instead of Eusébio, the star turn of the Portuguese team in South Africa is Cristiano Ronaldo, whose sculpted physique can be seen all over the world, promoting everything from underwear to hair-care products. For many, Ronaldo epitomises the best and worst of modern superstar footballers. The son of a cook and an alcoholic gardener from a rundown suburb of Funchal, Madeira, he overcame severe health problems as a teenager to sign for Manchester United in 2002.

Supremely gifted as a footballer, he is as well known for his exploits off the pitch as on it. A Google search for "Cristiano Ronaldo+girlfriends" produces 134,000 results in 0.9 of a second. A lengthy list of conquests is said to include the celebrity model Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton, the latter during celebrations in Hollywood to celebrate his £80 million (Dh420 million) transfer from Manchester United to Real Madrid in 2009.

His World Cup debut was distinguished by an incident in which he encouraged the referee to send off his then Manchester United teammate Wayne Rooney during a World Cup quarter-final with England (and then winking at the Portuguese bench after Rooney was expelled). Most Englishmen have despised him ever since. When a publicity-seeking shopkeeper accused Bobby Moore, the England captain, of stealing a bracelet before the 1970 tournament, the world snorted at the absurdity of the allegations. These days, the morals of the England team are less certain.

A little after being voted "Dad of the Year", John Terry of Chelsea was stripped of the captaincy after being caught having an extra-martial affair with the girlfriend of another England team member. It was later revealed he was pocketing substantial cash payments for private behind-the-scenes tours of his club's training ground. Rooney is another player whose commercial achievements far outweigh those for his country and who increasingly looks like a bomb waiting to go off. Despite sponsorship deals with Nike, Ford and Coca-Cola, he has yet to score in a World Cup finals match, where his notoriety rests on the red card that followed his stamp on the Portuguese defender Ricardo Carvalho.

In the past week, Rooney was cautioned for uttering an expletive to a referee in a warm-up game. Tattooed across his neck are the words: "Just Enough Education to Perform." Of course, bad behaviour by footballers is nothing new. Maradona, arguably the most gifted player since Pelé, has battled cocaine abuse and was sent home from his final World Cup in disgrace for failing a drug test. Improbably, he is back again in South Africa as the manager of Argentina.

Two things have changed though in recent years. One is the global passion for football and the marketing potential of its stars that means the streets of Abu Dhabi and Dubai are lined with an image of Lionel Messi, the Argentinian striker, uncomfortably clutching a huge bucket of fried chicken. The other is the rise of club football. Messi is also one of the stars of Barcelona and when it comes to club or country, there is increasingly a conflict of interest. Club managers (and their accountants) will flinch at every crunching tackle on their star players in South Africa, fearful that they will return on crutches. So too do the fans of the bigger clubs who increasingly place success in competitions such as the European Champions League above any triumph in international football.

In an age where a worldwide network of scouts can spot the most precious talent emerging in the most remote African village, it seems improbable that any talent will emerge from South Africa in the way that Pelé burst into the global consciousness over half a century ago. But if they do, their first thoughts will not just be the golden trophy to be presented on July 11 at Johannesburg's Soccer City Stadium, but the prospect of an arm draped round a supermodel, the keys to a Ferrari in their designer jeans and their face on the side of a soft drink can.