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Terry was ejected during last season's Champions League semifinal between Chelsea and Barcelona for kneeing a player in the back.
LONDON — John Terry has played soccer for Chelsea for 14 years, eight of them as captain, at a time when the team has never been more successful. He hates to miss a match. He plays injured. He plays hard. He plays as if every moment mattered more than every other moment. He plays with a fierceness and a focus that do not waver even when he is being baited and taunted by opposing fans, which is often the case. When he plays, even in away matches, Chelsea fans proudly unfurl a banner: "JT: Captain, Leader, Legend."
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Queens Park Rangers' Anton Ferdinand, left, was racially abused by John Terry in a Premier League match in October 2011. Terry was fined and banned four matches.
One of the canniest, toughest and best defenders in English soccer, Terry is also perhaps the country's most reviled player. Even in the combustible, fiercely tribal Premier League, where the fans' unconditional love of their teams is matched only by their implacable hatred of everyone else, Terry inspires a special degree of loathing. He is the only player in the history of England's national team to be removed as captain twice. (He retired from that team, under a cloud, last month.) Even many Chelsea fans are finding it harder and harder to reconcile John Terry, the fantastic soccer player, with John Terry, seemingly major league brat.
"J. T. is an amazing leader on the football pitch," said Neil Harvey, 51, a lighting consultant who has a £900-a-year season ticket (about $1,450) to Chelsea. "But, like most people — would you want him to be your friend? No. But he's not there to be my friend."
Nothing in his roller coaster of a career has matched what happened a year ago, when, in an on-field confrontation with a black player, Terry used a racial slur during an exchange of ugly insults. The scandal ended up engulfing all of English soccer, dividing players, exposing unsavory truths about on-field behavior and disgracing Terry, his team and the Premier League. Terry was acquitted in a criminal trial, but in a scathing judgment last month, an independent tribunal called his defense "improbable, implausible and contrived," fined him £220,000 (about $354,000) and handed him a four-match ban.
The incident was merely the latest in a wearying series of unfortunate episodes.
There was the time Terry and some teammates went on a drunken binge in an airport hotel bar while passengers stranded by the 9/11 attacks watched the Twin Towers burn on television. There was the time he was charged with assault after a melee in a nightclub in which a bouncer was slashed with a broken bottle. (He was acquitted.)
There was the time he was fined £60 (about $97) after leaving his Bentley in a parking spot for the disabled while he went to a pizza restaurant; the time he was thrown out of a bar in Essex after urinating in a beer glass and dropping it on the floor; the time he was investigated, and cleared, by Chelsea after he was accused of charging an undercover reporter money to show him around Stamford Bridge, Chelsea's stadium; the time he brutally kneed a Barcelona player in the back in the Champions League semifinal last April and denied it until confronted with a videotape that proved he was lying; and the time when he violated the players' unwritten code of loyalty by, it seemed, cheating on his wife not with a groupie in a bar, but with the estranged girlfriend of one of his teammates.
"He's a walking disaster," said Mark Perryman, a research fellow in sport and leisure culture at the University of Brighton and the author of "Ingerland: Travels With a Football Nation." Using English slang for hooligan, he said: "He's been caught out serially, and that makes him a yob — but that doesn't make him a bad footballer. It makes him a bad role model."
The Chelsea club did not make Terry available for an interview for this article.
Britain's newspapers mostly fell out of love with Terry a long time ago (in headlines, The Daily Mail flatly calls him things like "the serial brawler, drinker and womanizer John Terry"), and the Football Association ruling was seen as a disgrace too far. "John Terry and Ashley Cole have shamed Chelsea and embarrassed English football," The Observer of London said in an editorial, referring to a Chelsea teammate whose defense of Terry, the tribunal said, was a lie.
'A One-Club Man'
He had promise from the beginning. Anyone who knows Terry says that he lives and breathes soccer and that it has always been that way, since he was a boy kicking a ball around the rough streets of Barking in East London. His father was a forklift operator in a wood yard who was never good enough to play soccer professionally, but played for a local amateur team and encouraged John and his older brother, Paul, to aim higher (Paul Terry now plays for Thurrock, a lower-division team). Money was tight. Terry's father started work at 6 a.m., got home at 6 p.m., drove the boys to soccer and got home to dinner at 10. Soccer was a lifeline and a ticket out for an aggressively unacademic child like Terry.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: October 27, 2012
An earlier version of this article mistakenly identified Vanessa Perroncel as Veranika Perroncel.
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