Missionaries aren’t meant to have it easy but apparently the task of converting Americans simultaneously to the joys of football and the charms of the Beckhams’ lifestyle is already fraught with more problems than the golden couple and their entourage of attendants and advisers had anticipated. For some of us, the surprise is that anybody is surprised.

Only the monumentally naive would have imagined that the Los Angeles Galaxy could live up to the claims made about their standard of play by the club’s president and general manager, Alexi Lalas, whose gift for leaving reality in his wake was adequately demonstrated when he suggested that David Beckham was a sportsman capable of having a bigger impact in the US than Tiger Woods or Michael Jordan. Lalas’s tendency to talk rubbish was, by his own admission, matched by his team’s penchant for producing it on the field when they lost 3-0 at home to the Tigres UANL last week. The newly recruited star in the stands must have been nursing deep concerns as well as an injured ankle, and nothing that emerged from the Galaxy’s friendly game with Chelsea yesterday was likely to ease substantially his misgivings about the deficiencies of his teammates and of Major League Soccer in general.

However, as a famously sympthetic husband, he is probably dwelling less on his troubles that on those of his spouse. It is her ego that should be limping after the mauling inflicted on the so-called documentary devoted to the paralysingly banal specifics of her descent on LA. The nationwide consensus of the American television critics seemed to be that if talent and charisma were radioactive, Victoria Beckham’s share might escape detection by the most sophisticated Geiger counters known to science. They implied that anyone with social priorities as trivial and vacuous would have been better advised to keep quiet about them and, having braved exposure to the excruciating exercise, it was impossible to disagree.

The severest condemnation should, of course, come down on the fools masquerading as worldly counsellors who persuaded the central character that the programme was a good idea. From the moment of its conception, Victoria Beckham: Coming to America had the ingredients of a personal disaster and allusions to its grisliness are certain to pursue the Beckhams throughout their stay in the US.

If questions are now being asked about how long that stay will be, we must assume the answer will have much less to do with Posh’s failure to impress the natives than with professional anxieties that could be stirred in David Beckham as he absorbs at close quarters the full implications of hitching the fancy wagon of his celebrity to MLS.

Such worries would naturally increase if the assiduously generated clamour surrounding his arrival proved to have only a fleeting effect on his commercial value to his employers, curtailing the relevance of all the contractual promises relating to promotional and merchandising activities to the point where his earnings shrink disappointingly close to the undramatic (by his standards) sums associated directly with his services on the pitch.

In those circumstances, he may find himself belatedly registering the warnings of those who told him that turning his back on European football could represent the end of his career as a serious footballer, and in particular that it instantly threatened his chances of remaining in the England team.

It’s reasonable to wonder if David Beckham will see through his five-year commitment to be an intrepid spreader of the faith in a sometimes hostile land.

Isn’t it more likely we’ll hear the mission bell rung in hope of rescue?