LONDON, 17 June 2003 — Over the past few weeks the seemingly impossible has happened: The British media’s obsession with David Beckham, already extreme, has become even more extreme. With speculation raging as to whether Manchester United is about to sell its most famous player to a leading Spanish or Italian club, public fascination with Beckham and the minutiae of his existence has assumed pathological proportions. Does Beckham’s soccer prowess even begin to justify this hysteria? There are respected football commentators in whose opinion Beckham’s reputation is all about hype, and it’s true that the unassuming 28-year-old Londoner is hardly among the truly great footballers, an undeniable maestro of the caliber of Pele or Johan Cruyff. In some respects indeed Beckham is a player of conspicuous limitations; the basic skill of dribbling a football, for instance, barely features in his game.

Still, it seems perverse to suggest that the Beckham cult, however overblown, has nothing to do with talent. For what Beckham does well he does prodigiously well. Who has not marveled at his ability to bend a free kick round a wall of defenders, beyond the reach of the stranded goalkeeper and into the back of the net? Moments of high drama, such kicks have become Beckham’s trademark, his unique selling point.

Beckham’s fabled flair as a player of the dead ball has even been commemorated by the film industry. For his legions of British fans, the very title of last year’s comic movie Bend it like Beckham — which revolves around the efforts of a west London Asian girl to emulate Beckham’s virtuosity — constituted a powerful recommendation in itself. A big hit in Britain (it has grossed in excess of 7 million pounds at the British box office), the film has recently been winning unexpected acclaim in the United States, in the process stimulating trans-Atlantic interest in the sportsman who inspired it.

Thanks to the film’s success, Beckham may yet become something of a celebrity in America, a country where Manchester United are about to undertake a promotional tour but where football as the rest of the world knows it has yet to make much impression.

Beckham is not the first British footballer with whom the media has developed a fixation. Never before, though, has there been anything quite like this. His marriage to a British pop star, his taste for the latest fashions and his photogenic looks have all contributed to Beckham’s status as a contemporary icon who is also a monumentally prestigious business property and much-coveted marketing tool. One of the most lavishly rewarded footballers in the world (he receives 100, 000 pounds a week from Manchester United), he has for some time been earning far more money off the football pitch than on it — from mind-bogglingly lucrative business deals based on the merchandising power of his image. To manufacturers of soft drinks, mobile phones and much else, the value of Beckham’s product-endorsement is inestimable.

It is because of all this that Beckham has fallen foul of his sometime mentor, Manchester United’s formidable Scottish Manager Alex Ferguson. Full of puritanical contempt for the “effeminate” clothes and hair styles his protégé likes to affect, Ferguson believes that playing for Manchester United has ceased to be Beckham’s chief priority, and that these days he puts rather more effort into playing for England than into playing for his own club. Relations between the pair deteriorated catastrophically after an incident in which the hot-tempered Ferguson, enraged by a lacklustre Manchester United performance, kicked a football boot across the dressing room which caught Beckham on the side of the head; the following day photographs of the nasty cut Beckham sustained were provocatively splashed all over British newspapers. Accident though it may have been, the incident inevitably did serious damage to a “father-son” relationship begun when Beckham was still a boy.

Ferguson perhaps deserves a degree of sympathy: Managing a multi-millionaire superstar is bound to be a tricky business — even when you happen to be a multi-millionaire yourself. But if Ferguson is repelled by Beckham’s ever burgeoning celebrity, he is only too ready to turn it to his own advantage. The eagerness of the Manchester United manager and his colleagues to find a foreign buyer for him springs from their anxiety to realize Beckham’s maximum potential as a commercial asset before the player’s contract expires in two years’ time. Reportedly, Beckham is indignant that Manchester United are treating him “like a piece of meat.” It is all a matter of what is being called “Beckhanomics,” and he will scarcely cease to be exploited as a marketable commodity should he find himself playing for Barcelona and Real Madrid in the near future. Whichever club signs him up will be seeking to capitalize on his name and image in order to further their business interests in the Far East where Beckham is an object of widespread veneration; likewise bent on breaking into the Far Eastern market for European football, Manchester United would probably have been loath to lose his services — but for the souring of Beckhams’s relations with the club’s manager.

Many feel that Beckham is now too famous for his own good, and perhaps Beckham himself is among them. The other month when his fellow England players were training at La Manga in Spain, Beckham and his family were going to be billeted in their own separate quarters because of a kidnap threat (subsequently exposed as bogus). The plan was that the Beckhams would stay in a villa of their own, protected by bodyguards. In the event — because he had been suspended and was in any case ineligible to take part in England’s forthcoming match — the plan was aborted. But the episode illustrated the difficulty Beckham’s managers face in treating him as simply another player. It also illustrated just how impossible it has become for David Beckham to lead anything approximating to a normal life. Not for nothing has his closely guarded mansion near London been nicknamed “Beckingham Palace.”

He and his wife and two small children (the clean-living Beckham is esteemed as an exemplary father) have become the British people’s choice as a sort of unofficial royal family. Indeed, in this endlessly publicized super-rich footballer and his endlessly publicized super-rich pop singer wife, with their shared taste for shopping, many Britons see the embodiments of their dreams.