The most remarkable thing about David Beckham is that he is not all that great a football player. He is good, sure. Some days he is excellent. But he is not great. What sets him apart, what makes him unique, is that never in sport has the gap been wider between a player’s talent and his fame.
Until Beckham came along, the formula was simple: to be the biggest you had to be the best. Pele, Maradona, Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan, Zinedine Zidane and Ronaldinho have become famous because they are, or have been, indisputably the finest in their sport.
Beckham’s achievement has been to become the world’s most famous sportsman and best-known living Englishman (possibly even dead one — are Thatcher, Churchill, Nelson or John Lennon household names in Guatemala, Uzbekistan or Madagascar?) without at any point having come close to being the world’s best football player. Only his most devoted fans would argue that he has ever made it into the top 10.
All of which, as Beckham enters the twilight of his career (he has just turned 31 and he probably will not be England captain beyond this World Cup), raises a question. Will he be remembered as a footballer or as a celebrity? Today the answer has to be as a celebrity. For it is here that he has truly excelled, that he has been number one, or a contender for number one.
But now, this coming month, he has a shot at redemption. If he plays well and leads England to the World Cup — if, in other words, his sporting success catches up with his fame — he will be regarded by posterity more in the way it regards Bobby Charlton or Bobby Moore. But it is his last chance to change his destiny: to be remembered 20, 30 years from now as a footballer, rather than as a superstar without cause.
Beckham’s three years at Real Madrid, on the other hand, have been more successful than a lot of people in England seem to think. Yet at the same time they have exposed his shortcomings as a player, rendered them more apparent than they were at Manchester United.
He remains a great striker of the ball, a great deliverer of crosses and long passes, but his great weakness — and the chief reason why he has never entered the lists alongside Maradona and Cruyff, Platini and Zidane — is his discomfort on the ball; how easy it is to dispossess him on those rare occasions when he tries to slow things down in the midfield, look up, ponder his next move. You can count on one hand the number of times he has dribbled round his man these past three years.
And yet, and yet … Beckham has not performed at all badly at Real. He has been one of the team’s most consistent players. He has had some excellent games. Had he not had the misfortune to have arrived at the club at the precise moment when their great players went into decline, he might now be basking in glory. And, in a way, he is. The fans at the Bernabeu are the most exquisitely fussy in the world. Far, far from the ”we’ll support you ever more” ethic of the English supporter, they sometimes regard attendance at a football match as an experience comparable to a night at the opera.
That said, what they do have in common with all fans everywhere is that they value effort. They want to see a player demonstrating his commitment to the club. Giving his best. And this is a large reason why, despite being a manifestly less skilful player than several of his teammates, Beckham has become a big favourite at the Bernabeu.
When Real fans were polled in March by Spain’s biggest radio stations and two national newspapers, more than 80% wanted Ronaldo, Zidane and Roberto Carlos to leave at the end of the season — but 78% wanted Beckham to stay. No less strikingly, the sports newspaper AS asked readers last October whether they considered Beckham to be the de facto ”leader” of Real Madrid and 58% responded ”yes”.
There is also an admiration for those qualities everyone knows he possesses, for the elegance and precision of his passing, for that uniquely sweet quality in the contact between boot and ball. He is a far from complete footballer, but he is an aesthetically pleasing one.
In short, if Beckham spoke Spanish, the chances are there would have been a clamour a while back to make him Real Madrid captain.
So, does it follow that he deserves the England captaincy? It came as a surprise to some when he was selected for the job by Peter Taylor in 2000. He was a player with only one goal in his first 38 internationals and a foolish sending-off in a World Cup game against Argentina in 1998.
On the other hand, he was a star of the 1999 treble-winning Manchester United team and, by Sir Alex Ferguson’s reckoning at any rate, the best player in that epic Champions League final that United won with two goals in added time, both of them emanating from Beckham corners.
He rose to the occasion, amply, during qualification for the 2002 World Cup. One commanding performance after another once Sven-Goran Eriksson had settled him in the captaincy accounted, as much as any other factor, for England making it to Japan.
In the tournament itself he was poor, in part because he was not fully fit; in part because it was in the Orient that Eriksson was unmasked as a craven, defence-obsessed Serie A man. Ever since, Eriksson has played Beckham as a sort of permanent wing-back, curtailing by 50% or more his opportunities to do what he does best, namely tee-up goals. As for scoring them, not much luck there either. In the past 25 England matches he has scored just four times.
There again, neither has the rest of the team gelled. The thing about Beckham, whose fame always generated expectations higher than he can deliver, is that he needs the rest of the team to flow in order to play well himself.
I interviewed Beckham on the day he signed for Real and what came through, amid the global hoopla, was his humility, his feet-on-the-ground understanding that he was not in the same league as Zidane and Ronaldo. His strength, as he said, was as a team player. He was emphatic about it. He was not a galáctico, but a team player. And so it has proved.
When the rest of his teammates were going great guns, he did too. When they waned, and in fact practically disappeared altogether as has been the case since Easter 2004, Beckham waned too. Or his influence did. Because he himself, and this is the reason why the Bernabeu has remained loyal to him, has never ceased to give his best. He has never hidden. He has been what fans and players alike acknowledge to be a ”genuine” player. He is as good now as he was when he arrived.
Everyone who has met Beckham seems to agree that he is a very pleasant fellow. He is decent, considerate, loyal and attentive beyond human understanding to the fans who clamour for his autograph everywhere in the world at every time of night and day. And yet there are so many people in the football world who have developed something resembling a visceral hatred of him. Rarely can there have been an individual so nice who was on the receiving end of so much venom.
His curse, in this regard at least, has been his looks. And his knack for capturing the fashion of the times. His detractors say that were he just an ordinary looking bloke he would never have been reckoned worthy of playing for, let alone captaining, his country. They are wrong. They are blinded in their judgement of him as a player by their distaste for his lifestyle. They are unable to do what he has managed to do so well, namely to separate one thing from the other; to place a wall between Beckham the player and Beckham the celeb.
More people in the game would have detected his sterling qualities were it not for all the hoo-ha surrounding him and which he himself — with his wife as chief accomplice — has sought out. Had he been more ordinary looking, and less exhibitionist off the field, he would have been spared the destiny that seems to await him of being remembered, many years hence, not as a fine sportsman chiefly, but as a social phenomenon; as a symptom of a peculiar age; as a man famous for being famous.
Short of glory in the World Cup, that is the price he appears condemned to pay. In a saner, more measured, less celebrity mad world, he would have gone down in history the way he might have wished to go down: as a very good and gutsy player; as one of the better footballers that England has produced. — Â