With the standards set by the club and the demands made by the manager, you could never say you were in a comfort zone at Manchester United. But for fifteen years Old Trafford had been home for me, as a footballer at least. I knew how things worked, knew everybody I’d be likely to run into from day to day and understood exactly what was expected of me. Now, almost without my feet touching the ground, I’d been whisked off to a new club in a new country and didn’t really have a clue what was coming next. I was bracing myself for the challenge: unfamiliar surroundings, a different language and another way of life. Football’s football wherever you’re playing it, of course, but I was pretty sure that training at Real and the demands of La Liga would be very different to what I’d grown used to back home. How much of what I’d learnt so far, as a player and as a person, was going to be of any use to me here?
It didn’t help matters that I’d had some of the Spanish paper talk translated for me. Although I got the feeling that, in England, people genuinely wanted me to do well, some of the pundits here were saying that Florentino Perez had just signed me to help the club shift replica shirts. I’m confident in my own ability but, that summer morning at the training ground, there was a little twist in the pit of my stomach: it felt as though, whether I liked it or not, I’d arrived in Madrid with something to prove. For a start, I had the prospect of lining up alongside the galacticos to contend with.
‘Hola, David. How are you?’
Luis Figo was the first other player to arrive. Handy it was him: his English is spot on. Better than mine sometimes. He sat down next to me, asked if everything was alright and then scribbled his number on a bit of paper for me.
‘Any problems with anything, just give me a call.’
Of course, while we were chatting, I couldn’t help thinking of times I’d seen Luis play; and of the times I’d played against him. His goal from out on the touchline at the Bernebeu in the Champions League the previous season already seemed like something from a lifetime ago, so much had changed in my life since. One of the world’s great players, he was just sitting talking to me, an ordinary bloke trying to make a newcomer feel welcome. Strange: it wasn’t that I was in awe of him or anything, but I felt nervous at first. Maybe I was talking to Figo’s reputation instead of talking to him.
Luis had been the first galactico the President signed for Madrid and I already knew a bit about how controversial that transfer had been. At the time, nobody had been able to believe Senor Perez – or Luis – having the nerve to go through with it. Leaving Barcelona for Real was like leaving United to join Liverpool, only even more trouble: Luis had had to deal with all that and some of it had been pretty bitter. And then he’d had the ability and the strength of mind to live up to a £30-odd million price tag once he got to the Bernebeu.
We sat chatting but, just as I was beginning to let myself relax a little, in walked Zinedine Zidane. Then Raul. Then Ronaldo and Roberto Carlos, laughing and joking, of course. And as each of them said hello, my breath got a little shorter. Blimey, there can’t be many more of them, can there? Before long, the whole squad was in the changing room. And, by then, there wasn’t really room left for my doubts. After all, come what may, I was one of them now at Real.
And, just like at any club, the mickey-taking started from day one. That first morning, before we set off for the Far East, I’d spent an hour trying to work out what I’d need to take with me. Eventually I had three big bags packed and stuffed in the boot of the car, imagining I’d have every eventuality covered. But then I saw all the other players arriving at the training ground with not much more than toilet bags or little wheelie bags. First chance I got, I ducked back outside and started emptying my suitcases: I didn’t want to look like I was going on holiday for a month. I got it down to one small bag, a toilet bag inside another bag and thought I’d saved myself some embarrassment.
In fact, I’d done the opposite. Obviously, I was the one player who wasn’t familiar with the routine. We all got on the plane in our suits and, almost straight away, the other lads started changing into tracksuits and sandals for a very long flight: Where’d all that stuff come from? It turned out that they’d all travelled with at least as much gear as I’d packed and then unpacked in such a rush before we left. But they’d left their cases by the bus to be loaded on at the training ground and checked onto the plane for them. Now, here I was, left with not much more than the clothes I was standing up in. I shouldn’t have been surprised that, instead of sympathy, there were plenty of cracks at my expense while I wandered up and down the aisle trying to borrow a pair of shorts and a t-shirt for the journey. These guys might be big stars but they act like any other footballers I’ve ever known: always ready to give somebody stick.
Thinking back, I think settling in as a player at a new club was made a lot easier for me by us all going away together to China for pre-season training and a couple of exhibition games. Being out there meant I wasn’t coming into work every day and then going home on my own with the rest of my life – and our life as a family – to try and sort out. Getting organised in a place of our own and finding our way around Madrid and into a new life in Spain just had to be put on hold for a couple of weeks. To start with, I was in the company of my new team-mates, on something like neutral territory, twenty-four hours a day.
Instead of being shut away in our own hotel rooms, Real had booked us into a resort made up of little villas. There were five of us together: me, Steve McManaman, Santiago Solari, Esteban Cambiasso and the reserve keeper, Cesar. Stevie left to go back to England with Manchester City soon afterwards and Cambiasso moved on this last summer, but it says a lot about how well I got on with the other lads that they’re the players I’m probably still closest to at Real even now.
As comfortable as I felt around the rest of the squad, I was still pretty nervous when the balls came out and we got down to training. Was it because of what other people might have been saying or was it me feeling a bit unsure of myself? Having been a first-choice player at United and with England didn’t earn me the automatic right to the players’ respect or a place in the team at Real.
I had the chance, away from training, to let people see that I wasn’t what they’d perhaps imagined I was going to be. It was important that the players and staff I worked with saw past the media image of me, found out for themselves that I wasn’t about parties and fashion and shopping. That I was someone who, deep down, just cared about his family, his friends and his football. Once the lads saw me for who I was – I don’t know what their preconceptions might have been – we got along fine pretty much from day one.
I couldn’t say I’d ever felt frustrated by playing most of my career on the right side of midfield for United and England. Even so, I’d had a taste of what playing in the middle could be like – especially in the Champions League Final back in ’99 – and had been hoping for a while that I might get the chance to have a go at a regular place in there. It was in the back of my mind that the move to Real might make that ambition more likely to happen. Carlos Queiroz had mentioned the possibility in interviews after I signed, too. Those first days’ training out in China, though, all I was bothered about was whether I’d get a place in the team at all. I’d been asked in interviews whether I thought moving to Madrid would make me a bigger star. Were they joking?
‘No. I’m going there for the chance to play alongside the stars that are already there. You don’t line up alongside people like Zidane and Ronaldo and Raul and imagine you’re suddenly going to be the centre of attention, do you?’
The truth was that, as far as football went, I was the same as I’d always been. I just wanted to play. And improve by playing – and training – alongside the best in the world. But it took me a few sessions before I started to relax and trust myself in the company of the galacticos. In fact, it needed Carlos Queiroz, in the end, to come up and say to me:
‘Come on, you’ve settled in now. You don’t need to take the easy option. Play your own game. Pl
ay your longer passes.’
He was right. I’d been feeling inhibited, trying to make sure that I didn’t make any silly mistakes. Eric Harrison wasn’t there but he might as well have been: I was definitely holding back on what he used to call the ‘Hollywood’ stuff. I shouldn’t have worried: it wasn’t as if the other players were putting extra pressure on me. The Brazilian lads – Ronaldo and Roberto Carlos – are two of the most laid-back people I’ve ever met. Zinedine Zidane, as a man, is quiet and polite, a normal guy. It’s only once he’s playing that he’s transformed into the most talented, most perfectly balanced, player I’ve ever worked alongside. If anything, I think the rest of the squad were giving me the time I needed to feel comfortable. They weren’t testing me. Just the opposite: they were trying to help me do well.
Carlos Queiroz, of course, speaks very good English. So do some of the players, like Figo and Solari. Even Roberto Carlos has a go, even though I don’t understand a word of it most of the time. I can’t pretend it was easy at first, everything flying round my head in Spanish. I’m still not speaking it as well as I’d like to be. I understand most of what I need to these days, especially in training and in games, but I’ve still got the same problem as I had at the beginning. Every time I picked up on a word and got the drift of what was being said, the person I was trying to talk to would imagine I’d cracked it and fly off into Spanish at a hundred miles an hour. I’d just be left with a smile on my face, nodding:
‘Si, si. Porque non?’
It didn’t seem as if language was going to be a problem, though, when it came to playing football. I found myself enjoying it as soon as I lined up in the white shirt for the first time. We had a couple of games out in the Far East. I got 70 minutes against a Chinese team called Red Dragons in a game that, for me, was all about work rate and doing what I could supporting the rest of the team. Then we played in Japan against FC Tokyo in the pouring rain. I got booked ten minutes in, trying too hard to make an impression. But, after that, it turned into a good night. I scored from a free-kick and we ended up winning 3–0.
Pre-season went as well as I could have hoped. It definitely helped that I already knew Carlos Queiroz and a bit about the way he tried to prepare a team after our time together at Old Trafford. He made it clear what he wanted from me as a player and I was happy that, right from the off, he handed me the responsibility of playing in central midfield. I had one date fixed in my mind the whole time we were out in the Far East: 27 August would be my first game for Real at the Bernebeu. The rest of the squad had welcomed me in and I was grateful for that. But what would the madridistas make of a new boy named Beckham?
We had a friendly against Valencia at the Mestella that didn’t go well for me or the team. Then, in the first leg of the Super Cup – a Spanish version of the Community Shield – we were away to Real Mallorca and just never found a shape or a pattern. Worse for me, Carlos took me off ten minutes into the second half. The next day, I didn’t need to understand the articles to get the drift of the headlines. Basically, people were saying: Is that it? If it is, what’s he doing in Spain?
Maybe it was just as well I had so much on my plate now we were back in Madrid: looking for a house for us all, finding my way around, and getting my first taste of life in a new city. I spent a bit of time in the car those days before the season started. At least it didn’t take me long to get the hang of the Madrid A to Z. In the midst of it all, I didn’t have too much time to dwell on what I knew was being said about me, not that I would have let any of it get in the way of my own determination to do well anyway. I knew by now that my team-mates and the club believed in me, after all.
For the return leg against Mallorca at the Bernebeu a fortnight later, I was aware of what was already at stake. Perhaps they’d only ever seen me play on TV. Now I needed to let Real’s supporters know that I could bring something to their club. That there was more to me than selling shirts. More, even, than getting crosses in and striking decent free-kicks. In my heart, as well, I wanted to make a success of it – in that game and the ones after it – because I wanted people at home in England to be proud of me: not just my friends and family but also fans who I knew would get a kick out of the England captain doing well in La Liga.
Ever since I was a boy, playing until it was too dark to see in Chase Lane Park, I’ve always felt most comfortable – most myself – when I was playing football. Whatever else I had on my mind, wherever I was and whoever I was with, I could just lose myself in a game. Now at Real Madrid, just like at United, I’m aware of how important it is to concentrate on what you’re doing, whether it’s in training or during a game. And I’m lucky, maybe, that I’ve always been able to do that. Dad made sure it was second nature to me. It meant that during the first few months at the Bernebeu, however uncertain things were away from the club, I could clear my mind and throw myself into my football. Maybe I needed to do that more than ever last season. What’s sure is that things couldn’t possibly have gone any better once I got the white shirt on in a home game for the first time.
Everything that had gone wrong in Mallorca seemed to come right at the Bernebeu. Almost from kick-off, you could tell it was going to be our night. Raul and Ronaldo both scored and then, about quarter of an hour from the end, Ronaldo got away down the left wing. I was on my way forward but I was thinking: He’ll not cross it here. He’s bound to cut in and go for goal. He swung it over, though, and I could tell it was going to miss out Guti at the near post. As I jumped, I could see the goalkeeper coming to challenge and just concentrated on keeping my eyes open. It was a fantastic cross. I was in the right place for the ball to hit me on the head and go in, without me having to direct it at all. I could hardly believe it was happening. My first game at the Bernebeu and I’ve just scored my first goal for Real Madrid.
The other players all rushed over towards me. Roberto Carlos hugged me and lifted me up off the ground. I think the rest of the team understood what the moment meant to me every bit as much as I did. The Real crowd had been great with me all night, never mind what doubts I’d had beforehand. My first touch of the game, I chested the ball off to someone in midfield – a simple touch to a team-mate – and the fans were all up on their feet clapping and cheering. It felt like they wanted things to go well for me and the goal towards the end of the game capped it off, for me and for those supporters.
I’d been so unhappy during my last few months at Old Trafford: in and out of the team, in the wars with the gaffer, unsure of what was going to happen to me next. Now, in those few seconds as I celebrated on the pitch with a new set of team-mates who’d already done everything they could to make me feel at home in the Real dressing room, I knew for sure that, by moving to Madrid, I’d done the right thing. This setting, these players and this team: it’s all just what I need.
I thought about that goal after the game: Ronaldo crossing for me to score? That wasn’t in the brochure, was it? Surely I’d come to the Bernebeu to make chances for him. The league season started the following Saturday with us at home to Real Betis. And, two minutes into the game, Ronaldo did it again. This time, he got to the bye line and cut it back. I just had to get there to make sure of a tap in. That was a couple of goals I owed him and the season hadn’t even really started. We went on to win 2–1 and I had a hand in the winner, too. I passed long for Zidane. He crossed. Ronaldo sidefooted the goal.
I couldn’t have dreamt of a better few days, a better start to a career at Real Madrid. I was on a high, the team was on a high. It felt as if, almost overnight, my game had been lifted a level by being with the players around me. I don’t know about the lads, who had all been very positive from the beginning, but the Real crowd and the Spanish media seemed to decide overnight I wasn’t such a bad idea for Senor Perez and the club to have had after all.
If I had to describe myself as a player, I’d put my work rate pretty high on the list of things I will always try to bring to a team. But it was that part of my game that seemed to take people
in Madrid by surprise. I’ve always understood that chasing back and getting tackles in – fighting for the team – are important parts of the game and that supporters want to see players doing it. I’d been brought up with that attitude at United. It wasn’t going to be any different at Real. It made a big difference to me, though, to know it helped get the crowd on my side here in Spain.
It wasn’t just Spanish fans either. I got a real thrill from seeing English people in the stadium for home games as well. The Bernebeu is a dream destination for any football supporter anyway, but I ran into some of those day-trippers and lots of them said they’d come out specially to see me play in the white shirt. It felt almost as if playing in Spain was an extension of me being England captain. I’m very patriotic so anyone who knows me would realise how those fans being in Madrid made me feel. And there was even better to come. At the end of November I was at Buckingham Palace to receive an OBE from the Queen. To be recognised in that way for doing the thing I love best, made the day one of the best of my life. All my family around me, too: I couldn’t have been more proud.
Back in Spain, we were flying: the first month of the new season, Real went unbeaten until we lost to Valencia at the Mestella. It was the best start the club had made in ten years. But maybe there were signs even then, thinking back, which were a glimpse of what was going to happen to us later in the season: losing out to Valencia in La Liga was where it all ended, obviously. I also picked up my first injury, the first of many, in a draw at home to Villareal. The club sold Claude Makelele – a very good defensive midfield player – to Chelsea and we never really replaced him. And, even when we were playing well, we were shipping goals, like we did when we beat Marseille 4–2 in our first home game in the Champions League. That was a scoreline that came back to haunt us in the quarter-finals, wasn’t it?
David Beckham: My Side Page 40