Distend It Like Beckham
DAVID Beckham explains why he has signed a £128million deal that will see him end his playing days in the United States.
Says Day-vid in the Sun: “Soccer in America is the biggest played sport up to a certain age, and that’s where I want to take it to another level.”
As British football fans wince at the mention of “soccer” – the public schoolboy version of the game’s name that Americans insist on calling it – Beckham goes on.
“Eventually it can go higher than anyone can probably believe in America,” says he.
For the record, Beckham’s words are not rooted in a translation from his adopted Spanish. This really is what he said. And it is hard to know what he means. As with Day-vid’s famed metrosexuality, so it is with his ambiguous language.
Dave wants to take you higher, American soccer. Football is on the up and up in the US of A. David has signed for the Los Angeles Galaxy, an ambitious team whose name alone dwarfs the plans of some of Europe’s clubs to merely dominate planet Earth.
Pictured dressed in a pair of black sunglasses, Dave is ready to go to infinity and beyond. It’s up and up and away for David. And for David’s bank balance.
Following the front-page story that interest rate rises mean £600 on your mortgage (“and there could be worse to come”), the Mail reveals that Beckham is to earn £500,000 a week in a five-year deal.
Anyone who has seen Beckham’s performances in recent weeks – those times when he has been invited off the Real Madrid substitutes’ bench – will wonder at the business acumen behind the transfer. Who will pay Beckham a fortune to play when he is 36 years old? “Distend it like Beckham” will come the headline as an older Beckham, grown wider on the American diet, trots up to take a freekick.
This is “Beckham’s US goldrush,” says the Mail. The paper employs one of its writers to provide an epitaph to the former England captain’s European career: “A TRUE GENIUS RUINED BY HIS GREED.” Beckham is the superstar with “more style than substance”.
But it is not about the money. David has told us that. Forget “Posh & Bucks” (Mirror) and what the paper says is Beckham’s £1million-a-week deal in America (any advances on that?).
As 31-year-old Becks tells us: “I didn’t want to go out there at 34 years old and for people to turn around and say: ‘He’s only going there for the money.’ It’s not what I’m going there to do.”
Not a chance. Dave is going there to make the game “higher” and to “build a club and a team that has a lot of potential”.
Dave is off to California. He’s playing for the Galaxy. He’s reaching for the stars…
Posted: 12th, January 2007 | In: Tabloids Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
