From The Sunday Times

July 15, 2007

First job: saving the Galaxy
The celebrity work is going to plan but on the pitch David Beckham will face
bigger obstacles
Brian Doogan Los Angeles
At 2.20pm on Friday, more than four hours after confetti cannons and the Def Leppard song
Hello America had announced his arrival, David Beckham completed his final interview of the
day. “I’m coming to one of the largest sporting nations in the world, there isn’t quite the same
interest in football and I want to make a difference,” he told Carrie Brown of Al Jazeera English.
The formula had worked all day.

In addition to the blanket coverage on the sports channel ESPN, Beckham featured on
Entertainment Tonight and headlined on KCAL, the local TV station for general entertainment,
one of more than 700 media outlets that covered his official presentation by LA Galaxy at the
Home Depot Center. “It will be interesting to see how long the spotlight lasts on soccer and what
[Beckham and Galaxy] are able to do with it,” concluded KCAL’s presenter John Ireland as
Beckham walked off the pitch.

His new teammates were just returning from training and were mobbed by the season ticket-
holders still hanging around the stadium. “Is this what the future’s like?” Landon Donovan, the
Galaxy captain, asked as he found breathing space inside the main entrance. “I can’t do this
every day.” He may have to get used to it.

As Beckham drove away in a £44,000 Cadillac Escalade car - “Someone asked me if [the
Escalade and a £55,000 black Bent-ley Cabriolet] were a gift from Tom Cruise but, no, I bought
them myself,” he insisted, smiling and still wearing his smoky grey Burberry suit - his wife,
Victoria, was preparing to make her debut appearance on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. It
went well. “We are neighbours. You’re just a few doors down from me,” Leno pointed out. “Last
night coming home I was stopped by the police on my street. ‘Hold it right there. Where are you
going?’ a cop asked me. I said, ‘I live here. Was there a murder? What happened? Has OJ
[Simpson] been in the neigh-bourhood?’ He said, ‘No, no, nothing like that. The Beckhams are
moving in’. I thought, ‘Okay, I’ll go and get a cup of soup or something’.”

Victoria, whom the LA Times have dubbed “the woman the world can’t stop watching”, took the
banter in her stride and revealed to Leno a diversionary tactic that the couple have used to give
the slip to the paparazzi. “We went to a sex shop and bought a blow-up doll, dressed it up as
me and the paparazzi followed it for a whole day,” she said, laughing.

Her husband did not appear on the show but Leno quipped at his expense: “The Senate
announced today that they have doubled the reward for information which could lead to the
capture of Osama Bin Laden to $50m! It sounds like a lot until you realise that we here in LA
have paid $250m for David Beckham.” Galaxy, of course, consider it money well spent. With
more than 250,000 shirts sold in just two days - a total to which Victoria contributed towards by
spending $583 in the club’s store before she was whisked off for an interview with the LA Times
at the Chateau Marmont hotel in Hollywood - the team have almost recouped the amount they
will spend on Beckham’s wages in the next five years. Tim Leiweke, president of the Anschutz
Entertainment Group which owns Galaxy, has estimated that Beckham’s presence could be
worth up to $1 billion.
“A US Premiere That Already Looks Like a Blockbuster” was the headline in yesterday’s New
York Times, whose correspondent described the glitzy unveiling as “part crusade, part contrived
spectacle, as if it had been jointly produced by Billy Graham and World Wrestling
Entertainment”. Beckham is sure to raise interest in the sport, he wrote, while Victoria’s
entrance “in a fuchsia dress and spiked heels, if nothing else, aerated the turf”. The comparison
was made between what Beckham is attempting to accomplish and the impact Wayne Gretzky
made when he joined the LA Kings ice hockey team in 1988. “There probably wasn’t anybody in
Hollywood you can imagine who wasn’t intrigued by the whole thing,” Bruce McNall, then owner
of the Kings, recalled recently. Yet the lesson of Gretzky’s eight years with the Kings, during
which time he never got his hands on the Stanley Cup, is that his uplifting effect on his sport did
not last. “[Beckham] has his work cut out for him,” the Times’s correspondent suggested,
illustrating its point with a quote by the actor, Richard Chamberlain, who said in a television
interview: “I’m not sure I know who he is.”

In the Boston Globe, under the headline, “The brightest star in the Galaxy”, MLS commissioner
Don Garber insisted that “soccer doesn’t need to be saved. It is an emerging sport and is only
going to continue to grow.” New England Revolution will provide opposition to Galaxy next
month and the Revolution coach, the former Liverpool midfield player Steve Nicol, believes that
Beckham’s arrival is already having an effect. “Our average crowd is between 14,000 and
16,000 but for the game against LA Galaxy on August 12 we’re opening the stadium up to
30,000, maybe a little more, and it should be full,” he said. “Beckham fills stadiums and that’s
what will happen throughout MLS now that he’s in the Galaxy team. People who don’t usually
come to watch football in this country want to come and watch because he’s playing. Certainly,
that’s the reaction in Boston.”

Predictably, most of LA’s local newspapers were effusive in their coverage of Friday’s pomp and
ceremony. The Daily Breeze’s columnist, Steve Dil-beck, wrote about Beckham “the
conglomerate, the pop star” under the headline, “Galaxy in heaven as soccer god appears”.
Dilbeck’s colleague, Billy Witz, described the Beckhams’ commute from their Beverly Hills home
down the notoriously congested 405 freeway in the morning rush hour, “an Angleino ritual”.
Beckham, in fact, had time to stop off for coffee along the route while still arriving at Galaxy’s
stadium half an hour ahead of schedule. He met staff and his new teammates, one of whom
extended his hand, identified himself, looked Beckham straight in the eye and said: “Who are
you?”

Grahame Jones, soccer correspondent for the LA Times, assembled the best of what had been
said throughout the day, which ran beneath the headline, “The wit and wisdom of Beckham”. On
the subject of hype, Beckham maintained that away from it all “I’m a pretty normal person”. His
family, he reiterated, are his biggest priority. “Once I’ve done this in front of all these thousands
of people and in front of the world’s press, I’ll go back home and jump in the pool with my kids,”
he said. “I like to do normal things, like shopping for myself and I drive myself everywhere rather
than-someone drive me.”

He emphasised to Galaxy beat writers that he wants to remain involved with England for as long
as he can, “to Euro 2008 and even the World Cup in 2010”. “I’m very patriotic and this is one of
the things that has always impressed me about Americans,” he said. “Every house seems to fly
the Stars and Stripes. They’re so passionate.”

On fitting into the Galaxy team, with coach Frank Yallop having indicated that he will take up a
central midfield role, Beckham was particularly enthusiastic. “I have no concerns about it and
I’m looking forward to playing in the position,” he said. “The first time I played that position for
Manchester United was in the European Cup final and I played there for probably the first eight
months of my time at Real Madrid when I probably played some of the best football I’ve ever
played in my career.”

On Monday Beckham is scheduled to train for the first time with his new teammates. His wife’s
NBC TV special, Victoria Beckham: Coming To America, will air in the evening but the Galaxy’s
latest recruit will be “focusing on the football”. Last Wednesday in Richmond the team were
knocked out of the US Open Cup, embarrassingly by a side not good enough to compete in
MLS. In their 12 league games this season Galaxy have won three and lost five. “The biggest
challenge will be overcoming the perceptions my teammates have of me as a person and as a
player,” he said. “They’ve read things about me and now they’ve seen the circus but the real
business is about winning games and together that’s what we have to do.”

With Cruise in the crowd and Hollywood beckoning, “Mission Impossible” is not a headline
Beckham will want to read any time soon.

How America reported Beckham’s Galaxy launch

The New York Times Under the headline ‘A US premiere that already looks like a blockbuster’,
it wrote: ‘David Beckham began his soccer career in the United States with a stadium reception
that was part crusade, part contrived spectacle, as if it had been jointly produced by Billy
Graham and World Wrestling Entertainment’

The Tonight Show with Jay Leno The host of the talk show, which on Friday night featured
Victoria Beckham, left, said: ‘The Senate announced today that they have doubled the reward
for information which could lead to the capture of Osama Bin Laden to $50m! It sounds like a lot
until you realise that we here in LA have paid $250m for David Beckham’

Los Angeles Times Beckham’s arrival was splashed over the sports pages (‘Victoria gazed
adoringly at her husband…’) of his new hometown newspaper but he was reduced to a tiny item
on the paper’s front page

Fox Soccer Channel Nick Webster of the Fox Soccer Channel said: ‘This country knows how
to turn something that’s not very interesting into an event ... I’ve covered soccer in this country
for 10 years and I’ve never seen anything close to this’

USA Today The paper hailed Beckham as a ‘soccer saviour’ on Friday but left the story off its
news pages yesterday