Last week, Paris Foot Gay said its members were victims of homophobia when Creteil Bebel, a team of Muslim players, refused to play them this month.

The French amateur league said it excluded Creteil for “refusing the match on discriminatory grounds.”

“It’s a permanent exclusion, they will never be reinstated,” league president Jacques Stouvenel said.

The Paris Foot Gay team says Tuesday it received an e-mail from the Creteil Bebel club canceling a match scheduled for last Sunday.

“Because of the principles of our team, which is a team of devout Muslims, we can’t play against you,” the e-mail said, according to Paris Foot Gay. The e-mail received Saturday said, “Our convictions are much more important than a simple football match.”

Paris Foot Gay said in a statement that it asked the amateur league to sanction Creteil Bebel.

Zahir Belgarbi, identified as a spokesman for Creteil Bebel, told France-Info radio he apologized if “anyone felt upset or hurt.”

Clearly, Lippi needs to take an eye-opening trip to Milan.

There’s a gay soccer team there, competing weekly in an amateur league. The players’ sexuality doesn’t affect how they play. The ball, after all, is round for everyone.

Last season, Nuova Kaos Milano finished a creditable fourth in its league of 16 teams, not bad considering their opponents frequently try harder against them to avoid the “dishonor” of losing to gay players, says Nuova Kaos defender Klaus Heusslein.

“Here, people think, ‘They have to share the same changing room. Who knows what might happen if they have gays in the locker room? They might attack people,’” says Heusslein, a 48-year-old German who lives and works in Milan.

“In Italy, it will take another 100 years to get rid of these misconceptions.”

How depressing.

It’s a terrible blemish on soccer that homophobia remains so rife in the sport. As long as there are no openly gay players in the English Premier League and elsewhere at the top of the game, the shiny gloss bought by soccer’s wealth – in new stadiums, multimillionaire players and such like – is nothing but cheap veneer.

That players have their own perfume and fashion lines but still don’t feel safe enough to be able to say that they are gay is a damning indictment on the sport. The smoke-filled backrooms may have vanished, but archaic mentalities remain. That was proved by the hooliganism that scarred an English League Cup match between West Ham and Millwall this week, where several hundred people confronted each other and hurled bottles and bricks at police officers. Those likely were the same kind of so-called fans who have taunted players with racist and homophobic abuse.

True, soccer is not alone in being behind the times. Institutional intolerance in many sports has meant that far too few top-level athletes have felt comfortable saying they are gay. All the more reason, therefore, why the world’s most popular sport should take the lead. Peddling outdated views, as Lippi did this week, does soccer no favors. His comments were particularly unseemly given recent violence that has targeted gays in Rome.

Lippi, in a video interview with the Internet-broadcast program KlausCondicio, said he would advise gay players to stay in the closet. Because of the huge amount of attention that soccer gets in Italy, a gay soccer couple would create scandal if they came out, he argued.

“If a player came to me and confessed his homosexuality, I’d advise him not to express it, because it would create problems and could be exploited,” he said. “I don’t think it would be possible in football to have a relationship of this type. Maybe it already exists, I don’t know.”

Somewhere in Italy, perhaps in the national team he coaches or in the Serie A sides that Lippi once managed or played for, secretly gay players must have been shaking their heads.

Heusslein, the openly gay amateur, certainly did.

“It’s just repeating the same old stereotypes,” he said. “He’s either blind or he’s stupid.”

“He should ask himself what really would be the problem if he had gays on his team. Would that change his capacity to play, would it change his skills?” Heusslein asked. “People should see what they are doing on the field, not what they doing in their own bedrooms.”

According to British gay-rights campaigners, mentalities are only moderately more enlightened in the Premier League. The chanting of homophobic abuse by fans has been banned, on paper at least, at grounds since the start of the 2007-2008 season, and police this year charged 11 men who hurled abuse at former England defender Sol Campbell.

Nevertheless, the only top British player to date to have gone public was Justin Fashanu. The former Nottingham Forest and Norwich City striker hanged himself in 1998, fearful that because he was gay he wouldn’t get a fair trial in the United States on sexual assault charges.

Activist Peter Tatchell, a friend of Fashanu’s, says he knows of several gay players in the Premier League who want to come out but dare not because they are concerned that their clubs and sponsors wouldn’t support them. This despite the fact that Tatchell believes British soccer has progressed sufficiently since Fashanu’s death for gay players to be able to go public.

“They’d get a rough ride from some teammates and some fans for a while, but eventually it would calm down and most people would accept them,” he says. “They’d also get quite a lot of support and admiration from liberal-minded fans.”

That day, when it comes, will be a moment to celebrate because it will show that soccer is becoming the all-inclusive sport it professes to be. As a leader in the sport, Lippi should be a force for such progress, not standing in its way.

1. Dear  John Hodgman: please marry me. We can raise nerdy children.

2. Youtube is my week-end crack.

3. When will Pride events be over?

4. You and your lovah might be counted in the upcoming census!

5. Solitude becomes me.

6. This picture makes me worry about what will happen in Iran.

7. Looks like gay marriage will get voted on in New York. Empire State Pride Agenda thinks this is a good idea. What will happen is any one’s guess.

8. Americans winning a soccer match/game?! Get out!

9. When did New York City turn into Seattle? Nothing against the Emerald City but I’m not prepared for days and days and days and days of rain.

10. A Senate apology for slavery? Meh.

Seven more pleaded not guilty when the case opened at Portsmouth Magistrates Court, relating to Pompey’s 2-0 win on Sept. 28 at Fratton Park.

The former England defender infuriated Spurs supporters by leaving for north London rival Arsenal seven years ago. Campbell has been at Portsmouth since leaving the Gunners in August 2006 and has been regularly jeered by Tottenham fans, the latest incidents being at Sunday’s 1-1 draw at White Hart Lane.

At September’s game, police identified fans that allegedly aimed indecent, racist or homophobic chants at Campbell.

“There were families present, very young children. We also heard from witnesses who found the behavior disgusting and embarrassing,” magistrate Susan Waddle told the four men who admitted the charge. She also fined them 370 pounds ($500 US) and ordered them to pay 120 pounds ($162 US) in legal costs.

“No doubt you are upright members of society, but in there you acted like animals, like a herd,” Waddle said. “This was well-rehearsed, everyone was in sync, everyone knew the words, it was not something that just happened on the day.

“Whether or not Mr. Campbell was offended, decent members of the public found this very offensive and so did the (court). Anyone who indulges in this disgusting behavior will be dealt with very severely by the courts.”

The four who pleaded guilty to indecent chanting were Keith Stevens, 54, from Hailsham, south east England; Richard Gibbs, 36, from Wokingham, west of London; Stuart Turner, 34, Telford, central England, and Oliver Sylvester, 28, from the south coast city of Southampton.

The chairman of England’s Football Association has urged Tottenham to impose life bans on the fans who hurled racial and homophobic abuse at the former Spurs defender during a Premier League game at Portsmouth last month.

Police are also investigating Portsmouth’s complaint about the incident, but are hampered by the fact that no action was taken during the game and that no culprits were identified.

“The high-tech cameras should be able to pick up the people who are doing that kind of stuff and eject them from the ground,” Ferdinand said. “That is the only way I can see to stop it happening.

“We are talking about a football match. There are young kids present who want to be entertained, not hear someone a couple of rows back slagging players off.”

Campbell has regularly been barracked by Spurs supporters since he quit the club at the end of his contract in 2001 to join fierce north London rival Arsenal on a free transfer.

Ferdinand was also upset that FIFA fined the Croatia Football Federation just 30,000 Swiss francs (C$27,700) last month after fans directed racist chants at England striker Emile Heskey during a World Cup qualifier.

The governing body’s disciplinary committee threatened Croatia with a more severe punishment if it did not control the problem in future, but Ferdinand was adamant that was insufficient.

“The football authorities need to look at themselves,” Ferdinand said. “(FIFA president) Sepp Blatter likes to speak up about things that are good for FIFA’s image. I would love to see them stand up and dish out the right punishments for these incidents.

“They make a lot of comments about what they are going to do but they never back up the words with actions. Croatia were fined a few thousand quid. What good is that going to do? If things like this keep happening, you have to take points off them.”

(The Games’ sole openly gay male athlete, Australian diver Matthew Mitcham, took home the gold in the men’s 10m platform.)

To help you get familiar with these new out Olympic champions, we’ve created an overview of their performance at the Games — including Katja Nyberg’s four goals for Norway in the women’s handball final against Russia, Natasha Kai’s game-winning goal for the U.S. in the women’s soccer quarter-finals, and the stunning upset that earned Vicky Galindo and Lauren Lappin a silver medal in women’s softball.

We’ve divided the medalists by sport — click on one of the sections below to get started.