By the time the 2006 World Cup came around Beckham was no longer a Manchester United player. In his 2013 autobiography Ferguson revealed that he sold Beckham to Real Madrid in 2003 because the player thought he was bigger than both the club and the manager, although the manager’s attitude to Mrs Beckham made it clear where he thought the blame really lay. It was the Beckhams’ celebrity lifestyle that made him incompatible with the ethic Ferguson promoted at Old Trafford. Relations between the two men, which had been deteriorating since Beckham’s marriage in 1999, reached their low point after a 2–0 home defeat to Arsenal in the FA Cup in February 2003. In the dressing room during the post-match recriminations, Ferguson lashed out at a boot which hit Beckham in the face and left a gash above the player’s eye. Beckham never said anything but he ensured that the wound was exhibited for all the world to see.
There had been plenty of flashpoints prior to the incident following the Arsenal game. Beckham once arrived at training wearing a beanie hat with twenty photographers in tow. Ferguson had discovered Beckham was planning to unveil his latest haircut in front of the cameras and ordered him to remove the hat at a pre-match meal, but the player refused. Ferguson threatened to drop him, ruining the midfielder’s plan to reveal his freshly shaven head moments before kick-off. Ferguson wrote that Beckham had gone ‘berserk’ at the instruction. There was only going to be one winner in the war between Ferguson and a player, no matter who his wife was. Shortly afterwards Beckham was on his way to the Bernabéu.
The transfer didn’t hurt the brand that Beckham was seeking to manufacture. Real Madrid was a bigger club than Manchester United in terms of its global reach and he was still the captain of England. Quite what kind of a captain he was and the vital importance to him of the ‘Beckham brand’ was seen in stark contrast in October 2003, just before a qualifying match in Turkey for the European Championship finals to be held the following summer in Portugal. Rio Ferdinand had recently missed a drugs test at the Manchester United training ground in favour of driving into Manchester to go shopping. His stupidity earned him widespread condemnation and the FA responded by dropping him for the match in Istanbul, although the FA disciplinary hearing, which eventually ended with Ferdinand receiving an eight-month ban, had not yet taken place. On this point of ‘principle’ Gary Neville led an insurrection, threatening that the England players would not even get on the plane if Ferdinand were not reinstated. To the men who had played for England under Sir Alf Ramsey the idea of a strike must have seemed farcical. They could not even persuade their manager to let them take their heavy winter suits off in hot weather; they could not persuade him to choose a film other than a western when they all trooped off to the cinema together.
Interestingly, the battle turned into one between Mark Palios for the FA and Gary Neville for the outraged proletariat. The two men who should have been most visible in this storm, Sven-Göran Eriksson and David Beckham, were notable for their absence. It would be impossible to imagine earlier England players adopting this attitude of defiance but if they had, there is no doubt that Billy Wright and Bobby Moore would have been leading the charge up the ladders and out of the trenches. Gary Lineker is explicit in defining the England captain’s job as acting as a bridge between the players and the management. Beckham, no doubt strongly advised by those whom he paid to do it, decided that in such a toxic atmosphere discretion was the better part of valour. Whatever the temptation might have been to wave a flag in defence of a man subjected to a perceived injustice, it was Neville (unwittingly recalling the antics of Fred Kite, the ludicrous shop steward in I’m All Right, Jack memorably played by Peter Sellers) who therefore took the brunt of the negative comment in the press and on the airwaves. Eriksson, too, had no taste for confrontation and both men were no doubt much relieved when what had threatened to be the storming of the Bastille turned into a slightly awkward coach ride from Sopwell House hotel in St Albans to Heathrow Airport.
The match in Turkey ended in a hard-fought goalless draw which would have been easier for England had not Beckham blazed a penalty over the bar. Nevertheless, the vital point meant England would go to the European Championships with no little expectation of success and Beckham, at twenty-nine and fully fit, would be able to demonstrate to a wide audience his skills as a player and as the captain of a feared international side. In the event, the 2004 European Championship finals brought little joy for Beckham and his quest to promote himself as a footballer on the world stage, being chiefly notable for the emergence of the Everton teenager Wayne Rooney and the surprising triumph of Greece. Beckham had an almost entirely anonymous tournament until, in the crucial quarter-final against Portugal in Lisbon, which ended 2–2 after extra-time, he seemed to lose his footing on the sandy surface and sent the first penalty, yet again, high over the bar. England lost the shootout 6–5.
It was at the 2006 World Cup in Germany that Adam Crozier, briefly the FA chief executive, had predicted that the ‘golden generation’ of Beckham, Steven Gerrard, Frank Lampard, Ashley Cole, Gary Neville, Michael Owen and Paul Scholes would reach their peak. This time the tournament was to be played in Europe as opposed to somewhere very hot and indubitably foreign on the other side of the world. England went into it as one of the favourites. In 2003, Beckham must have witnessed the ecstatic reception given to the England rugby team that won its World Cup final against Australia with a dramatic drop-kick by Jonny Wilkinson in the dying seconds of the game. He might have been surprised by the similar response – including an open-top bus tour and a Downing Street reception – given to the England cricket team after it regained the Ashes in 2005. He would certainly have understood the deep ache in England football supporters to show just as much adoration for its World Cup-winning footballers. Bobby Moore’s image was established for all time when he held aloft the Jules Rimet trophy. Beckham must have believed that he and Moore, so alike in so many ways, were destined to be the two England captains to stand proudly on top of the football world.
However, Deutschland 2006 turned out to be just the latest in a series of English disappointments, more famous for the shopping activities of the wives and girlfriends of the players than for footballing success. BBC Radio 4’s PM programme covered the arrival of the WAGs at the team’s hotel with a live broadcast that gave them the sort of prominence previously accorded to American presidents or popes on their first visit to the United Kingdom. It was a symbolic sanctification of the contemporary status of football but it gave a somewhat skewed perspective on the game’s priorities or possibly just the dearth of intelligence within the BBC.
By 2006 Beckham had become a problem for the England team which his greatest supporter, the England manager Sven-Göran Eriksson, refused to acknowledge. Beckham’s move to Real Madrid had been a great success from a commercial standpoint but his performances on his return to England had become increasingly ineffective. Brian Glanville thought that Eriksson reorganised the pattern of England’s play to accommodate Beckham to the detriment of the team when he employed him in what Glanville termed ‘a quarterback role’. Eriksson himself attracted almost as much press attention, and of a similar nature, as his captain. On his appointment in 2001, the Daily Mail had welcomed him with the sorrowful recognition that ‘We have sold our birthright down the fjord to a nation of seven million skiers and hammer throwers who spend half their lives in darkness!’ The almost immediate satisfaction engendered by the 5–1 victory in Munich temporarily quietened this sort of xenophobic reaction but, bespectacled, with silver hair and a receding hairline, Eriksson looked less like the natural successor to Winston Churchill and more like the Derbyshire batsman David Steele emerging from the Lord’s pavilion to face the terrifying prospect of fast bowlers Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thomson and memorably dubbed ‘the bank clerk who went to war’.
David Beckham with England coach Sven-Göran Eriksson after England lost to Portugal on penalties in the World Cup quarter-final, 1 July 2006 (Aris Messinis / AFP / Getty Images).
The unpr
epossessing figure of Eriksson nevertheless managed to have his surprisingly colourful sex life displayed for public consumption as he passed from his glamorous Italian lawyer girlfriend Nancy Dell’Olio to the TV presenter Ulrika Jonsson and a secretary at the FA called Faria Alam, who revealed rather winningly that the England manager always carefully stacked and turned on the dishwasher before commencing anything more romantic. If it wasn’t Sven’s sex life that caused a stir it was his almost insatiable greed. He was revealed to be talking to Chelsea about abandoning the very well-paid England ship for the even better-paid shore of Stamford Bridge, or possibly Old Trafford, and finally he was set up by the undercover tabloid reporter Mazher Mahmood, the so-called ‘fake sheikh’, in Dubai, and exposed in the News of the World. The Sun’s farewell was ‘Goodbye Tosser’ as it called him ‘a passionless bungler’. Eriksson was clearly excellent at calming the hysteria of the Kevin Keegan regime but never managed to inspire his troops. Gareth Southgate remarked about Eriksson’s performance at half-time in the World Cup quarter-final defeat against Brazil in Japan in 2002: ‘We were expecting Winston Churchill and instead we got Iain Duncan-Smith.’
Whatever the doubts of some players, there was a strength in the relationship of Eriksson and Beckham, not dissimilar to that between Winterbottom and Wright and between Ramsey and Moore. They each seemed to embrace the celebrity lifestyle as warmly as Ramsey would have contemptuously dismissed it. Certainly, as long as Eriksson remained the manager, Beckham’s place in the England team appeared sacrosanct even if his Spanish club side did not share that opinion. He had another poor World Cup in Germany, outpaced and laborious throughout, and was eventually substituted by Aaron Lennon in the quarter-final against Portugal, which England contrived to lose yet again on penalties. Shortly afterwards, Beckham resigned the England captaincy in an emotional press conference that appealed greatly to devotees of daytime tabloid television. He would never now hold the World Cup aloft: he would never be another Bobby Moore.
Brian Glanville was never a fan of Beckham’s captaincy, claiming that he barely realised that Beckham was the captain, so insignificant was the impact he made, despite the fact that he captained his country on 59 of his 115 appearances. His summary of Beckham’s contribution to the game overall is withering in its contempt and uncannily reminiscent of the judgement pronounced by George Best:
Beckham was a complete fraud. He had a great right foot, but as an outside-right he couldn’t run, he couldn’t beat a man, he couldn’t get to the bye-line and pull the ball back. What he did was to lob in shells like Big Bertha. He was excellent on free-kicks, had a very dangerous shot with his right foot. To give him all those caps was insane – all those silly little five-minute appearances as a sub. He reminds me of what F. R. Leavis wrote of the Sitwells – that they belonged to the history of publicity rather than the history of poetry.
Gary Lineker, however, holds an entirely contrary opinion:
He was a good captain of England, players liked him. He did the job as well as you could do it in that he was a good spokesman off the pitch and that’s what a good captain has to be. In football that’s really all you can be. Unless you played with him you don’t know how he handled things in the dressing room as the representative to the management. Only people who played with him know that. I’ve not spoken to any players who speak negatively of him and that says a lot. Beckham is unbelievably loved. My son George adores everything that Beckham does. All of us will get people who don’t like us – whether it’s because he played for Manchester United, whether for football reasons or out of pure envy of his success. They might say he’s not the brightest, he’s not a great speaker, he has this high-pitched voice, but I think you could tell from the way he played his football how bright he was. He makes the right decisions all the time on the pitch – when to cross it, when not to cross, when to cut inside, when to drop into a deeper position. People take these things for granted but you can’t teach it. It’s instinctive. It’s spatial awareness, a kind of intelligence of awareness of everything that’s going on around you. You cannot do that if you’re thick.
David Bernstein became the chairman of the FA in January 2011, shortly after the embarrassing failure of the 2018 World Cup bid in which Beckham had been involved. The cult of Beckham remains a puzzle to him:
Beckham is a phenomenon I simply don’t understand. He is a marketing man’s dream of course – a decent footballer but certainly not a great one – a great crosser and a dead-ball specialist but not a great player. Of course he is managed by a marketing genius… Beckham represents the celebrity culture that I am not very keen on. It’s just so superficial. It’s a triumph of image over substance. I’m not a Beckham fan but you have to admire what he has achieved. Andy Murray won Wimbledon and that victory will always be associated with him. I’m not sure that Beckham has done something specific as a player that will always be associated with him in the same way.
Beckham divides the nation. Very roughly, people who are Beckham’s age or younger tend to be much more admiring and understanding of him than those who are older, who are much less sympathetic to the lifestyle image he conveys. His tattoos, to those who abhor tattoos, are unsightly and revolting. To those to whom tattoos represent desirable body art they are something to be admired and copied. Age is not the only determining factor since there must be plenty of ageing Hell’s Angels and sailors with anchors tattooed on their arms still around but for most people in late middle age and beyond tattoos had traditionally been the preserve of Hell’s Angels and sailors and possibly criminals. That is clearly no longer the case, but Beckham’s visible tattoos mean he has aligned himself firmly on one side of the fence. Those on the other side of the fence are unlikely ever to cross it.
A tattooed David Beckham after a Los Angeles Galaxy game against Portland Timbers, 14 April 2012 (Photo Works / Shutterstock).
Whatever else Wright, Moore and Lineker did in their lives off the field, their fame was almost entirely related to what they did on it, although none of them, while captain of England, was presented with the commercial and promotional opportunities offered to Beckham. The images of Beckham off the field have such a ubiquitous presence that they tend to overwhelm what he achieved on it. Certainly, Wright, Moore and Lineker had their detractors, as anyone in public life has, but Beckham was always the butt of jokes in a way that none of the other three were.
Older people who are not particularly comfortable with contemporary music or contemporary television will also (although by no means in all cases) tend to be uncomfortable with Beckham because Beckham symbolises the age of boy bands and reality television. In a way Beckham, aided by Simon Fuller, turned himself into a one-boy boy band, and if Beckham would have been unlikely to have appeared on television in the age of Wright or the age of Moore because of his background and the way he spoke, it didn’t matter at all in an age in which reality television shows grabbed the ratings and the air time. Television, always on the lookout for cheap, endlessly repeatable shows for which the public revealed an instant liking, fell upon Big Brother, The X Factor, The Apprentice and the rest of the new genre with cries of ecstasy. Beckham didn’t need to appear on these shows. He was far too important for that, but his appeal reached out to viewers of these shows and beyond. He could appear in his underpants on television or on giant posters without a shred of embarrassment (or, some thought, a shred of modesty) and he would be widely admired. Most men in their underpants are looking for their trousers; Beckham was looking for public adoration.
Simon Oliveira, Beckham’s publicist since 2004, is the managing director and co-founder of Doyen Global, the company which helps to expand his activities outside the United Kingdom. A bright, intelligent man, Oliveira emerged from a background not dissimilar from that of his client.
I come from a council estate in north London so all those jokes about Beckham being stupid I thought were motivated by snobbery. They listen to him and they look at him and they say anyone who looks like that
and speaks like that, what can he possibly know? He’s been involved with a football club since the age of fourteen and his focus was entirely on becoming a footballer, but though he was never immersed in schooling, it doesn’t mean you’re less intelligent but simply that you haven’t gone through the educational process in the way others have. If you’re three moves ahead of the opposition on the football field that means you are innately intelligent, sharp and astute. He wouldn’t have been in the position he is now in, to have made the decisions he has from a management perspective, or to have achieved what he has on the football pitch, or to have made the money he has throughout his career, or to have chosen the people he has surrounded himself with, if he wasn’t intelligent.
David Beckham’s new Emporio Armani underwear campaign is unveiled at Macy’s, New York, 18 June 2008 (Kevin Sam / Getty Images).
It is odd, then, that the jokes about Beckham, even when he was the captain of his national team, were always that he was as thick as two short planks. In 2001 he and Victoria gave hostages to fortune when they were interviewed for Comic Relief by Sacha Baron Cohen as Ali G. Victoria put up a decent battle as she fought him off for as long as she could, while her husband laughed nervously alongside. Ali G’s opening comment to Beckham was a pointer to what was to come. ‘Now, just because it’s Comic Relief don’t mean you can speak in a silly voice.’ The Beckhams sportingly put up with a series of uncomfortable questions about their private life and the state of their marriage. Referring to the Beckhams’ taste in decor and clothes, Ali G asked: ‘So, they is some people who suddenly get loads of money who become very tasteless. How has you two managed to avoid that?’ Beckham giggled. Victoria admitted that some people might think that what they bought and displayed was indeed tasteless.
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