Peanuts. That was the word that sprang to the mind of Jose Angel Sanchez, the director of marketing at Real Madrid. He had clinched the purchase of David Beckham for a shockingly low sum. For peanuts. No word in his own language, Spanish, expressed with more biting economy his stupefaction at Manchester United’s decision to surrender their most precious jewel so lamely.
Sanchez could not believe his ears when Peter Kenyon, Manchester United’s chief executive, named his price: ¤35m (£24m). It was as if United had failed to realise what they, the pioneers of merchandising and global sponsorship in the modern game, ought to have understood better than anybody. As if they had calculated Beckham’s worth in terms merely of the market rate for a footballer of his abilities, failing to add into the mix his value as the most resounding brand name in world sport.
Sanchez, a big man bursting with entrepreneurial ideas, wanted to shout for joy. But he could not. It was important now that he restrain his natural exuberance. Kenyon was sitting across a table from him, over lunch at a restaurant in Sardinia. Sanchez had flown in that morning from Madrid in the expectation of a long, hard slog, a tough day’s bargaining. The surprise at the way things turned out only heightened his euphoria. But he had to keep himself in check, to try to preserve a poker player’s composure. He couldn’t blurt out, “Yes! Yes! I’ll take him! Yes! Thank you. Thank you!” Besides, he hadn’t spoken to his boss yet, to Madrid’s formidable president, Florentino Perez. He wasn’t authorised to agree the deal on his own. Perez had the last word.
So, with a heroic effort of will, Sanchez merely nodded in acknowledgment of Kenyon’s proposal, battling to ignore the fireworks going off inside his head. Then, cool as could be, he began to argue some of the finer points of a potential deal. How much money would Real pay up front? How much would be contingent on Real winning trophies with Beckham in the side? Kenyon proposed a ¤30m/¤5m breakdown. Sanchez said how about a bit less up front. After an hour Kenyon — to Sanchez’s further surprise — relented, settling for ¤25m down and ¤10m more if Real and Beckham won every trophy under the sun together. It was now four o’clock in the afternoon. Sanchez got up, left the table and phoned Perez.
“Peanuts, they’re asking peanuts!” he cried, this time translating the word into the Spanish cacahuetes, in case el presidente missed the point. But el presidente did miss the point. Or feigned to do so.
“Is that what you went to Sardinia for? You’ve got to be kidding!” Perez said.
“What?” replied Sanchez.
“I mean push them lower,” Perez said. For the one and only time since he’d worked for Perez, Sanchez lost his temper with his boss. The effort to contain his emotions in these past few euphoric minutes had been too great. Now he let go. “What are you talking about, ‘Push them lower’? Don’t you see what we’ve got here, for Christ’s sake?” Perez did see. He understood better than anybody the value of the Beckham brand. Buying Beckham had been his idea. As it had been to buy Luis Figo, Zinedine Zidane and Ronaldo. Perez was a Spanish Medici, a lavish patron of the football arts resolved to assemble at the Bernabeu a contemporary collection to rival in their way the old masterpieces on display a couple of kilometres down the Paseo de la Castellana at Madrid’s Prado Museum. But as well as patron, fan and president of Real Madrid, he was a businessman, a tycoon who had made a fortune in the construction business, and his instinct, now that he smelt blood, was to keep squeezing. He would have responded the same way had Sanchez informed him that United had agreed to let Beckham go for ¤20m, for ¤10m.
This time, though, Sanchez felt that Perez was letting instinct get the better of his judgment. Okay, so maybe they’d knock Manchester United down a million euros if they kept at it; but maybe, too, they’d lose their man. And that was a prospect too ghastly to contemplate. Having invested so much mental and emotional energy in an enterprise that had become the consuming obsession of Sanchez’s life, which Perez himself had identified as crucial to his strategic vision for Real Madrid, it would be sheer madness to risk scuppering everything now for a few euros more. Beckham was on offer for less money than Perez had paid for the other three superstars — the so-called galacticos — whom he had acquired since being elected club president in the summer of 2000. A lot less money. Figo had cost ¤60m from Barcelona. Zidane had cost ¤75m from Juventus. Ronaldo had cost ¤45m from Internazionale. And now here was Sanchez telling him that Manchester United were letting Beckham go for a fixed price of ¤25m plus ¤10m more, conditional on how many trophies Real Madrid won with him on the team.
The final amount that Madrid would have to pay out, Sanchez estimated, would be about ¤32m. Which, in purely football terms, may have been a fair reflection of his worth compared to Zidane, Figo and Ronaldo, winners between them of six of the previous seven World Footballer of the Year awards. But if you factored in what Beckham would do for the club’s bank balance, the income he would bring in from sponsorships — with or without a ball at his feet — it was the football bargain of all time. Mind- bogglingly, the price United were asking placed the sale of the global icon outside the top 15 most expensive transfers in the world up to that point.
Never mind that football was humanity’s great unifying religion. Never mind that Beckham was one of the idols of the world game. Beyond that, beyond everything, he had become possibly the most famous man alive. Who else was there? The Pope? Maybe, although John Paul II cuts less of a figure than Beckham in the Muslim world. The president of the United States? Perhaps, but his identity would have been less well-known in large swathes of the Third World, and his popularity significantly lower everywhere outside the United States.
As for pop stars — Britney Spears, Michael Jackson, Madonna — or Hollywood actors — Julia Roberts, Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise — none reached an audience as deep and as wide. Household names they might have been in London, Paris or New York, but Beckham played on a bigger stage and his fame had spread — with the exception of parts of the US — to every corner of the planet. What couldn’t you sell, with Beckham on your team? “Okay,” Perez asked Sanchez. “So how much is Beckham worth to you?” “Five hundred million euros,” Sanchez shot back. Perez pondered that for a moment. A ratio of one to 15. A 1,500% return on his investment. Sanchez might have been exaggerating; but maybe he wasn’t. Beckham, as Sanchez would say, was an industry.
Beckham, the richest footballer alive (Zidane and Ronaldo were the next richest), was a one-man global brand whose full money-making potential had yet to be fully tapped. Especially in the great booming market of the world, Asia, which was in the grip of football mania, especially Beckham-mania.
