The Beckham effect

The suicide bombers, young martyrs-in-waiting, told Jaber of their eagerness to blow themselves up and kill as many Israeli civilians as possible. They spoke of their desire to hear Israeli mothers scream. They spoke of the reward that would await them in heaven, the unimaginable beauty of the virgins who would administer those carnal pleasures the sons of the Prophet had been denied on Earth. At which point another of the “fighters” burst into the room. “I have very important news,” he cried. Everybody stopped what they were doing. The al-Aqsa martyrs had been waiting for this messenger. The blessed virgins, the screaming Israeli mothers, the holy Palestinian cause all ceased, for one moment, to be the be-all and end-all of all life, or even death. The whole room hung on the new arrival’s words.

“Manchester United 5,” he declared. “. . .West Ham 3!” The result, from that afternoon’s Premiership action, was greeted with satisfaction. But there was more news, more reason to rejoice. David Beckham scored twice, the bearer of glad tidings said. “Very good, Manchester.” Cries of pleasure filled the underground death chamber. And then a chant arose. “Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar!” — the chant of victory when news arrives of a successful result on an Israeli bus. “God is great!”

How unique a cash-generator was Beckham during his first season at Real Madrid? Jose Angel Sanchez, the club’s director of marketing, struggled to contain his wonder at the power of the brand. He had seen at first hand what the Beckham effect meant, but could not quite believe it. He would just shake his head when I mentioned his name, repeating, “Amazing, amazing!” over and over. “It’s not possible to put precise numbers to it,” Sanchez said, “ but we have a good indicator in shirt sales. Shirt sales do not in themselves constitute such a large slice of our cake, but they offer a faithful index of Beckham’s pull. The season before this one we sold about 900,000 shirts. This season, following Beckham’s arrival, we’ve sold 3m.”

It didn’t mean the extra 2.1m were all Beckham shirts, but the figure was not far off. In business terms, Beckham has been the best investment ever made by a football club. On the pitch, in his first season, April proved the cruellest month for the team — Real were knocked out of the Champions League by Monaco and lost their League title. The plumed galacticos lay writhing on the battlefield, eager to be put out of their misery. Beckham got himself sent off for calling a linesman a son of a whore, and then in the last game of the season, a game in which Beckham did not play because of the red card, and one in which the chance remained to finish runners-up in the League to Valencia, they lost to Real Sociedad and ended up fourth — behind Barcelona. And Real didn’t just lose, they got hammered 4-1, a humiliating conclusion to a sequence of five successive League defeats.

They had fallen apart. Zinedine Zidane could not even do the simple things, misplacing one pass after another; Roberto Carlos lost his zing; Ronaldo looked less like a buffalo than a cow; Beckham was a headless chicken. Only Luis Figo kept battling away, attempting time and again to take on the entire rival team single-handedly.

Humility was not a word you automatically associated with Florentino Perez, the club president, but such had been the force of Real’s fall that he had no choice but to admit that he had erred. The day after the defeat to Real Sociedad, he bought the Argentine central defender Walter Samuel for €25m. If you had told Perez, even two-thirds of the way through the season, that he’d be spending that much on a far-from-charismatic defender whose global brand value was less than zero, he would have laughed in your face.

And yet even as the team suffered, the club’s marketing department pulled off the mother of all results. Sanchez cut a deal with adidas, the likes of which had never been seen in sports sponsorship. He was itching to tell me exactly how much it was worth, but he could not, out of loyalty to adidas, which jealously protected this kind of information for fear of making its other clients jealous. I told him I had seen in the Spanish press a figure of € 168m for eight years. “ Eight years is right,” Sanchez said. “The sum the press mention is laughably below the real figure. What we are talking about here is the biggest sponsorship contract in the history of sport. The benchmark until now has been Manchester United’s deal with Nike. Our deal with adidas is worth double what United got.”

Manchester United got a 13-year deal worth € 450m from Nike. That worked out at € 34m a year. Which meant Real Madrid had clinched a deal worth about € 480m over the eight years of the contract.

Whether, once things began to fall apart for Beckham and Real, relations would continue to remain simpatico, or whether Beckham would be heading back home, was a question that generated almost as many column inches in Britain as the transfer saga that played itself out 12 months earlier. Stories started turning up in the sports pages suggesting that Beckham would be leaving Real for Chelsea. The yarn that acquired the most credibility was that he was happy at Real Madrid and eager to stay, but his wife was demanding he come home; his departure was all the more imminent because Real had fallen out of love with him and would sell him for a sum the British press placed at about the same mark (£24m) they had paid for him.

Peter Kenyon, having sold Beckham to Real a year earlier on Manchester United’s behalf, now wanted him back on Chelsea’s. When I was sitting with Perez, in his office on May 29, an Italian agent called to inform him of what he already knew: that Kenyon and his boss, Roman Abramovich, were on the hunt for some galacticos of their own, and their first choice was Beckham. The agent apparently had a straight line to Kenyon, which was why Perez made a point of spelling out what his conditions would be.

“Tell Chelsea the situation is this,” Perez said down the phone. “If they want Beckham, they must pay his contractual buy-out clause in its entirety. That’s €180m — not a euro less. Not € 179m. Not € 179,999m. € 180m. Second, what they must also do before I will begin to consider letting him go is receive the consent of the player. He must want to leave Real Madrid. Only then would I agree to accept € 180m for him. Otherwise he stays.”

As for Beckham’s own calculations, he understood Chelsea would be a come-down. “David Beckham, Chelsea and England” was one thing, “David Beckham, Real Madrid and England” something else altogether. Were he to have left after just one year in Spain, something told him he would have a hard time one day explaining to his grandchildren why he had done something so weak. Above all, he had unfinished business in Spain. Were he to return home trophyless, those critics of his whose judgment he took so much to heart would have a field day.

Having come to these conclusions, having at last succeeded in persuading his wife to abandon England for Spain, it was understandable that Beckham should have started harbouring fears that it might all go terribly wrong; that perhaps the British newspaper stories might have been right, that perhaps Perez did want to get rid of him. Thus it was that when he approached Perez in the second week of May, he was apprehensive. “I want to be able to issue a statement, Mr President,” he said, “saying I am going to stay at Real, that my wife and family are going to come and live with me in Madrid. Can I say that, or is it true you want to sell me?”

This was the moment of truth. It had taken courage to ask the question, but it needed to be asked to put to rest the agony of uncertainty that gripped him. Perez smiled. Broadly. Warmly. Paternally. “David, listen to me,” he replied, “I would sell the stadium before I sold you.”

The newspapers might choose to dwell on Beckham’s loss of form, but Perez had not forgotten the class he displayed during the first half of the season, or how quickly he won over the Bernabeu. Beckham had repaid Perez’s faith in him once, and he had no doubt that he would do so again.