Beckham - the football, the lifestyle, the wife

David Beckham walked through LAX airport and into a blinding glare of flashbulbs. Having climbed into his Lincoln Navigator, complete with police outrider, a helicopter tracked him from the airport all the way to his new mansion in Beverly Hills. The pictures of that freeway pursuit were unfortunately reminiscent of the runaway O. J. Simpson.

Then, yesterday, the boy from Leytonstone in East London walked out at the sun-baked Home Depot Centre, where as many as 600 journalists and the Riot Squad — the distinctly unmenacing gang of Los Angeles Galaxy fans — welcomed their new missionary for soccer. And still a Galaxy spokesman managed to claim that “with games coming up, we want this to be low-key”.

Yeah, right. If the Galaxy had got their way, their new star signing would have arrived by parachute. No wonder Beckham has said that he is worried about living up to the hype. No man is bigger than the club, they say. With a shower of ticker-tape and thumping rock music as he received his new No 23 shirt from the Mayor of Los Angeles, they continued to pump up Beckham to be bigger than an entire league.

The smartly besuited man himself was not exactly playing things down as he talked about spreading his popularity far beyond the realm of sport. “It’s always nice to be loved and liked for not just soccer,” he said. “It’s great when people make me feel special. I have had that from the gay community around the world, the black community and the Jewish community. I’m half Jewish. If I can have that effect in America, great.” He conducted one interview in Spanish so as to charm LA’s huge Hispanic community.

The immediate effect of his arrival is tangible. Thousands of miles away in New York, they are expecting their usual 10,000 attendance for the Red Bulls to quadruple when Beckham hits the Big Apple on August 18. His first away game, at the Pizza Hut Park in Dallas, is close to a sell-out. Poor Beckham has to live up to expectations and to try to sustain this surge of interest far beyond the novelty of the first season.

Through the ubiquity of the marketing and advertising, “Brand Beckham” has broken new ground even before he has kicked a ball, but the question of whether he will “put soccer on the map” — as his paymasters hope — is far less easy to estimate because most people start from a false premise. A significant misunderstanding about the US is that the locals need converting.

There are already millions upon millions of football-lovers in the States, but their passion is for La Liga, Serie A, the Premier League or South American football. Partly that is because of heritage, but it is also, to be blunt, because Major League Soccer (MLS) has a woeful lack of quality.

It is not the sport that needs selling but the US domestic league and, as everyone knows (and Beckham must fear), that will take much more than the arrival of one man, however great his fame and his ability to become an icon for the gay community.

The sustainability issue was lucidly acknowledged by Beckham when he made comparisons to the boom-and-bust NASL of the 1970s and talked of financial structures to ensure a more egalitarian league.

“Years ago, Pelé, George Best, Franz Beckenbauer were all here and it didn’t work, but the league is a lot more stable now,” Beckham said. “Back then, people pumped money into just one team [the Cosmos]. There’s a wage structure in the MLS now, which is the way to go.” Of course, what that did not recognise was the huge distortion of Beckham earning 50 times the average MLS salary.

Only Landon Donovan, Cobi Jones and Abel Xavier will not have required introductions to Beckham when he met his teammates before yesterday’s showbiz enterance. However thorough his preparation, it is a fair bet that the former England captain would not have recognised Quavas Kirk or Kevin Harmse.

“It’s like the first day at school again,” Beckham said, but the ice was broken when one joker went up to him, shook his hand and said: “Who are you again?” What will really bind the dressing-room is to improve a league record of 12 matches and only three victories.

Dragging the Galaxy up the table is, of course, only a small part of Beckham’s task. The backers of the MLS hope that his presence will prove — not least to United States internationals who flee to Europe at the first opportunity — that their competition is worth playing in.

In many ways, it is an intriguing, exciting — even admirable — project and one that Beckham was always likely to embrace at some stage of his career. He has long spoken about moving to the US and it is hard to see how his family can fail to enjoy a privileged life in the sunshine of Los Angeles. It was, though, impossible to shake off the knowledge that Beckham, 32, would not have come here now had he not been led to believe that his international career was over. American soccer is a home for those who cannot make it in Europe or are tired of doing so, and Beckham’s defiant fight to regain his England place has proved that he is no has-been.

Over time, perhaps he can help to transform the status of the MLS — “The overall goal is to take soccer to a different level and I won’t fail for want of trying,” he said — but there are certain to be times when, for all the incessant attention, he will feel like the lonely explorer of a new frontier.

That figures . . .

700 Accredited media attending David Beckham’s unveiling, with several hundred applications rejected

200 The number of media greeting Beckham on arrival at LAX airport, double the number of fans

8,600 Fans attending the presentation out of the 10,000 invited season ticket-holders