Beckham should stop being a ‘brand’ and a global industry

Pursued by a convoy of angry Real Madrid fans and allegedly spurned lovers, David Beckham is probably thinking that these spring days are the worst of his life. They may turn out to be some of the best. The opportunity that now presents itself to him is one that may not come again. To be frank, he has a chance to go back to being a footballer.

From this side of the street, the wisest course of action is for him to leave Real Madrid this summer and sign for Chelsea. But on one important condition. If he becomes Roman Abramovich’s tool for popularising the Chelsea ‘brand’ around the world, he will fall back into the same old maelstrom of over-the-top security and round-the-clock scrutiny. It may make Abramovich feel he is getting some return on all those millions of roubles, but it will not help Chelsea develop into a championship-winning team.

If he really wants us to love him, the Tsar of Stamford Bridge can start by banning the word ‘brand’ and telling his chief executive, Peter Kenyon, to forget about building Hollywood next door to Fulham Broadway tube. Beckham is sliding into one of the villain phases of his wildly-hyped career — and some of the resentments being dumped outside his door are absurd.

He, more than any of Real Madrid’s galacticos, is being blamed in Spain for the team surrendering a three-goal lead against Monaco in the quarter finals of the Champions League. Sorry? Real got knocked out of the European Cup because Rebecca Loos sold the story of their tryst? That’s a good one. If there is a serious point to be made about Beckham’s presence destabilising the old Bernabeu culture of order and privacy, it can be debated without holding him responsible for the fact that under the current regime Real are only one half of a great team.

Let’s deal with the playing side first. When they sold the defensive midfielder, Claude Makelele, to Chelsea, Real pushed their tradition of beautiful attacking play into the realms of self-destruction. It was a fine line even before Makelele was sold, but the failure to replace him adequately turned the rear half of the side into a barn door swinging in a gale. Across town at Atletico Madrid two weekends ago, I watched Real defend three-on-three for much of the second half. This suicidal refusal to bother with the rudimentary mathematics of defending has been a major factor during Beckham’s first (and maybe only) season with the world’s greatest club.

Apart from distorting his tactical role in the team, which has veered between right-winger, attacking central midfielder and ball-retriever, this blind spot in the club’s managerial intellect has allowed some of Beckham’s teammates to hide behind the excuse that his arrival has turned Real Madrid into a showbiz commodity. When the president, Floretino Perez, and his pals woke up to the fact that they were sitting on a goldmine of global shirt-sales and mobile phone endorsement deals, there was certainly a dilution of club spirit.

But it would be grotesque to take it out on Beckham himself. His fame was plenty prominent enough in the brochure they read before they bundled him out of Manchester.

In the first half of his eventful year in Spain, he was a biology diagram of skill and honest endeavour. In most games he looked like he belonged alongside Raul, Luis Figo and even Zinedine Zidane. In the unseemly rush to declare his Spanish experiment a disaster, we ought to remember what a good advert for English football he was when he was trading accurate passes with Zidane.

There is no point, though, denying that the mutation of his life into one big commercial opportunity, TV documentary and photo shoot has distorted his sporting career, to the point that people are questioning whether he should be England’s captain at Euro 2004. It’s not that columnists and fans are making moral judgments about his private life. The greater worry is that Beckham brings so much extra baggage and hassle to the England camp that the team’s preparations are in danger of being undermined.

Rather than stripping him of the armband, Sven-Goran Eriksson and the Football Association could instead call him into the office and tell him the days of FA genuflection and special arrangements are over. This principle should apply equally in his club career. The monster of his fame is out of control. With him riding so high in the rich lists, there is no need for him to chase every last dollar to the detriment of his footballing career.

This raises a fascinating question. An attention-seeker by nature, can England’s likeable captain survive without selling exclusive access to OK magazine, allowing TV cameras into his walk-in wardrobe for yet another ‘intimate TV portrait’ or trying to promote himself as a celebrity icon in America, as he tried to do last year?

This has the feel of the fundamental human question at the core of his life. Beckham’s journey from the back pages to the front has redefined fame in British society. It has had a seismic effect on the careers of his England teammates, for good and for bad (the good being the extra money, the bad being all the additional hoo-haa). With Tony Stephens — widely regarded as the best deal-maker — to arrange his next footballing contract, Beckham has no reason to chase new commercial tie-ups that expose him to yet more scorching light. These are his decisions, naturally, but if you love the game and want England to win something before hell freezes over, you probably want him to stop being replacement-royalty and a global industry and start concentrating on what’s left of his career as a fine footballer.