Italy PM Monti urges halt to soccer after scandal

Italian professional soccer should be halted for two or three years to get over the match-fixing scandal which has spattered its image, Prime Minister Mario Monti said.

The soccer federation and several clubs rejected the idea, which is Monti's personal opinion and is not binding.

The widening scandal has seen a number of top players arrested, the coach of this season's title-winning club placed under investigation and the national team training headquarters raided by police.

"It's particularly sad when a world which should be an expression of the highest values - sport, youth, competition, fairness - turns out to be a mass of foul play, falsehood and demagoguery," Monti said at a news conference with visiting Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk.

"This isn't a government proposal, but I wonder if it wouldn't be a good idea to suspend the game for two or three years."

The idea is unlikely to gain much traction in Italy, a country which is both obsessed by soccer and inured to an apparently endless series of financial, political and sexual scandals in recent years.

"I understand and share the bitterness of Prime Minister Monti," Italian soccer federation president Giancarlo Abete said in a statement.

..but to stop the championship would mean humiliating all of football, penalising the majority who work honestly and it would also mean the loss of thousands of jobs. It is not the solution."

Monti's suggestion underscores the growing disgust over an affair which has shone a harsh light on the pervasive corruption at many levels of Italian society.

"It's so easy for the great majority of citizens to see the origin of all Italy's problems in politics," Monti said. "It's a big mistake."

In the latest phase of an operation which began last year, police placed Antonio Conte, coach of championship-winning Juventus, under investigation on Monday over allegations relating to a 2011 match between previous club Siena and Novara.

They also arrested Stefano Mauri, captain of Lazio -- one of the two big clubs in Rome, and raided the Italian national team's training base at Coverciano after placing Italy defender Domenico Criscito under investigation.

Criscito was then dropped from the squad for the upcoming European Championship.

The scandal echoes earlier match-fixing affairs in 1980 and 2006, further tarnishing the image of Italian soccer which has long lost the pre-eminent position in the European game it enjoyed during the 1990s.