As an aid to comprehending the full lunatic reach of some of the claims and declarations associated with David Beckham’s migration to Major League Soccer, nothing serves better than a statement made well in advance of Friday’s mock-regal reception in California for the former England captain.

The words came from Alexi Lalas, the president and general manager of Beckham’s American employers, the Los Angeles Galaxy, and Lalas could hardly be surprised to find them interpreted in a London newspaper as suggesting that his new acquisition “will be bigger in the USA than Tiger Woods or Michael Jordan”. His actual quotes were wild enough: “The US will never have dealt with an athlete who has had this kind of international impact. Tiger Woods has that international appeal but with due respect to Woods and Michael Jordan, David Beckham is at an entirely different level.”

That’s definitely true, Alexi. For a start, Jordan is widely hailed as the greatest basketball player ever to step on to a court, and many are prepared to attribute equivalent distinction to Woods in golf. If attempts were made to assemble a roll of the greatest footballers in history, anybody who included Beckham in the top 50 would be considered not so much eccentric as crazy. So, yes, it would be wrong to think of Tiger and Michael and David as belonging on the same level.

Of course, Lalas was stressing the importance of the international dimension of Beckham’s status, which he says has no precedent among athletes in America. There’s an instant impulse to whisper a certain heavyweight’s name into his ear. But probably Muhammad Ali, as a unique phenomenon, should be left out of the discussion. More relevantly, we can ask how much weight Beckham’s world-wide image - the marketing value so helpful to the global brands of Real Madrid and Manchester United - is sure to carry within the US, which is in sport, as in much else, by far the most insular of the developed nations.

He has been recruited to proselytise an American public with an inbred resistance to the most popular game on earth. That’s why those who have staked so much on his powers of conversion were delighted when he appeared the other day on the cover of Sports Illustrated. Perhaps in the midst of all the inane gibbering about how Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods are doomed to be outshone in their own land, Lalas will take a moment to reflect that Jordan can look back from retirement on 49 SI covers while Woods, though he will not have his 32nd birthday until December 30, and is therefore eight months younger than Beckham, has already racked up a total of 28. Ali’s score, incidentally, stands at 40.

Mentioning those statistics has nothing to do with any inclination to see them as measuring achievement. Media accolades are arbitrary and often of dubious worth. Yet the cover count of the US’s most influential sports publication is a fairly reliable guide to national enthusiasms and on that basis Jordan’s 49 to Pele’s one tells a tale nobody can misread. Tabloid clamour in Britain may give the impression that the Galaxy’s recent signing is causing much more excitement on the other side of the Atlantic than the New York Cosmos’ enlisting of Pele did in the summer of 1975, but such validity as there is in that assessment relates strictly to the showbiz element of what is happening now, the interest created by the Hollywoodisation of Becks and Posh.

In pure sports terms, the incomparable Brazilian’s arrival (even as a 34-year-old who had been regarded as retired for the previous eight months) struck a deeper chord. Most Americans didn’t begin to understand the miraculous feats that had made him a sporting divinity but they knew that’s what he was and, with their hunger for superlatives, it meant a lot to them that they had attracted somebody acclaimed as the best of the best. The man himself, though battle-worn by then, had lost none of his pride in performance and this witness can testify that his service to the Cosmos was exemplary.

No doubt Beckham will be equally conscientious in committing himself to the cause of bringing enlightenment to football’s last dark continent. However, his exceptional but narrow talent (almost entirely dependent on the glorious precision of a right foot that makes him a masterly deliverer of the ball, whether he is striking long passes, whipping in crosses and corners or bending free kicks beyond goalkeepers) leaves his credentials for evangelising on behalf of the beauties of the game thoroughly dwarfed by those of Pele, whose comprehensive virtuosity was spellbinding. So is the crusade likely to prove any more successful for MLS than it was for the North American Soccer League two or three decades ago? The NASL reinforced the Pele coup with the importation of many other distinguished flag-bearers from Europe and South America (such as Franz Beckenbauer, Johan Cruyff, George Best, Bobby Moore and Carlos Alberto) but by the early 1980s the league was disintegrating towards oblivion.

Arguments for envisaging a contrastingly happy future for MLS (in spite of the widespread financial losses that persist in its 12th year of existence) invariably emphasise the care taken this time around to provide professional football in the US with a solid infrastructure designed to put the sport in a position to exploit what is perceived as an environment of increasing opportunity. There is talk of the growing numbers of youngsters playing the game in the suburbs and, inevitably, reference to the vast fan base that could be established among the country’s 42m Hispanics. But will it be easy to wean many in that latter group away from the foreign matches ceaselessly transmitted on Spanish-language cable television channels?

MLS’s current TV rights deal reportedly gives an annual return of $22m, which might look like a telephone bill to the Premier League’s negotiators.

Obviously, the most fundamental obstacle to persuading a huge body of the US population to fall in love with our version of football is a long-nurtured cultural attitude that tends to demand from team sports the kind of explosive, high-scoring action that is readily calibrated in percentages, yardages or blizzards of points. When I told an American friend that one of the best games I ever saw was Brazil’s 1-0 defeat of England in Guadalajara at the 1970 World Cup finals, he said in amazement: “One-nil? What the hell were they doing for the rest of the hour-and-a-half? And what the hell were you doing?”

I was savouring a magic that, the David Beckham roadshow notwithstanding, the great nation across the ocean may never have any serious eagerness to share.

Major problem for our golfers

There was a time when the failure of European golf to produce the winner of a major championship over a period of eight years would have been far from astounding. But the sustained success of players from this side of the Atlantic in the Ryder Cup has changed all that and now the drought stretching back to Paul Lawrie’s improbable but highly honourable victory in a bizarrely dramatic Open at Carnoustie in 1999 seems positively unnatural.

Recalling more impoverished eras in the past 60 years is no consolation but the patterns of results are interesting. After Northern Ireland’s Fred Daly took the Open title in 1947, the Englishmen Henry Cotton and Max Faulkner quickly emulated the feat, in 1948 and 1951 respectively, only for golfers from the US and the southern hemisphere to monopolise the majors throughout the ensuing 18 years. Then Tony Jacklin managed a home win in the Open of 1969 and followed up with triumph in the US Open of 1970. But Jacklin’s glory was isolated and another barren spell wasn’t interrupted until Seve Ballesteros set an inspiring example for contenders from the Continent at Royal Lytham in 1979.

Between 1979 and 1999 golfers from Europe were winners of the Open eight times and of the Masters 11 times. However, since that glorious surge ended, the pride of the European game has had to rely on the Ryder Cup for nourishment. It has been a satisfying diet, and we have been able to berate the Americans for the deficiencies of their team spirit. But let’s own up. Golf is in essence a solo game and unless our representatives can start winning majors again (Carnoustie next weekend would be a good starting point) it behoves us to stay civil.