Far from the pitch, David Beckham remains soccer’s biggest star

Four days have passed since then, and World Cup stars have been popping up everywhere, not just on the field.

Have you seen David Beckham’s Home Depot ad? Or Ray’s? Or Adidas? Do you think Beckham has ever played linos in his own house? Probably not, but it’s a lot more believable than the idea of ​​him eating potato chips.

Watching the game, these ads are as depressing as the brainwashing scenes in A Clockwork Orange. A month from now, you’ll need eyelid clips.

Beckham is also at the stadium. He played in the season opener in Mexico and the season opener in Los Angeles, but not the season opener in Toronto.

This absence, rather than Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s absence, is the real insult. Prime Minister Trudeau is nothing more than a Katy Perry handbag porter in California, so he chose to watch the World Cup in the safety of Los Angeles. He would have been booed mercilessly here. Beckham’s excuse?

Cathal Kelly: “Canada must accept America’s grudge and fight, fight, fight.”

Beckham also received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Some may wonder what the star is for. He had a five-second role as a “projectionist” in “The Man From UNCLE.” In that fleeting moment, he realized how incapable he was of overcoming his innate David Beckham-ness.

Beckham is 51 years old, but he could pass for a sun-loving teenager. He is not a regular member of the game as he has no talent as a critic. He only shows up for big events like this one, when warehouses full of ultra-processed foods need to be emptied.

What’s the problem? It’s not like there aren’t millions of current stars Ramin Yamal and Jude Bellingham in their prime. They receive advertising as well, but not as much as Beckham. Football is obsessed with this guy. Even though it’s been nearly 15 years since he left the game, he’s still the most reliable salesman I’ve ever had.

Do you think Lionel Messi will still be such a big player 15 years after he left? Why do you think he had to come all the way to Miami to artificially extend his career? Because Messi knows that if he is not active in football, he is headed for a life of riches and worthlessness.

Beckham may be more widely admired now than when he was in uniform, as he can’t take penalties lightly while wearing a suit. Has there ever been a figure so deeply ingrained in the cultural psyche of sports?

Before Beckham, I would have said Pele. For years, this brash Brazilian has been calling it soccer, football, or whatever you want to call it. People understood that in Rawalpindi and Riyadh as well as in Rio.

Pele was a natural sport. He embodies the purity of competition, that people do it purely for the pleasure of it, to watch it, to be obsessed with it.

Pele was also an advertiser’s dream, but always within the context of the game. No one knows who Pele was married to, how he got along with his kids, or whether he flew on Tom Cruise’s jet.

Beckham is a corporate-optimized Pele. Now, when you think of him, you don’t think of sports at all. I think of Krieg’s lights, his hairstyle, his bubbly personality and his chaotic home life. Beckham is social media personified. He exists to be seen.

‘Great field to play on’: World Cup players approve of Vancouver’s turf

In his way, Beckham is as monumental a groundbreaker as Muhammad Ali, but Ali broke ground on a completely different level. In Beckham’s case, he taught the sports world how to sell out.

What we do on the field is just a part of it. I remember the 2002 World Cup, the height of Beckham mania. He continued to cover his head until his debut. A lot of people had money riding on the cuts he would take. He took a false hawk with him. Of all the millions of copycats out there, Beckham is the only one alive who didn’t look ridiculous. barely.

Beckham seemed to inherently understand that what people really want from athletes is performance, but that it doesn’t have to end at the whistle. From the beginning, he performed everywhere.

None of this would have worked, except for resentment, if he wasn’t an extrovert. Most extroverts like attention, but that’s their decision. Beckham would be happy to accept any method. The more he gets criticized in the media, the more his popularity increases.

He was heavily criticized for being the face of Qatar ahead of the last World Cup. On the flight there, I watched a tourist video of Beckham happily wandering around a souk. It was so cornball that it could have been smeared with butter.

Was Beckham offended by the planned alliance with a dictatorship? At least not. As always, he was smiling everywhere throughout the tournament as if he had just achieved his number. The man should not get out of bed in the morning. He has to jump from there. Whatever the Qataris paid him, they got their money’s worth. Mr. Beckham could sell his timeshare to a concentration camp.

In person, what’s striking is how real Beckham is, despite the artificiality of his image. He looks people in the eye. He often laughs self-deprecatingly. He gives off an air of luck rather than entitlement.

His magic lies in being able to convey this emotion through his camera. Beckham exudes authenticity. It doesn’t matter whether the authenticity is real or not.

He has some contemporaries — Tom Brady is already chasing the World Cup record — but none have the trick of looking both glamorous and ordinary at the same time as Beckham. No iconic athlete has ever scored higher on Ross McCammon’s two-beer-and-puppy test. He’s a very nice person.

Obviously, this spell is becoming more and more powerful. Someday soon, Beckham may be blazing a different path: an athlete who inevitably became famous in his youth and never became famous for the rest of his life.