What can we expect from the new Netflix series about David Beckham?

[Tony Sweeney]

What can we expect from the new Netflix series about David Beckham?

The humble beginnings behind the David Beckham empire is set to form
part of the documentary series. But as an active decision-maker of his
own publicity and his media company at the helm of the production, will
this be a true warts-and-all narrative?

Regina Lavelle


A quick flick through David Beckham’s Instagram and one wonders how he
has a spare moment.
June alone brought us clips from Qatar with Gary Neville, Soccer Aid, an
ad campaign for a yacht, Singapore for a soccer camp and filming with
luxury car company Maserati. In the meantime, he was apparently
preparing his home-grown honey, presumably made by Cotswold bees at the
Beckham family lair in Oxfordshire.
Just a week later, another venture. An as-yet-untitled documentary
series promises to “go beyond the shine of stardom to explore Beckham’s
humble working-class beginnings in East London, and the drive and
determination that led him to become one of the most recognisable and
scrutinised athletes of all time”.
Officially announced by Netflix last month, it has been in progress
since 2021. Beckham announced it last July, while unveiling Studio 99,
the content company he co-founded with long-time manager Dave Gardner
and Nicola Howson, a former CEO of Freuds’ communications and ITV
communications director. “I’ve made up my mind that now is the right
time to tell my story through a documentary,” he told an industry audience.
“There have been so many chapters in my career, the business ups and
downs, the family, the children, putting Inter Miami together.
“Launching Studio 99 really excited me — I love the creative side. I’ve
been in front of the camera and on sets for 25 years, working with some
great people. I saw what was happening with Netflix and Amazon,
documentaries like Michael Jordan’s The Last Dance. I wanted to be able
to create programming, knowing that way I’d be in control of the content
and the narrative.”
The definitive account of Building David Beckham? Perhaps.
Since emerging in the late 1990s, Beckham has become one of the world’s
most bankable sportspeople. Others may be more talented, better-looking
and more eloquent, yet his alchemy is to seem likeable and approachable,
as well as aspirational.
In his first season at Real Madrid, he accounted for 50pc of jersey
sales. At 38, he was the best-paid player in the world, eclipsing the
likes of Wayne Rooney and Cristiano Ronaldo, because of his global audience.
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“As an icon, there are very few sportsmen or women or even clubs in the
world that can match David Beckham in terms of popularity,” wrote The
Bleacher Report in 2012. “He is old-school cool combined with modern
style and he has universal appeal to both men and women across every
continent.”
And that is the riddle of Beckham — popular but not cool, old-school but
modern, easy-going but controlling (such control appears evident on his
Wikipedia entry, which compresses his private life into a virtual footnote).
Already, the framing of “humble working-class beginnings” suggests rags
to riches. But the real adversity of his career came in the wake of the
1998 World Cup, his feud with Alex Ferguson, leaving Man United and the
subsequent Rebecca Loos affair.
(The Loos business gets a sentence on his Wiki, similar to the details
of a £750 fine for using his phone while driving.)
His upbringing, in fact, seems solidly respectable. Beckham’s father,
Ted, was a thwarted footballer and instilled in his son his adoration of
the sport. He had trials for Leyton Orient in his teens, but talent gave
way to “distractions”, he later confessed. Ted married Sandra at 21,
settling into a 1930s terraced house in Chingford, Essex. He is mostly
described as a gas engineer, but Wikipedia has him as a kitchen fitter.
Though David paid off the mortgage on the Chingford property after his
parents’ divorce, Ted continued to work up to six days a week until aged
nearly 60.
David seems to have become an instrument of Ted’s footballing ambitions.
He wouldn’t give “kids too much praise”, lest they had “nothing to work
for”, he once admitted. On the pitch, he would say: “You were brilliant,
son, but what about that silly ball you played down the line when you
should have played it inside?”
Aged 15, David had left home to join the United schoolboy squad, some of
whom would become the Class of ’92, a product of Ferguson’s vision to
develop young talent.
That crop yielded Beckham, Ryan Giggs, brothers Gary and Phil Neville
and Paul Scholes, among others. They became England’s best side in the
mid-90s but it wasn’t until the season of 1998-99 that they achieved
truly astonishing success.
Victoria Adams’s star was also ascendant in the 90s. The Spice Girls
released Wannabe in 1996. They were an instant phenomenon, having been
groomed for fame by Simon Fuller. In a 2007 feature documenting Fuller’s
career, a witness to early Spice Girls recording sessions said that
Fuller “told them exactly what to do, and they acted out their parts to
the letter, like robots”.
Victoria met David after a United match in 1997 at the players’ lounge.
She later told Ruby Wax that she had initially been “watching the wrong
team because I didn’t have my glasses on” and knew next to nothing about
football.
She approached him, she said, and suggested he ask her out. He obliged
and came down to London. Victoria’s description is of besotted lovebirds
who spent their dates discussing their dogs and gardens. “A couple of
’burb kids’,” Wax quipped.
They were engaged in a media frenzy in 1998; do-it-yourself royalty.
Soon, they seemed to settle into their celebrity.
There was the holiday at Elton John’s house on the French Riviera, a
week before the World Cup, where David wore a sarong designed by
Jean-Paul Gaultier, prompting a flurry of trend pieces on the
metrosexual man (they wore moisturiser but loved football).
Cool Britannia was at its zenith. David Baddiel and Frank Skinner had
released the song Three Lions two years earlier and it was the era of
Britpop, Kate Moss and Liam Gallagher and Patsy Kensit on a Union Jack
on the cover of Vanity Fair.
The tournament was supercharged with England Expects. In the knockout
stages, England faced Argentina with no small amount of animus on either
side. Beckham was fouled, reacted to his opposite number and was sent
off. England drew but lost on penalties.
The fury was immediate, most of it raining down on 23-year old Beckham.
His face was printed on dart boards. Effigies were hung across the
UK. The sarong episode was invoked as evidence of him being more in
thrall to fame than to football.
The Posh ‘n Becks 1999 nuptials did little to dispel such criticisms.
The Luttrellstown wedding in Dublin had a Robin Hood theme, involving
“an abundance of greenery, apples and tones of burgundy, green and
purple,” OK reported. Apples were “pierced” to reveal their aroma and
the couple sat atop gold thrones.
Back at Old Trafford, relationships at Man United were on the turn.
Ferguson, a disciplinarian, felt Beckham wasn’t delivering. When he was
photographed at a fashion event with Victoria after he had been excused
from training to mind his son, frustrations boiled over.
In 2003, Beckham moved to Real Madrid. It was a lucrative new territory,
but where he met Rebecca Loos. The daughter of a Dutch diplomat, Loos
was born in Madrid and educated at a private school. She had been
working for a sports management agency and was assigned to the
newly-arrived Beckham to help him settle in the city. It was early 2004
when the News Of The World broke the story of their (alleged) affair.
Even at a time when the kiss-and-tell was standard Sunday-tabloid fare,
this one was particularly shocking, the graphic nature of the (alleged)
text messages, too lurid to be published even in the Screws.
Sainted Beckham in such sordid business? It was almost inconceivable.
Worse, more women emerged to allege affairs. The story seemed
unstoppable. It was Posh who staunched the speculation, on the French
pistes of Courchevel. In a display of togetherness, they grinned on the
slopes. What it lacked in sophistication, it made up for in efficacy:
Brand Beckham wouldn’t break.
In the years that followed, David’s career soared. He became a global
ambassador for football, in the US and elsewhere. He lent his face to a
series of successful enterprises. He was a doting father to his four
children.
Victoria became a sort of comic-book wife. In Victoria Beckham: Coming
to America, she played a parody of herself, making outrageous demands.
Back in the UK, the sneering was gleeful. She was routinely ridiculed as
too thin and too fake. When she released her first fashion line, one
headline (above a flattering piece) ran: “The Talented Mrs Victoria
Beckham. (No, honestly)”.
Meanwhile, David’s career went from strength to strength. He was
credited with reinvigorating interest in LA’s then-benighted MLS (Major
League Soccer).
He has partnered with Adidas on sports camps, become an ambassador for
the World Cup in Qatar, he has endorsement for watches, fragrances and
clothing.
But there are inconsistencies between the myth of the icon, and the
facts of the man. On one hand, he is a self-effacing Unicef ambassador
who backs projects like Soccer Aid and Save Our Squads for London
schoolboys.
On the other, there’s the man who, denied a knighthood in 2014,
reportedly called the honours committee “c***s” (when newspapers tried
to report on the emails from the knighthood affair, his people tried to
injunct them). And the man who does business with Qatar, a state whose
human rights violations are repeatedly raised by Amnesty. These do not
seem to square with the avuncular David Beckham.
Victoria and David recently celebrated 23 years of marriage. In one
interview she made it clear that their success is part love story, part
empire-building.
“David and I both respect that each of us are very, very busy; we are
both running big businesses, but we do put the phones down, and
sometimes we just talk.”
The new series is “inspired” by Jordan’s The Last Dance. This was
reviewed by the The Guardian as “having delivered in every imaginable
way” as entertainment: as journalism, the portrayal “borders on
malpractice” because of the involvement of Jordan’s own production company.
One imagines Beckham’s new production may be similar — burnishing the
narrative, rather than exposing its blemishes.
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