Four Lions

by Colin Shindler

  The point about Beckham is that his audience did not expect him to be able to outwit Ali G and did not think the less of him for being unable to do so. What they admired was his smiling tolerance and his sportsmanship for agreeing to subject himself to exposure and ridicule. It is a smart person who knows his limitations and clearly Beckham is very self-aware. Whether or not it was a policy worked out by his ‘advisers’ or an instinctive feel for what the public demanded from him, he made no attempt to fight back when he was mercilessly ridiculed by Ali G, when abused by the press and the fans after Saint-Etienne, when Ferguson went on the attack, when he was dropped by Fabio Capello at Real Madrid or, just as hurtful and perhaps more surprising, when Steve McClaren, on taking over from Eriksson, told him his England career was over. In the latter two cases he made no complaint but simply worked harder. Eventually he was restored both to the Real Madrid and the England starting line-ups. It betokened an admirable determination and it gave the soap-opera story of his life in football a happy ending. Beckham would go on to extend his England career into the Capello era, eventually breaking Bobby Moore’s record for the most caps for England for an outfield player, although of course, as Glanville pointed out, Moore didn’t win caps for short-lived appearances from the subs’ bench as Beckham did.

  Beckham has long since abandoned his position as a mere footballer, albeit a decent one and captain of his country. His rise to fame was propelled by football but his ability to remain there, indeed positively to increase that already highly visible profile, stems from the self-propelling nature of celebrity. His intrinsic worth should really amount to nothing more than the sum of his many achievements, but the fact remains that that worth is due to the value that his many adoring fans place on it. Lineker is associated with Walkers Crisps as Denis Compton was associated with Brylcreem, but Beckham endorses so many products it would be impossible to associate him instantly with any one of them. Despite this commercial promiscuity, sponsors come back for more because association with Beckham means global, not just national, sales.

  The essence of advertising is to convince people to buy things they don’t need but that they might desire. They don’t need convincing to buy milk or bread but they do need to be persuaded to buy a particular brand – Police sunglasses or Armani underpants, to name two of Beckham’s chosen targets. However, it could be argued that anything can be made into a brand. The England cricket team spent the summer of 2015 desperately trying to convince the public that they were playing a new brand of cricket. Whatever this amorphous use of the word ‘brand’ might mean, it certainly lacked conviction when they were beaten by over 400 runs at Lord’s and by an innings at The Oval, but that didn’t stop the indefatigable image makers and media managers. Almost anything can be made into a brand to be sold and consumed and it is frequently argued that Beckham himself is a brand, which his commercial advisers are only too anxious to encourage and manage. Oliveira reveals that:

  When he was still playing we would never have done an advert for alcohol and we made a decision not to go with fast food or gambling. Once he had finished playing, we looked at the Haig idea because we thought it was interesting. It had been famous but it was rather lying dormant when they came to us and we had the chance to help to revive it. It needed refreshing and transforming and it gave us the opportunity to work with a classic historic British brand. He really enjoyed the creative planning of the campaign, how to build this new strategy. The UNICEF relationship he’s had now for over ten years dates back to his days at Manchester United. It’s the first time in the history of the UN organisation that they’ve created a separate fund because he has seven different projects around the world like changing one country’s water supply; in El Salvador we’re trying to stop violence against children committed by armed gangs; we’re trying to reduce infant mortality and stunting in Papua New Guinea. It’s an incredibly ambitious series of projects into which he has thrown his whole being and heart. We want to work on a few things but do things that are truly original and transformational. He’s always been keen to use his power as a force for good.

  All four of the captains whose lives form the kernel of this book became famous because of their talent as players, but what separates them from the other captains of England is that their lives offer particular insights into the changing nature of the society in which they lived. In many ways, Beckham is the most extraordinary of these four men simply because his career coincided with a technological revolution that offered opportunities for a previously undreamt-of level of global commercial exploitation of his looks, celebrity and lifestyle. Billy Wright became a much-liked television executive; Bobby Moore’s attempts to succeed in business failed disastrously, but he bore the sufferings imposed on him by the studied ignorance of the FA and the tragedy of his final illness with all the grace and dignity he had displayed on the field. Over ninety matches, Moore and Wright set the benchmark for what a captain of England should be. Lineker was a smart and clever footballer who captained England in only fifteen games and who rarely had the support of an increasingly paranoid manager. The mistrust that developed between them and the brevity of his time as England skipper militated against his becoming a captain on the level of his two predecessors, particularly since he was surrounded by players who would never have been considered good enough to have played for England in the era of Wright or Moore.

  Beckham played more times for his country than any of the other three and stands fourth in the list of long-serving England captains but, despite having better facilities and better support at his disposal than Wright and Moore, and far better players than those whom Lineker led out, he could not be called a successful captain of England. Given the heightened expectation created by the false concept of the ‘golden generation’, the side he captained underperformed badly. The nation was disappointed but not always surprised at successive tournament disappearances at the quarter-final stage. The football world had changed and only perhaps the readers of the red-top tabloids who dressed up as Spitfire pilots or Crusader knights expected England to be at the top of it. Maybe that was why tabloid editors seemed surprisingly reluctant to let go of the jingoistic prejudices of the age of Billy Wright.

  Before the semi-final of the European Championships of 1996 the Daily Mirror sent an armoured car to the hotel where the German footballers were staying and printed on its front page a photograph of Stuart Pearce and Paul Gascoigne in Second World War helmets underneath the headline ACHTUNG SURRENDER! If they can’t let go of the Second World War, why should other countries not continue to assume that England is still obsessed with it and that the country’s football administrators have not adjusted to the fact that, in the twenty-first century, football does not belong to England and the British Empire?

  In fact, England’s football administrators understand very well that the power in world football has devolved and that it won’t be too long before a country from Africa or Asia wins the World Cup, but still it is forced to confront the consequences of national stereotyping. David Bernstein, a successful and principled chairman of the FA, notes:

  The reaction of foreigners to England and its football team is schizophrenic. When they come to matches at Wembley they love it. They are in awe of Wembley; they are very respectful of England’s football history and so on. The president of the foreign FA always speaks with great respect of England when he is at Wembley. All that history and so on, it’s certainly genuine. However… when you meet them again at a FIFA Congress or whatever it’s an entirely different story. When they’re in that situation there are definitely many countries who regard us as arrogant; certainly the prejudice against England is deep-seated and it’s still there. I am very conscious that the situation requires great diplomacy, you have to be very careful about what you say; you can’t afford to seem pushy or sound in the slightest way arrogant. It’s partly about how the FA was perceived to have behaved in the past but it’s also about England’s status as a former colonial power. The old Africa
n colonies are very sensitive and you have to be aware of that. Malaysia and Sri Lanka are now all part of the new world family of football and they used to be ruled from London but they aren’t now and though the people you meet weren’t necessarily alive then, we are all conscious of that unspoken history. If you speak out in the way I spoke out about Blatter’s unopposed re-election [in 2011] there will be some fairly Anglophobic forces ranged against you. Some people were aghast that anyone could criticise Sepp Blatter. I felt that FIFA was like the old-time Soviet Praesidium. It was all orchestrated on a big scale and beautifully stage-managed. When I stood up and said something unexpected and not particularly welcome it was a big shock to many of those countries.

  Victory over England still appears to give some countries more satisfaction than victory over other countries who do not share England’s imperial history. It is clearly unfair to expect England players in the twenty-first century to be representatives of an imperial policy which started in the seventeenth century, particularly as some of them will undoubtedly have been born into families who emigrated from countries that had once been British colonies. This is just one of the factors that make the relationship between the country and its football team so much more complicated now than it was fifty or sixty years ago, as David Bernstein acknowledges:

  Then the FA looked after the England football team and the FA Cup. Now it’s quite different because of the advent and the strength of the Premier League and its all-powerful domination of English football and, of course, the Champions League. The FA Cup has lost a lot of its attraction. It was inevitable; it would have been almost impossible for it not to have done so with the growth of the other competitions. On the other hand I think there is still a huge desire to support England in the country. I think people are desperate for the England football team to have success, which is why there is so much despair around when it all goes wrong.

  In fact, football was now being regulated not by the FA but by legal bodies such as the Monopolies and Mergers Commission that blocked the BSkyB takeover of Manchester United in 1999. The Office of Fair Trading ruled against price fixing in replica shirts and it was the European Court that decided that the Sky/BBC monopoly over football rights was illegal.

  The hold terrestrial television used to have on the British population has been eradicated by the growth of satellite and cable and the profusion of channels to appeal to every taste. One of the consequences of the diminution of ‘water cooler’ television is that England’s matches in the big tournaments have now become one of the few occasions on which the nation gathers together to watch television at the same time, which is why its response to victory or defeat appears to be unjustifiably magnified in its importance. Football before 1992 appeared on television at strictly controlled and not very frequent intervals. As a consequence a great deal of football history vanished because it was only seen by crowds who went to a particular match on a particular day. By contrast, today some part of every Premier League game appears on television and most of the Football League matches can be found somewhere. Almost any game today can be summoned on to a screen at will. If it can’t be then it’s not history, a view that logically E. H. Carr, who professed no spoken allegiance to any football club, would nevertheless have to agree with.

  Football is part of the national debate. To be ignorant of football is to be ignorant full stop. Everybody has to have an opinion about José Mourinho, everybody has to support a club because it is socially de rigueur to do so. Football-crazy children who could once recite the names of every league ground in England can now, thanks to the constant exposure of the game on Sky Sports, on ESPN, BT Sport or through football computer games, reel off the starting eleven of Valencia or Feyenoord. It is the same mania expressed in a different context. Perhaps more concerning is the fact that no politician can assume a place on the national stage without a ready-made opinion on football prepared by his spin doctor. John Major gave the appearance of a genuine passion for Chelsea, formed in the days of Roy Bentley and Jimmy Greaves. His successor as prime minister, Tony Blair, made an entirely specious claim to have supported Newcastle United and stood on the terraces at St James’ Park to cheer his hero Jackie Milburn – who left the club before little Tony was four years old. Gordon Brown was excused because his support for Raith Rovers aroused bewilderment in England in people who couldn’t find Raith on a map, but David Cameron attracted predictable scorn for temporarily forgetting he was a fervent Aston Villa supporter and announcing he supported West Ham United – until he was publicly reminded of his previous life-long commitment. He was no doubt confused by the similarity of their home strips. Burnley supporters beware.

  Football, or at least the Premier League version of it, is now regarded by politicians as one of Britain’s great industrial success stories, like Lancashire cotton and shipbuilding on the Clyde had been in the nineteenth century. As New Labour rode a wave of unsustainable growth in banking, as house prices escalated to a level far beyond the actual worth of the house, so football became ‘a great product’. It wasn’t a great game with its cheating, spitting, feigning injury, diving in the penalty area and a variety of other disreputable patterns of behaviour which would have surprised and disgusted Billy Wright, but it was, so it was claimed, a great ‘product’. When David Cameron flew to China to persuade the world’s perceived strongest growing economy that Britain was also booming, he took with him, among others, Richard Scudamore of the Premier League as evidence of his country’s new-found ability to produce what the world wished to consume. It was perhaps an unfortunate choice of companion as a few months later the exposure of Scudamore’s emails revealed to public view opinions of a decidedly old-fashioned sexist nature.

  The negative impact of the Premier League on England’s recent performances is too obvious to warrant any questioning of it except by the Premier League itself, which blusters constantly that it does not recognise any causal connection between the national side’s decline and the fact that only 30 per cent of players who start their matches are even eligible to play for England. Most of the owners and most of the managers are no longer English so it is hardly surprising that Premier League clubs have little interest in the health of the England team. They loathe it when their players are called up to play for England because they might return injured and because their energies are expended in the national cause and not in the cause of making foreign-owned clubs, with eyes constantly on the global market, even richer. The success of Manchester City, owned by the private equity company Abu Dhabi United Group for Development and Investment, certainly has an impact on the world standing of Abu Dhabi. The success of the England side has none. Before the recent purchases of Raheem Sterling and Fabian Delph, only one regular member of the Manchester City starting eleven, Joe Hart, was English. The same argument can be applied to most of the top sides in the Premier League with the possible current exception of Tottenham Hotspur.

  There is no doubt that the England football captains have all wished to have been in charge of a successful team but it would be impossible to be unaware of the countervailing pressures on them of the need to perform and succeed at club level. Thirty-eight Premier League matches take up most of every season. England matches are essentially interruptions to the football calendar. Since the reality is that England are unlikely to win either the World Cup or the European Championships in the near future, it is quite understandable that the commitment to the national cause of John Terry, Steven Gerrard and currently Wayne Rooney has been less than total, no matter what words they may deliver for public consumption. Does that make them less patriotic? Has the transition from Wright to Beckham, through Moore and Lineker, been a straightforward diagonal line down the graph of patriotism?

  Fortunately for Beckham and his retinue of advisers he had things to offer his country beyond success on the football field. That makes his story different and it is not yet finished. His publicist Simon Oliveira speculates on what he might achieve in the next ten years:


  He’d love to inspire the current generation of England players to be more patriotic – that’s a huge passion of his. UNICEF and other charity work will still be a huge part of his world. But then there’s the magic stuff – the stuff you don’t expect. Will he get the offer from the FA to manage England? Or Manchester United? Or will he have a successful movie career? He’ll be fifty years old in 2025. I wouldn’t be surprised to find he’s navigating a successful test mission to Outer Space. Nothing should ever be ruled out. Nothing is impossible for David Beckham.

  Bobby Moore might have climbed out of the team hotel window to run off to NASA. He would certainly have found it more fun than another screening of El Dorado in the company of Alf Ramsey. Billy Wright would have shaken his head at the prospect and smiled. He would have been much happier eating fish and chips and talking about football than flying into Outer Space. Gary Lineker would have anchored the studio broadcast of the space flight but he is far too sensible to want to be sitting in a small capsule being propelled into the stratosphere. On the other hand, if they do play football on the moon or on Mars or Jupiter or Saturn, David Beckham will own all the teams and all the broadcasting rights before the next space mission leaves Cape Canaveral. The England football captains have certainly travelled a long way since Billy Wright first read that stop press on the bus journey from the Wolverhampton Wanderers training ground to his digs in Tettenhall.