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.