PROFILE: David Beckham is the most influential man in Britain today, but the Beckham brand may be about to leave Manchester United to relaunch in sunnier climes, writes Shane Hegarty
When David Beckham goes home after training he'll sometimes spend the afternoon in the garden, in his bare feet, practising free kicks. It gives him a better feel for the ball and might explain why he is considered the greatest dead ball specialist in the modern game.
If Barcelona FC buy Beckham this summer, however, they will be getting more than just a player. Beckham the brand is estimated to be worth £200 million (€285 million). His endorsement of Brylcreem saw that company's sales rise 50 per cent. He has 90 per cent name recognition in Japan.
Yet, Barcelona will be buying more than a commercial asset. He and his wife Victoria were mentioned some 18,000 times in the British press last year. There are fashion shows and photo shoots. There has been a stalker, a plot to snatch their son Brooklyn outside Harrods and last week's kidnap-case-that-may-not-have-been.
Barcelona, though, will be buying much more than a celebrity. They will be buying an icon.
At 28 years-of-age, he is no longer the boy who first ran on to the Old Trafford pitch as a mascot in 1987, who kept his autograph book with him during his early years with the senior team and who was once too scared to remove the underpants that Sir Alex Ferguson had flung on his head during a fit of rage.
Earlier this year, an academic study concluded that Beckham was the most influential man in Britain today. In One David Beckham: Celebrity, Masculinity and the Soccerati, co-authors Dr Andrew Parker of Warwick University and Professor Ellis Cashmore of Staffordshire University argued that he has combined traditional and contemporary roles to create a new vision of the British man. He is a warrior on the pitch, but a doting father, loving husband and fashion model off it.
"By defying expectations in areas such as what clothes men are allowed to wear, he has helped create a complex new concept of masculinity," it said. "That has already begun to change male behaviour and has the potential to encourage a whole generation of young men who admire him to act more like him."
The study pinpointed his attitude to homosexuality. Beckham has a large gay following and is happy to acknowledge it, going so far as to pose for gay magazine Attitude. In a sport where gay men dare not come out, this cannot be taken lightly.
Then there is Beckham the black icon. A recent Channel 4 programme, Black Like Beckham, argued - with tongue ever so lightly in cheek - that he is Britain's most famous black sportsman, having appropriated the chunky jewellery and now the hairstyles of black fashion. The Beckhams, it pointed out, even called their dogs Puffy and Snoop after promenent American rappers.
This week, when the English FA needed a player to tell fans that continuing violence could see the national team kicked out of Euro 2004, Beckham was the natural choice. He abhors racism and is quarter Jewish, but it goes beyond that. After being sent off against Argentina during the 1998 World Cup, he returned to a nation that loathed him. The terraces at away grounds heaved with abuse. Opposition fans massed at corner flags, screaming obscenities at him. Chants questioned the faithfulness of his wife and the paternity of his child. It was provocation on an immense, unrelenting scale that would have driven most men to either retaliate or to flee.
Yet, he kept taking the corners. He kept scoring goals. He still put on the England shirt and represented the very people who wanted to break him. He wavered briefly when he gestured back at fans after a defeat to Portugal in Euro 2000, but he never broke. He says that those days made him stronger, that a lot of good came out of it. He still gets abuse, but it is nothing like it used to be. He takes Victoria's advice: "just think what they are doing. They are getting their aggression out on you and going home to a sad life." That thought, he says, calms him down.
It does not mean that he is insensitive to ridicule. After a television profile of Beckham, one journalist calculated that he had uttered 72 "you knows", 27 "erms" and eight "obviouslys" in an hour. Comedian Alistair McGowan portrays him as a simpleton under the thumb of his wife. "Everyone thinks I'm stupid," he once complained. Victoria consoled him by saying, "Well, they're all ugly."
Beckham has worked hard to become a more articulate, composed speaker, but he will never be as loquacious nor as provocative as Muhammad Ali was. What may have been seen as a weakness, however, may have proved otherwise. Literary critic Terry Eagleton described reading Beckham's autobiography My World as "a bit like munching your way dutifully through yard upon yard of muslin." Yet, in the next paragraph Eagleton wrote: "Curiously, though, its very monotone, stream-of-tape-recorded consciousness style begins, after a while, to seem like some artful, sub-Pinteresque device."
This sums up the relationship between the media and the man. Beckham speaks through his actions, through goals, through fashion statements. He seldom articulates the rationale behind these actions. When he wore a sarong while on holiday in 1998, he did not follow it with a dexterous deconstruction of his gender-defying decision. When he once wore an Adolf Eichmann T-shirt, he did not stop with waiting journalists and explain his motives. He wore nail polish on a night out as if it was just something men do.
Beckham may be busy reshaping the idea of modern British man but he never takes time out to let commentators know where he's coming from and where's he going next. So the commentators fill in the blanks. Journalist Julie Burchill wrote Burchill on Beckham - a collection of essays deconstructing his status as working-class boy turned national icon - without ever actually seeing him play football.
Burchill, though, got it wrong. She presented Beckham as a misunderstood victim of bourgeois snobs and homophobes, when he has, in fact, reached almost messianic status in his home country. He was hated for a time, but his redemption has not only been swift but total. It helped that Sven-Goran Eriksson made him captain in 2001, when Beckham-baiting was still a favoured sport on the terraces, but the manner in which he rose to that responsibility was extraordinary.
He dragged a disorganised, under-performing team through matches they should have lost. Then, his astonishing free kick in the last minute of the last match of the 2002 World Cup qualifiers sent England to the tournament. If it was Hollywood, the credits would have rolled there and then, freeze-framing him as he grabbed at the Three Lions on his shirt, as he roared in triumph in front of a tumultuous terrace. But the credits did not roll. In the World Cup, he scored the only goal against Argentina, and to the public atonement, he could now add private restitution. The writer of that script would have been sacked many acts ago.
Manchester United, it appears, are now willing to sell him. The more cultured environment of continental football may suit his lifestyle. He has always seemed like the first European footballer to have been born in Britain. The style, the hair, the interest in ballet over lager: these were always the hallmarks of imports into Britain's blood, mud and booze tradition.
This week, meanwhile, David and Victoria were introducing themselves to America, only for America to give a curt handshake and return to what it was doing before it was interrupted. The caption beneath their photograph in the New York Times put it quite neatly: "David and Victoria Beckham are famous almost everywhere." Yes, David Beckham is famous, but anybody can be famous.
Few become icons.