The Beckham Experiment by Grant Wahl - Excerpt
The Beckham Experiment by Grant Wahl - Excerpt
The Beckham Experiment by Grant Wahl - Excerpt
THE
BECKHAM
E XPERIMENT
How the World’s Most Famous Athlete
Tried to Conquer America
G R A N T WA H L
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ISBN 978-0-307-40787-0
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
FIRST EDITION
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CONTENTS
1. WE ❤ BECKHAM 7
4. AMERICAN IDLE 49
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viii CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 289
INDEX 291
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INTRODUCTION
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2 T HE BECKHAM EXPERIMENT
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INTRODUCTION 3
thing I’ve been interested in,” he said.) He was not coming to score three
goals a game. (“That’s one thing I’m worried about, because people
probably do think they’re going to see me turn out and we’ll win our
first game ten-nil.”) And he was not coming simply to be a marketing
tool (though his signature cologne, Instinct, was available in many fine
drugstores). “I’m moving to America because of the soccer,” Beckham
insisted. “I didn’t want to make it into a big sort of hoo-ha where it was
more about other things than the soccer. It’s not a big brand thing.”
Yet the task facing Beckham—to make soccer matter on a regular
basis in the U.S.—would be enormous. The greatest player of all time,
Pelé, couldn’t turn soccer into the daily religion that it is nearly every-
where else in the world when he played with the New York Cosmos in
the late 1970s. (His league, the NASL, folded a few years after he re-
tired.) Nor did the U.S.’s hosting of the 1994 World Cup. Since its incep-
tion in 1996, Major League Soccer had gained stability and produced
competent young American players, but it was still losing money and
had yet to advance beyond niche status. There were plenty of Americans
who considered themselves occasional soccer watchers—the U.S. televi-
sion audience for the 2006 World Cup final (16.9 million) beat out the
average audiences for that year’s NBA Finals (12.9 million) and World
Series (15.8 million)—but they followed only the sport’s biggest events,
and the few hard-core American soccer fans preferred the European
Champions League and the superior leagues in England, Spain, and
Mexico to MLS.
Despite the challenges, the man who created American Idol was
convinced that Beckham could pull it off. Simon Fuller, Beckham’s
manager and the chief executive of 19 Entertainment, acknowledged
that making soccer really matter in the U.S. would be a “far greater”
challenge than his previous successes, which included turning Idol into
America’s most popular television program and conquering the U.S.
market with the Spice Girls in the 1990s. But that hadn’t stopped this
mastermind of the music world from hatching a “grand vision” (Fuller’s
words) for the next chapter of his most famous sports client’s career.
“There seems to be a real foundation now for soccer” in America, said
Fuller. “David is the most iconic of footballers, and he’s achieved pretty
much everything you can achieve in Europe, apart from maybe winning
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4 T HE BECKHAM EXPERIMENT
a big tournament with England. He’s still in his early thirties, still play-
ing remarkably well, and you have to start thinking: What’s the next ad-
venture? The States is the last frontier in terms of soccer. Everywhere
else on earth, soccer is huge. It’s the sport. And while many people have
tried before, no one has seemed to have cracked America.”
The last frontier. A grand vision. An adventure. There was something
quintessentially American about what these Brits were trying to achieve.
Beckham vowed that he was in this New World Adventure—the Beck-
ham Experiment—for the long haul. Otherwise, why would he have
signed a five-year deal? “If you have most things you want in life, you
can take it easy, you can retire, you can continue to take money off a
team in Europe,” Fuller said. “But together with David our ambition is
bigger than that. Shoot for the stars, and if you don’t hit them, then it
was fun trying.
“If you do hit them, then you’ve made history.”
Having covered the U.S. soccer scene for ten years at Sports Illustrated, I
knew that the Beckham Experiment would be one of the most auda-
cious projects in recent sports history, not least because the chances for
failure were so high and the personalities involved were so big.
The next two years would perhaps be the most rollicking stretch of
Beckham’s storied career. There would be plenty of surprises, good ones
and bad ones. There would be lost-in-translation frustrations and unin-
tentional comedy. There would be full stadiums, media hype galore, and
the enormous ego clashes that result whenever you mix money, sports,
and Hollywood. The most compelling aspect of the Beckham Experi-
ment was this: Nobody knew how it was going to turn out. Even if Beck-
ham and the Galaxy were successful on the field, would mainstream
America respond? Would Beckham’s undeniable charm win over the
Yanks? Or would he be just another Robbie Williams, joining the ranks
of Brits whose worldwide appeal failed to translate on these shores?
If there was ever a book about American soccer that demanded to
be written, this was the one, in large part because it was about not just
the sport but so much more: the engineering of American celebrity, the
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INTRODUCTION 5
powerful seeking more power, the clash of cultures and American ex-
ceptionalism. For years, too, I had craved the chance to chronicle the
ongoing inside story of a team, to do more than just parachute into
town for a couple days for a snapshot magazine story. It was one thing
to interview Beckham in Madrid on the eve of his American arrival,
when optimism reigned and he had as much buzz as any Hollywood
blockbuster. But it would be quite another to interview him underneath
the stands in Columbus, Ohio, on Buck-a-Brat night after a Galaxy loss
in October.
And so, in the summer of 2007, I began a sixteen-month journey
following Beckham and the Galaxy across America, a pursuit that con-
tinued until the global saga leading up to his scheduled return to the
Galaxy from Italian giant AC Milan in July 2009. I went to the games, of
course, but I also visited the offices, homes, and hotels of the players, the
coaches, the moneymen, and the message shapers. I had meals with
them in their houses, in Los Angeles–area diners and dive bars, and in
fancy New York City sushi restaurants. Along the way I developed an
even greater appreciation for American soccer players, who tend to be
smarter and more insightful than their counterparts overseas and in
other sports, owing to their college educations, their need to find other
jobs during and after their playing days, and the humility that comes
with earthbound incomes (as little as $12,900 a year) and soccer’s place
in the pecking order of American sports.
For years, whenever anyone has learned that I cover soccer for an
American sports magazine, I am invariably asked when the sport will
“make it” in the United States. My answer is always the same: Hell if I
know. I am not a soccer proselytizer, and I don’t know if soccer will ever
be one of the top three spectator sports in the United States. But I do
love this game, and I find it fascinating that so many wealthy in-
vestors—wildly successful billionaires, in fact—continue to sink so
many dollars into the proposition that soccer can indeed “make it” here
as a viable enterprise.
Ultimately, the purpose of the Beckham Experiment was to try to
change soccer’s position in the hierarchy of U.S. spectator sports. By the
time it was over, Beckham’s American adventure would be regarded as
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6 T HE BECKHAM EXPERIMENT
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CHAPTER 1
WE ❤ BECKHAM
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8 T HE BECKHAM EXPERIMENT
Angelo Road, west on Sunset Boulevard, and south on the San Diego
Freeway, past Santa Monica, past Manhattan Beach, past the city’s fash-
ionable addresses, until he arrived in Carson, a working-class suburb
composed of African-Americans and immigrant neighborhoods of Ko-
rean-, Chinese-, and Hispanic-Americans. The main entrance of the
Home Depot Center, Beckham’s new professional home, was across the
street from a KFC. The HDC itself was a lush sporting playground, a
$150 million complex that included tennis and track-and-field stadi-
ums, an indoor velodrome, twelve soccer practice fields, the Los Angeles
branch of the David Beckham Academy, and the Galaxy’s 27,000-seat
stadium, the finest soccer facility in the United States. Beckham passed
security, parked his Escalade near the bottom of the stadium’s supply
ramp, and took a deep breath.
You could learn a lot about Beckham from his first drive to work in
Los Angeles. He was smitten with fancy cars. He enjoyed having fun
with the paparazzi by taking them through drive-thru windows, like the
one at Starbucks where Beckham grabbed his usual venti java. He was
obsessive about punctuality, always arriving early to events, the sort of
OCD behavior that drove him to arrange soda-pop cans in identical
rows of four in the refrigerator, labels facing forward, and to vacuum
perfectly straight lines in the living-room carpet, like the mowed rows
of a soccer field. And, not least, he got nervous when it came to public
speaking or meeting new people.
Beckham’s new Galaxy teammates might have been shocked to
know that Beckham was just as anxious about meeting them as they
were about meeting him. “Joining a new team is always quite daunting,
quite scary,” Beckham admitted. “I wish I had a chance to meet the play-
ers before going over, but it’s not been possible.” As for the thousands of
Galaxy fans and hundreds of international media who had assembled to
hear Beckham address the masses, they’d be surprised to know that the
most famous athlete in the world was a self-described introvert. “I’m
shy,” Beckham said. “Even when I’m in England, people say, ‘Why aren’t
you talking?’ I’m not a man who’ll sit there and chat and chat and chat.
I’m a quiet person.”
Beckham’s sensitive nature—he called it his “feminine side”—was
ingrained early on in his life. “I get it from my mum,” he said. “My dad’s
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WE ❤ BECKHAM 9
sort of a man’s man, but I’ve got more of my mum’s personality. She’s a
lot softer, a lot more affectionate. We both get really emotional.” Beck-
ham cried when Victoria gave birth to their sons, Brooklyn, Romeo, and
Cruz. He cried that awful night in 1998 when he was red-carded at the
World Cup and became the Most Hated Man in England. He cried a
year later when he won back his nation’s affection, and he cried again
when he gave up the England captaincy in 2006. “I’ll even watch films
and cry,” he said. There would be no tears on the first day of the Beck-
ham Experiment, the first chapter of a new era for Beckham and for
American soccer itself. But make no mistake: Beckham’s insides would
be churning.
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WE ❤ BECKHAM 11
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WE ❤ BECKHAM 13
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Gordon knew there would be plenty on the line for him now that Beck-
ham had arrived. Play poorly, and the Galaxy wouldn’t renew his con-
tract at season’s end. Play well, and he could stay in L.A. for another
season—and maybe even draw some interest from overseas clubs. “Peo-
ple are watching everywhere,” Gordon said. A former college teammate
living in England had called to say he’d seen Gordon on TV there in the
Beckham news coverage. “This is either going to be the best thing ever
or the worst thing ever for me,” Gordon reasoned. “If you do really well,
everybody’s going to see you do it. But if you don’t do well, everybody’s
going to see it, and they’re going to think you suck.”
After most of the Galaxy players had met Beckham, Landon Donovan
strode into the locker room through the training-room door. As soon as
he walked in, Donovan could feel a buzz in the room, a thrum of excite-
ment that was different, palpable. He looked around and noticed that
his teammates all had smiles on their faces, a rare occurrence in a season
that had started poorly. Donovan saw Beckham, walked over, and of-
fered the Englishman a smile and a handshake: “Welcome to Los Ange-
les. It’s good to have you here.” They exchanged some small talk. Even
Donovan sensed that it was a little awkward at first.
That would have to change. If the Beckham Experiment was going
to work—if the Galaxy was going to not just sell jerseys but win
games—Beckham would need a cold-blooded, world-class finisher on
the ends of his passes. Nobody could deny Donovan’s game-changing
potential, especially in MLS. At twenty-five he was on the verge of be-
coming the U.S. national team’s all-time leading goal scorer, and he had
already guided his teams to three MLS Cup championships. Blessed
with explosive speed, refined technical skills, and a laserlike finishing
ability, Donovan burst onto the global scene as a twenty-year-old at the
2002 World Cup, where he scored two goals during the U.S.’s surprise
run to the quarterfinals. By the summer of 2007, most American soccer
aficionados considered Donovan, a native of Ontario, California, the
most talented field player the U.S. had ever produced.
But critics argued that Donovan had squandered his chance to be-
come the first U.S. superstar in European club soccer. On two occasions
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WE ❤ BECKHAM 15
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cares,” Donovan said. “Guys are astute enough to understand why he’s
making what he’s making. It would be kind of a nice gesture if he came
in and just splashed the locker room with cash for some of the younger
guys, but I don’t think it’s going to be a big issue.”
Pause. Smile.
“And he’d better be picking up meals and shit, too, or else I’ll call
him out on it.”
Outside, as the clock approached 10 A.M., the more than 5,000 fans and
700 media members were transforming the scene into a frenzy. Victoria
Beckham sashayed onto the field, and a battery of photographers began
jostling like a school of starved fish at feeding time. Her look was
pure Posh: a knee-length fuchsia sheath dress, an oversized Birkin bag
in the same electric shade, huge black Jackie O sunglasses, a new blond
bob hairdo that would soon take over America, and six-inch stiletto
heels that would have dug into the grass had she not been so perilously
thin.
Victoria knew what to do. Facing the wall of photographers, she
stuck one knee in front of the other and placed her left hand on the hip
of her dress. In an odd way, the pose looked a lot like the one her hus-
band assumed before one of his signature free kicks. Her face was fixed,
unsmiling, a Blue Steel gaze that David favored as well, the better to
avoid showing their not-quite-perfect teeth in photographs. And then
she held it. All of it. For sixty seconds. It was affected. It was preposter-
ous. It was perfect.
The Galaxy fans roared. “One of us! One of us! One of us!” they
screamed, and Victoria waved in appreciation, both sides apparently
unaware of the chant’s over-the-top absurdity.
From the moment David Beckham began dating Victoria Adams at
the height of the Spice Girls craze in 1997, they had been daily fodder in
the British tabloids. After the period of national grieving over Princess
Diana’s death in August 1997, the royal family appeared drab next to
the new pop couple. (The tabs dubbed their twenty-four-acre spread
Beckingham Palace.) Introduced by Victoria to the fashion world,
David embraced its trappings; he was photographed wearing a sarong
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WE ❤ BECKHAM 17
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Now that Victoria had warmed up the crowd and taken her seat in the
VIP section in front of the stage, it was time for the main event. First
came the music, a thumping beat over the stadium’s sound system, with
the same phrase repeated over and over: “HELLO, AMERICA.” Then
David Beckham emerged from the tunnel, flanked by various soccer of-
ficials, and made his way through a wall of sound—cheers, music, and
high-pitched screams—to the stage.
The men in suits kept their remarks mercifully brief, given the di-
rect sun beating down on the proceedings. Leiweke, the CEO of the
Galaxy’s ownership group, announced that 250,000 new Beckham jer-
seys had been ordered from Adidas. Then came MLS commissioner
Don Garber (“This is truly a historic day. It’s a moment we should all
cherish”), followed by Galaxy coach Frank Yallop (“It’s been a long wait,
believe me. The team cannot wait to get him on the field”). Then Lalas
took the podium, welcomed past and present Galaxy players in the au-
dience, and cut to the chase. “If you have a camera,” he announced, “this
might be a good time to take the lens cap off.” And with that, Lalas in-
troduced Beckham, pulled out the new white Galaxy number 23 jersey,
and presented it to the man of the moment. Beckham raised the jersey
to the sky, the music blasted once again, and the giant confetti cannons
on both sides of the stage erupted, spewing tens of thousands of pieces
of blue-and-yellow paper into the air.
Sitting next to Victoria in the VIP section, his white shirt untucked
in the classic SoCal style, Simon Fuller stood along with everyone else
and applauded. Like the scene unfolding around him, Fuller didn’t do
subtle. Long before he became Beckham’s manager, the American Idol
creator had turned the Spice Girls into a global juggernaut through
clever promotion, lucrative-if-disposable spin-offs (like the movie
Spiceworld), and a drill sergeant’s demand for long work hours from
Victoria and her bandmates. Not for nothing was Fuller often identified
by the British tabloids as a Svengali. Yet for all his success, Fuller stu-
diously avoided the spotlight himself, rarely gave interviews, and seemed
content to be mistaken by nearly everyone for Simon Cowell, the hyper-
critical judge on American Idol.
It was Fuller who insisted that the press release announcing Beck-
ham’s signing include a line that his five-year deal could bring him
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WE ❤ BECKHAM 19
$250 million, even though media around the world misinterpreted that
claim to mean his Galaxy contract was worth $250 million. In fact,
whereas Beckham’s endorsements, jersey royalties, and other revenue
streams might bring him $250 million in a best-case scenario, Beck-
ham’s Galaxy salary would pay him far less ($32.5 million) over that
span.
Nor did Fuller shy away from rhetorical grandstanding, proclaim-
ing that the “grand vision” for Beckham’s move across the Atlantic was
his idea. Fuller’s frequent use of the term “we” to describe David Beck-
ham was revealing—and more than a little bit eerie. “I thought, well, if
we’re going to America for a grand vision, there are ways of structuring
a deal that make it not a ridiculous move,” Fuller said. “I think it led me
to coming up with a very creative deal that I worked out together with
[AEG bosses Tim Leiweke and Phil Anschutz] that really worked for
everyone and evolved into probably the biggest sports deal of all time.
That’s because as we started to go down that road there’s a lot of interest
in soccer doing well in America, whether that’s from big sports compa-
nies like Adidas or whether it’s through sponsors that want to be in
sport and feel that soccer is a great sport to be in, or whether it was
David’s existing sponsors that have years of a relationship with him that
want to take that relationship to another level by going to America.”
The business relationship between Fuller’s 19 Entertainment and
the Galaxy’s owner, AEG, was based on far more than just David Beck-
ham. AEG was one of the top two music concert promoters in the
United States and owned some 130 concert venues around the world,
while 19 represented some of the world’s most popular recording
artists, including Amy Winehouse, Carrie Underwood, and all the other
stars of the American Idol franchise, to say nothing of the Spice Girls. It
was no coincidence that AEG had signed on to promote the Spice Girls’
reunion tour, which would kick off its U.S. swing that December at the
AEG-owned Nokia Theater in Los Angeles and continue with seventeen
dates the following month at the AEG-owned O2 Arena in London. In
other words, Victoria’s career interests were inextricably linked to
David’s move to America. “The more we talked and thought about it,
the more it resonated with everything that we were doing and wanted to
do,” Fuller explained. “It works for Victoria because America is a place
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she loves and she spends a lot of time there. It was an idea that grew and
grew, and it became a reality.”
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WE ❤ BECKHAM 21
he said. “Wine, women, and song. Never has so much been done with a
modicum of talent, a little facial hair, and a guitar.”
Lalas became the first American in the modern era to play in Italy’s
Serie A, for Padova, and even after his retirement from the game he was
viewed abroad as a symbol of U.S. soccer. In 2005, while reporting a
story on Arab-Israeli soccer star Abbas Suan in a dusty town not far
from the Lebanese border, I asked Suan if he knew anything about
American soccer. Without missing a beat, he pulled a long imaginary
beard down from his chin. Lalas.
The beard was gone now. Lalas had cleaned up, gone corporate, and
yet in other ways the Galaxy’s highly quotable front man hadn’t changed
a bit. A guitar bearing the new Galaxy logo—the one Lalas helped
design—was one of the first things you saw in his office. “I’m still a mess
on the inside,” Lalas joked, and at thirty-seven his shtick was more or
less the same now that he was a suit: to shoot off his mouth and pro-
mote the sport by any means necessary. For this was Lalas’s article of
faith: If soccer was going to succeed in the United States, it needed more
than just skilled players. It needed personalities, celebrities, entertainers.
Wasn’t entertainment what the E in AEG stood for? “That’s what I love
about sports,” Lalas said. “I love the criticism and the analysis and the
rumor and speculation and innuendo, not just about what the guy did
on the field but what the guy did off the field. That’s personality. That’s
excitement. That’s fuckin’ entertainment. I don’t think enough players
are encouraged to express themselves.”
Yet Lalas had won his share of enemies and detractors as a soccer
executive, and his outlandish statements struck some observers as the
remarks of a buffoon. Lalas had already earned mocking headlines in
the U.K. for claiming that MLS’s parity made it far more competitive
(and, in his view, entertaining) than the English Premier League. And
despite Lalas’s bold proclamations that he wanted the Galaxy to become
MLS’s first global SuperClub (“get it right: big S, big C, all one word”),
his teams had yet to win many games. In Lalas’s three full seasons as a
GM with AEG-owned clubs in San Jose, New York, and Los Angeles, his
teams had never advanced beyond the first round of the playoffs.
Nor did it help that this season’s Galaxy, which had failed to reach the
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WE ❤ BECKHAM 23
suit was missing a button on its right cuff. For most people this would
be no big deal, but for an international fashion icon as detail-obsessed
as Beckham it was shocking, the sartorial equivalent of forgetting to
wear pants, a reminder that despite appearances to the contrary not
everything was perfect in David Beckham’s world.
Not that you would know judging from the questions tossed his
way in the room that day. A reporter from People magazine asked Beck-
ham about his much-publicized friendship with actors Tom Cruise and
Katie Holmes. (“They’re good friends of ours, and they’ve welcomed us
so far really, really amazingly.”) Another questioner asked if Beckham
wanted to become an actor. (“I’m just here to play football, to play soc-
cer, sorry.”) And another asked about the brand of Beckham’s suit.
(“Burberry.”)
On July 13, 2007—Friday the thirteenth—not one of us in the room
asked about his injured left ankle.
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The Beckham Experiment
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