For an Englishman abroad, living away from his family in a foreign city and faced with an uncertain future, the arrival in town of his favourite football team might be just about the perfect distraction. But when the Englishman in question is David Beckham and the team are Manchester United, gearing up for their encounter with Inter Milan in the Champions League at the San Siro tomorrow evening, a nostalgic trip down memory lane might not be altogether welcome.

It is almost six years since Beckham left United to join the circus that is the modern-day Real Madrid and while his bank balance and his celebrity have continued to soar over that period, his fortunes as a footballer have not. While his peers, Ryan Giggs, Gary Neville and Paul Scholes, have gone on to cement their place in Old Trafford legend, their respective medal collections resembling an Aladdin’s Cave, Beckham has added only a solitary La Liga title and a Supercopa de España, the Spanish equivalent of the Community Shield, to the honours he won with United.

While those three United players attempt to secure the footballing immortality that would move closer with another Premier League and Champions League title, Beckham is enduring a strange kind of limbo between his chosen path in Major League Soccer (MLS) and the desperate hope of a resurrection with AC Milan.

The likelihood remains that Beckham will somehow get his way over his attempt to turn his loan move with Milan into a permanent transfer, if only because he tends to get what he wants. But just suppose that neither Milan nor the Los Angeles Galaxy blink in their transfer negotiations. The Galaxy and MLS have rightly taken umbrage at an offer of about £2 million for a player whose commercial value to the league is vast. Milan, for their part, are entitled to balk at a £10 million valuation for a player who will be 34 in May, who is near the end of his shelf-life as a footballer and who, even if he is available on a free transfer later this year, might not be a prudent signing for a club intent on rejuvenating an ageing squad.

The more you look at Beckham’s situation, the more it becomes clear that he has far more to gain from staying in Italy, as he looks to prolong his England career. As such, it seems fair to wonder how much he would be willing to sacrifice in a financial sense to get his wish if the impasse drags on. If, as he seems to fear, returning to MLS would spell the end of his England career, is he willing to buy himself out of the highly lucrative contract that he signed in January 2007, the contract that took him out of the realms of football and sent him to Hollywood, where him and his wife could hang out with Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, where once he was content with the Neville brothers?

The Beckham camp likes to paint Steve McClaren as the villain in this particular piece, for hastening the move across the Atlantic by saying, incorrectly as it turned out, that he would not reconsider our hero for England. A personal view is that Beckham lost ultimate control of his destiny as a footballer the day that he started to involve Simon Fuller, the man behind the Spice Girls and the Pop Idol phenomenon, in his career choices.

Fuller knows the entertainment industry inside out, but football? Here are some choice quotes from an interview he did with The Times in July 2007, when Beckham’s MLS career was beginning amid such high hopes: “We [yes we] could have stayed at Real Madrid and done another three years, but David has already won everything in club football in Europe. So he wins another league title. So what?” “Really, what is the worst that can happen for David’s career?” The worst that could happen for Beckham’s career was that he would flop so badly in MLS that he would end up desperate to move back to Europe.

As it transpires, the worst has happened, but not at the expense of his England career, which, remarkably, has been revived since his move to the United States. That is testament to Beckham’s unwillingness to give up, which remains his most endearing quality, and his desperation to prove that, no matter what dreams are painted for him by men such as Fuller, he remains a footballer at heart.

In many ways, though, the chasm between the values placed on Beckham the icon, by MLS, and on Beckham the player, by Milan, offers the perfect microcosm of a splintered career. Nobody can question Beckham’s dedication to football without being told that he is the model professional and that he has won 108 caps for England, one of which featured a career-defining performance against Greece, his stoppage-time free kick the reward for hours of practice.

But there is dedication to your art and then there is total dedication of the type that has kept Giggs, Neville and Scholes at the top of the game for so long. That is why Sir Alex Ferguson adores the trio, describing them as “the spirit of Manchester United”, and why he was prepared to wash his hands of Beckham when their relationship hit the rocks in 2003.

Ferguson knew that, whatever the player’s professionalism, there would always be another side to Beckham, with men such as Fuller calling the shots. That other side has made Beckham rich beyond his former team-mates’ wildest dreams, but would Giggs, Neville and Scholes swap their medals for the life and the wealth he has built for himself? Not a chance.

And another thing…