David Beckham didn’t give 100 percent effort. Beckham didn’t give it all in training. Beckham was a bad captain. Sell more books. Sell more books. That was the first impression I had of Grant Wahl and his new book about Beckham joining the MLS – he was driving up the controversy.
I do plan on reading The Beckham Experiment but I’m tired of hearing Grant Wahl saying Beckham wasn’t serious about playing for the LA Galaxy. I’m curious about the day to day events of Beckham time in LA, and the impact it had on the players on the team. But, Grant Wahl doesn’t seem like a soccer players journalist. Yes, I understand he wasn’t to get all the details and facts – he’s not trying to paint anyone in a bad light necessarily.
Yet he doesn’t seem like someone who really understands the game of soccer down to how players feel and approach the game. Perhaps Wahl will grow from this experience a bit and see it from Beckham’s side, too. Of course Beckham is making a ton of money but he is taking a risk too in coming to the United States to play in the MLS.
An excerpt From Grant Wahl’s new book about David Beckham coming to the MLS:
After his five-month loan to Italian superclub AC Milan, David Beckham is expected back with the Los Angeles Galaxy and scheduled to play on July 16 against the New York Red Bulls at Giants Stadium. But when he takes the field the mood will be far less giddy than the one that heralded his arrival in the U.S. in 2007. In Beckham’s two years with the Galaxy he has successfully sold jerseys and served as celebrity eye candy, but the soccer story has been an epic disaster, from his injury-plagued season in ’07 through a loss-filled campaign in ’08.
Beckham’s side made sure he became team captain, and later they engaged in a behind-the-scenes takeover of Galaxy management. Yet L.A. failed to reach the MLS playoffs both years. By the end of the ’08 season Beckham was barely speaking to his teammate Landon Donovan, MLS’s leading scorer, who questioned the Englishman’s commitment to the team.
The Beckham Experiment is a story of worlds colliding, bringing together the planet’s most famous athlete with teammates who earned as little as $12,900 a year. But that inequity was only the start of a downward spiral that, on the eve of Beckham’s return, has turned into a soccer fiasco.
The summit meeting took place at Mastro’s, a high-class steak house in Beverly Hills. On July 25, 2007 — three days after their welcome-to-Hollywood party, hosted by Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, and Will and Jada Pinkett Smith — David and Victoria Beckham joined Landon Donovan and his wife, Bianca Kajlich, for a get-to-know-you meal. At the Home Depot Center, 10-foot-high profiles of Beckham and Donovan stared at each other from huge banners. Now, for the first time, the team’s two biggest stars were facing each other across the dinner table.
Nearly anywhere else in the world, Donovan’s achievements would have made him a household name, a fixture on the covers of sports magazines and (considering that his wife starred in the CBS sitcom Rules of Engagement) celebrity rags. As a 20-year-old at the 2002 World Cup he had scored the goal that sealed the most important victory in U.S. men’s soccer history, a 2-0 second-round defeat of arch rival Mexico. Now 25, Donovan had won three MLS titles and been voted the national team’s player of the year a record three times. Yet it was his fate — equal parts fortune and misfortune — to have been born in the U.S. Which is to say that the three dozen paparazzi outside Mastro’s were not there for him.