So I decided to respond to one of those "Call For Papers" shouts. Well, Dubai in November. What's not to like?
David Beckham and The Celebrity Phenomenon
By Jed Novick, Senior Lecturer at Brighton University
It was 17 August 1996, the first day of the 96/97 football season. Manchester United were playing Wimbledon at Selhurst Park. It was a bright and sunny day. Lovely, but largely unremarkable. United were quickly 2-0 up. No surprises. A routine day and a routine match.
But routine things didn’t happen when Manchester United played at Selhurst Park. It was there the previous season, that Eric Cantona launched his infamous kung fu kick. That had also been a routine match.
David Beckham picked up the ball just inside the United half of the pitch. Until that moment Beckham had been a promising young player, one of a crop of promising young players at United. A right-sided midfield player with one good foot and not much in the way of pace.
As Beckham looked up, he saw Wimbledon keeper Neil Sullivan had wandered off his line. He pulled his right foot back and… that was when it happened. That was the moment The God Of Celebrity decided to sprinkle his fairy dust on David Beckham. In the 59th minute of that routine match on that routine day, David Beckham did something extraordinary. Or, rather, something extraordinary happened to David Beckham.
As his perfectly placed shot dipped over the hapless Sullivan and into the Wimbledon net, Beckham turned round and raised his arms. His floppy fringe framed his boyish face and, as one, the world was drowned in the sound of clicking cameras.
David Beckham was something new. We’d not seen anything like Beckham before. There’d been football icons – George Best being the most obvious example – but Becks was completely different. Best, a celebrity in spite of himself, was on auto-destruct. Becks is on auto-survive, a celebrity because of himself. Becks is the pop star who doesn’t make bad albums, the film star who can open a film anywhere in the world, the ad man’s dream.
As a footballer, he’s reached the top. He’s played for the three biggest clubs in the world – Manchester United, Real Madrid and AC Milan. He’s captained England. He’s got the record number of England caps for an outfield player.
He’s the Roy Of The Rovers who has somehow managed to throw away the rule book.
He’s cut through – seemingly effortlessly - the often brutish macho world of professional football. He popularized the notion of metrosexuality. In a world where there has been but one ‘out’ gay player – the late Justin Fashanu- Beckham has openly courted the gay world. And we’re not just talking about a designer sarong. He’s appeared on the cover of gay magazine Attitude. Topless. He’s posed outrageously in underpants. He advertised Police sunglasses looking like one of The Village People. He’s half of a pop star couple who captained England while sporting a Mohican haircut. He has somehow managed to transcend every prejudice, every barrier, every hostility.
It’s easy to talk about a pop star or an actor being ‘metrosexual’. But this is a professional footballer and we’re talking about a world where not so long ago a player was nearly destroyed for reading The Guardian.
And all the time he was doing this, he was England’s captain, one of the most feted footballers in the world.
Note we don’t say “one of the best footballers in the world”.
Those who previously held the position of “most famous” in the football world – Pele, Cruyff, Maradona – 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.
Beckham is a very fine player, undoubtedly. But who would claim he has ever been better than 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?
But Beckham is not just a footballer. He’s a footballer plus. He’s a cultural phenomenon, an icon. Someone who is now taken so seriously that when England needed a final PR push in the 2018 World Cup bid, three men were selected: Prince William (the heir apparent), David Cameron (the Prime Minister) and David Beckham.
Sport and celebrity. No one else has ever managed to ride these two horses at the same time without falling off.
So how has he done it? This paper 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.
Here, Jed Novick, sport journalism lecturer, pop writer and co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Football, looks at the cult of Beckham and the rise of celebrity- and wonders how one man can be so many things to so many people. And we haven’t even mentioned Simon Fuller yet.
