It would have to be in Brazil, of course. It would have to be in the sunshine and the dust and the splendid chaos of that wonderful country that so many of the good things and the bad things about soccer would suddenly come together and explode into a scene of madness and awe.

It happened in Belem, in Brazil’s north. The focal point, naturally, was the local soccer stadium, the Mangueirao, jammed with excited fans. The stadium holds 45,000, but as many as 55,000 had squeezed themselves in. Whatever the number inside, there were 5,000 or more outside who wanted in, and there was trouble.

Reuters reported that “Desperate fans, including children, were seen running, falling over each other, and being trampled on amid a background of screaming and wailing sirens. Riot police were brought in and used pepper spray to try and control the situation.” AFP reported that 60 people were injured, six of them seriously, in the crush.

Meanwhile, inside the Mangueirao, the game went on. Except that there was no game. This huge crowd, this wild excitement, this frantic melee was caused by nothing more important than a training session. The Brazilian national team was in town, getting ready for a meaningless World Cup qualifier against Venezuela – doubly meaningless, really, because Brazil had already qualified and Venezuela was already eliminated. Brazil’s great stars – Ronaldo, Kaka, Adriano, Roberto Carlos, Ronaldinho, and Robinho – were there in Belem, giving fans a rare chance to see them in the flesh. The team bus had made its way to the stadium through streets lined with cheering fans.

The Brazilian soccer authorities have always been generous about their practice sessions – no closed doors, no admission charge. This time, they asked everyone attending to bring a kilo of non-perishable food, for later distribution to the needy.

A lovely idea, but can there be little doubt that many of those attending were themselves the “needy”? One of the reasons for the crush was simply that a large number of the fans would not be able to afford the ticket prices for the real game a day later. That is modern soccer, a sport that is steadily pricing itself out of the reach of the masses who have always been its strength.

The sport of the people, it used to be called, but the phrase has a hollow ring these days. Money is changing soccer’s very nature, it is attracting people who are more interested in profit than sport, something that was unheard of in better days, maybe only three decades ago, when profits were a dirty word, when FIFA had regulations barring club shareholders from receiving remuneration, when love for the game was at the heart of soccer.

The fans besieging the Mangueirao were the desperate symbol of how that has changed – fans who, in every sense of the term, had been locked out of the game, their game. But it’s not their game, not anymore.

This year in England we saw the bitterly hostile reaction of Manchester United’s fans when Malcolm Glazer – an American financier and owner of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers with no experience or knowledge of soccer – took over the club. How could he possibly love the sport? The worry has reached the top levels of FIFA. Last week, its president, Sepp Blatter, sounded in man-the-barricades mood as he railed at the sport’s richest clubs, accusing them of a self-destructive “Wild-West style capitalism.”

Soccer, said Blatter, is a sport with 1.3 billion active followers, but it could be suffocated by the “pornographic amounts of money” now being pumped into it. “All too often,” he said, “the source of this wealth is individuals with little or no history of interest in the game, who have happened upon football as a means of serving some hidden agenda.”

There is a strong hint here of the criminal underworld, of soccer being used as a means of laundering dirty money. FIFA says it will investigate and try to ensure that the sport remains clean, but one wonders how it can hope to crack a problem that the combined police forces of the world have never come close to solving.

And one thinks again of the very different world of Belem. Of the lowly fans who want to see their sport and their idols. Not only can they not afford it, they rarely even have the chance, since almost all of the top Brazilian players now play in 6,000 miles away in Europe. And it is money, of course, that has lured them away.

Those rich clubs that Blatter excoriated, they’re all European clubs, the likes of England’s Manchester United, Chelsea, and Arsenal, Italy’s AC Milan and Juventus, Spain’s Real Madrid and Barcelona, Germany’s Bayern Munich.

These are clubs that scour the world – particularly South America and Africa – for talent. Clubs that will shift a whole family across the Atlantic if that is the only way to sign their talented son, exactly as Barcelona did with the 13-year-old Argentine Lionel Messi in 2000.

FIFA now has a regulation that is supposed to prevent that sort of thing, but no one is kidding themselves that it can be enforced against the rich clubs if they want to find a way round it.

The sport of the people has become the plaything of the rich. The incident in Belem is a disturbing mirror of the turmoil within the game, but also a moving reminder that, for all the high prices and impossible distances that now separate ordinary fans from their idols, there is still plenty of passionate fire at the grassroots level.

Perhaps it is only in Brazil that 50,000 fans would mob a training session – but that is positive, too, a reminder that the Brazilian game is still the pinnacle of the sport, soccer at its most crystalline, soccer with a sharp, shining, simple beauty and a personality and a spirit that can never be suffocated by the rapacity and commercialism of the rich clubs.

pgardner@nysun.com