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David Beckham was a footballer. That’s one thing the new Netflix documentary seems keen to point out. David Beckham played football, and he was good at playing football. There was some other stuff happening in the background, but if you’re going to take one thing away from the upcoming four-part documentary Beckham: football.
It would ordinarily be a little odd that a sports documentary about a footballer would have to convince you of his worth as a footballer. Usually it’s the other way round, and the documentary maker would spend multiple episodes trying to convince you that, say, the footballer Nicolas Anelka actually contains multitudes and stands for all sorts of things which aren’t football. But this is David Beckham. He is a fashion icon, an all-purpose sprinkler of stardust on British public occasions from the Olympics to The Queue, a poster boy for the power of a radical haircut, and many more things besides.
Beckham is directed by Fisher Stevens, who you’ll know as the oily Hugo from Succession, and from its trailer, it appears to do a lot of the things these documentaries tend to do: the home videos of the subject booting a ball around as a kid, a clip from when they made their debut as a fresh-faced teen, a section where paparazzi bulbs strobe to imply their growing fame, a hint at some new revelations from familiar moments. According to Netflix, it will feature “unprecedented access to David, his wife Victoria, his family, his friends and his team-mates”. Charting his ups and downs, from humble beginning to worldwide fame, it will be “an intimate portrait of a man as well as a chronicle of late-modern sports and celebrity culture.”
There’s some very cute, unguarded images here too: Victoria filming the crowd at Old Trafford with a cutting-edge camcorder with one of those flip-out screens and apparently having a right giggle doing it, for instance. And there’s a little more dramatic irony than we’re used to in sports docs too.
“It definitely didn’t change me,” Beckham says of his burgeoning fame. Then there’s Sir Alex Ferguson. “It changed him, no doubt about that,” says Ferguson.
But more than anything, it feels like a very clear restatement that David Beckham was a footballer, and a footballer who was very good and worked hard. The fame and Victoria and the red card against Argentina and the flounce to Real Madrid creep in and disrupt that, but that’s the main trunk of it.
For a long time, ideas of Beckham’s worth as a footballer were kind of fluid: the fame was such a vast thing to try and get around, and for all that you might admire his right foot and his passing, someone would always be there to point out that he wasn’t particularly quick, didn’t have a particularly good left foot, or wasn’t that good in the air. It looks like Beckham will try to pare some of that away and restate his fundamental charms: that he was a good-looking, hard-working guy who arrived in football just as it was morphing from a sport into a glamorous pop cultural event, and skilfully stepped straight from the changing room to the green room.
Beckham is on Netflix from 4 October
