The original chapter description

David Beckham and The Celebrity Phenomenon

That David Beckham has been arguably the most famous footballer of the past decade represents an authentic cultural phenomenon. Those who previously held that position in the football world – Pele, Cruyff and Maradona among them – attained their fame on the basis of unparalleled skills and achievement. They were the most famous because they were the best. Much the same may be observed of the most famous from other sports – Ali, Jordan, Senna, Federer, Woods. However much the media built the image, the underpinning was the same – they were the best.

David Beckham has been a very fine player, captain of England for several years, close to the all-time caps record and a winner of numerous trophies with Manchester United. But it would take an utterly besotted admirer to claim that he has been better than very, very good. Would he rank even among England’s best 20 players of all time, or the best 10 in the world over the past decade ? One has to doubt it.

Yet his fame, which shows every sign of outlasting his playing career, is undoubted. Just as striking is the manner in which a man once regarded as an examplar of the unintelligent sportsman is now taken so seriously, an ambassador for the England 2018 bid, a marginal player still taken after injury to the 2010 World Cup with the England party, preferred in a poll by around 12 per cent of Guardian readers (a group who might be assumed to be more immune than the norm to the pull of celebrity) as the next England manager.

So how has he done it? This chapter looks at how a merely very good London-bred and Manchester-based footballer became a cultural icon – a junction box for a range of forces that included the rising fashionability in football from the early 1990s on, the ever-intensifying nexus between football and commercialised popular culture, the rise of the cult of celebrity and astute media manipulation by Beckham and his management. It looks at him in the context of these developments, recognising that neither marrying a pop star – as the studiously unmodish Billy Wright did in the 1950s - nor becoming a fashion exemplar, as George Best was in the 1960s, is unprecedented. It illustrates these insights with comparisons to previous football celebrities such as Wright, Best, John Charles, Pele, Stanley Matthews and Bobby Moore and contemporaries like Wayne Rooney, Zinedine Zidane and Lionel Messi.