Fabio Capello’s declaration yesterday that David Beckham would not play for Real Madrid again was in curiously vindictive contradiction to the manner in which the coach precipitated the former England captain’s decision to leave for Los Angeles at the end of the season.
Beckham and his handlers have sought to convey the impression that he jumped, when the facts show that, if not exactly pushed, he received a sharp, unambiguous prod towards the exit.
The decision as to his future was taken not by him in the first instance, but by the three most powerful men at Real Madrid during what Bernabeu sources would later describe as “a crisis cabinet meeting” at the club’s training centre on Monday morning. The three were Ramon Calderon, the president, Predrag Mijatovic, the sporting director, and Fabio Capello, the coach.
The mission to which Capello had pledged himself at the start of the season, to bring success to the club after three trophyless years, was in smithereens. His team had lost ignominously at the weekend to Deportivo la Coruña, who had not won in La Liga for nine games and had not scored since November. In the previous game, just before Christmas, Real had lost 3-0 at home to Recreativo de Huelva, a freshly promoted team, few of whose players the average Spanish fan could name.
Heads had to roll. In such circumstances it is traditional in football for the coach to go. But the Real presidency of Calderon, who may have to run for re-election in the coming months, was too wedded to Capello, on whom he had bet everything. If Capello went, the president would have to go too. And that was unthinkable.
So a consensus was swiftly reached that it was the players who were to blame. After those two fiascos against Deportivo and Recreativo, Capello had done something that Sir Alex Ferguson and Arsène Wenger would never do: instead of shielding his players, he dedicated both post-match press conferences to rubbishing them. At the “crisis” meeting with Mijatovic and Calderon, it was Capello who did most of the talking, naming the players who should be scapegoated and therefore purged. First on the list was the three-time Fifa World Player of the Year, Ronaldo. Following close behind was Beckham.
Capello proposed that Ronaldo should be sold immediately and that Beckham’s contract should not be renewed. This came as a surprise to Calderon, who all season long had been publicly stating that he wanted the Englishman to stay. He had come up with a firm financial package for Beckham, one whose details were scheduled to be examined with the player’s representatives at a meeting in Madrid on Friday.
The offer was going to be much the same as the one he had received on joining Real in 2003, according to club sources. If he stayed, he would be making a lot less than the vast sums he is expected to receive after joining LA Galaxy. Clearly, he has known of this offer for some time. Clearly, then, if Beckham has been stalling for several months over whether to stay in Madrid or go to America, money was not, as he has said, uppermost in his considerations.
What was, as Calderon and other club insiders have let slip in recent months, was whether he would be able to command a regular place in the Real starting line-up under Capello. Beckham’s first prize, his most desired goal, was to make it back into Real’s first XI and then go on to challenge for his first big trophy with the club. If he could achieve these two objectives, he kept saying to himself as the season unfolded, he would like to stay; he would delay his lucrative pre-retirement in the US. But he was kidding himself.
The writing has been on the wall since practically the start of the season. But Beckham, a great optimist by nature, chose not to see it. He also attached a little too much faith to Capello’s understanding of the concept of fair play. The former England captain has spent progressively more time on the bench than on the pitch under Capello. Does this mean his game is on the wane? Not necessarily. He has never been given a sufficient run in the team for us to be able to judge.
The only scientific conclusion we can reach from his exclusion from the side has been Capello’s strategy of playing with six defensive players in the team, in addition to the goalkeeper. Previously, Beckham’s Real had played with six attacking players. In other words, midfield used to be not a second line of defence, but a second line of attack. When Capello changed that, the competition for places in the forward line became 50% more fierce.
Yet as the months passed and Christmas loomed, Real, rather than meeting Capello’s oft-stated guarantee to create a trophy-winning team within 60 days of taking the job, began to play worse and worse. The Italian, the most sergeant-majorish figure in world football, experienced something novel in his 60 years of life: self-doubt. He chopped and changed the team in a continually exploratory, apparently random manner. He seemed lost, irrational (the latest symptom being his announcement yesterday that he would dispense with the services for the rest of the season of a fit, able and willing player). The team was in a rudderless drift.
This may in turn have fed Beckham’s hopes; made him cling to the dream that amid so much uncertainty, he might yet reclaim his place. The purchase of Fernando Gago, a defensive midfielder from Argentina, four days before Christmas may have made the Englishman pause, but still he hoped. After all, if the likes of the mega-star Ronaldo and his compatriot Robinho, reckoned within Brazil to be as good as Ronaldinho, were in and out of the team too, then clearly the dust had not yet settled in Capello’s mind.
Everything was possible. Including, despite the grinding aesthetic poverty of Real’s football, a trophy. The two calamitous pre-and post-Christmas results required urgent action, or at least the appearance of it. For internal political reasons sacking Capello was not on (two Real insiders say that in his heart of hearts Calderon deeply regrets having signed the Italian, as do the vast majority of Real fans), so the players became the targets instead.
How better to convey the required image of order, direction and resolve, and to stiffen Capello’s dwindling authority, than to target the club’s two most high-profile players, Ronaldo and Beckham? And thus it was that last week Beckham understood at last that the future lay not with Real any more; that the Bernabeu no longer held any fun or joy or hope for him.
He will find comfort in the knowledge that the decision to terminate his services was pre- eminently political. He knows this for one simple reason: he and Ronaldo together have played half as many minutes this season as Raul has, and fewer minutes than eight other players in the squad.
To attach the blame for the team’s woes to the two former galacticos is manifestly, in sporting terms, as unjust as it is irrational.
The abject failure of three of the players Capello pleaded with Real to buy — Emerson, Mahamadou Diarra and Fabio Cannavaro — has far more to do with the team’s abominable displays.
As for Raul, he has been possibly the most ineffectual attacking player in Spain this season. But for political reasons, because he is Real’s sacred cow and Capello personally likes him, the former Spain captain stays and the Brazilian and the Englishman go.
Throughout, Beckham has been his usual ambassadorially polite self. One day when his career is over and he settles down to compose his memoirs, — the real ones, shorn of that customary blandness of his — he will reflect on his last months in football’s top flight with a sense of bitter betrayal. And if he doesn’t, he will simply be kidding himself again.
