David Beckham was a generational footballer, both on and off the pitch. Heir to George Best, thirty years later, with the number seven on his shirt. Extraordinary plays, surgical free kicks that ended under seven. Often behind the goalkeepers. What was extraordinary about Beckham’s career was everything he experienced outside the pitch. Cover man, footballers become fashionable also thanks to him. Clean face of a football that usually does not erect the beautiful ones in its own image, except for overhead kicks or extraordinary goals. Beckham married Victoria, in a “royal” or quasi-royal wedding. Certainly the fame of both of them, he at Manchester United while she is the face and voice of the Spice Girls. An introjection between pop: football and music, precisely.
For every Icarus that comes close to the sun, there is also a time when it can fall. He does so in the summer of 1998, when Beckham has to meet Argentina during the World Cup in France. Simeone mistreats him, instigates him, he falls into the trap by reacting with a football. In the Var era it would be an exaggerated expulsion and certainly removed. Instead Kim Milton Nielsen waves the red card, England goes out on penalties and Beckham becomes the scapegoat of an entire nation for four years.
Redemption arrives in Korea and Japan, with the penalty that eliminates Argentina in 2002. Now he is no longer a footballer: entrepreneur, prosecutor, president of Inter Miami. Still a pop icon, though. In 2012, the penultimate year of his career, he was the highest paid footballer in the world with 46 million dollars. David Beckham turns 49 today.