15 key revelations from the David Beckham documentary
Never before has the world been permitted an inside look at one of the most photographed couples in the world. The Beckhams — aka UK royalty, tabloid sensations, and a marketing goldmine — have been in the spotlight for nearly three decades. For the first time, they are sharing their side of the story.
Directed by Fisher Stevens, the four-part limited series largely follows David’s illustrious football career, while also lifting the lid on his 24-year marriage to the former Spice Girl. Best of all, it leaves no stone unturned — from that infamous World Cup semi-final red card to the infidelity rumours that have plagued the couple’s relationship.
Ahead of its Netflix worldwide release today (October 4), here are the 15 surprising revelations from the four-part series.
Addressing those Rebecca Loos infidelity rumours
In the final episode of the four-part series, Victoria finally addresses the affair rumours that surfaced in 2003. “100 per cent,” she confessed when asked if it was the hardest time in their marriage. “It was the hardest period for us. Because it felt like the world was against us.”
David’s personal assistant Rebecca Loos first made the allegations to the now-defunct News Of The World newspaper. She claimed that the two had had a four-month affair when the footballer first moved over to the Spanish club, which David vehemently denied.
“When I first moved to Spain, it was difficult because I had been part of a club and a family for my whole career, from the age of 15 to when I was 27. I get sold overnight, the next minute I’m in a city, I don’t speak the language. More importantly, I didn’t have my family,” David explained. “Every time that we woke up we felt there was something else... we both felt at the time that we were not losing each other but drowning.”
“I don’t know how we got through it, in all honesty,” the Inter Miami owner added. “Victoria is everything to me, to see her hurt was incredibly difficult, but we’re fighters and at that time we needed to fight for each other, we needed to fight for our family.” He continued: “And what we had was worth fighting for.”
Victoria resented David for having to leave the UK
In response to the crisis, the pair decided that Victoria should relocate to Madrid, although this wasn’t a decision taken lightly. “As soon as I could get the kids in school, we then move full-time. Did I resent David? If I am being totally honest, yes I did. It was probably, if I’m being honest, the most unhappy I have ever been in my life. It wasn’t that I felt unheard because I chose to internalise a lot of it because I was always mindful of a focus that he needed.”
The designer also confessed that Spanish football fans perceived her as “the villain” because she delayed moving to Madrid, which she insisted was because she wanted to find suitable schools for their sons Brooklyn and Romeo first.
How they first met
David recalls seeing Posh Spice on television. “I turned round to Gary [Neville] and I said, ‘See that one there, I’m gonna marry that one’. And kind of when you know we’re laughing and joking, I’m like, ‘No, I’m gonna marry that one. The posh one in the black dress’.”
The pair met in 1997 at a charity football match, when he was a 21-year-old Manchester United player, and she was one-fifth of the world’s most famous girl band. “I just fancied her,” David continued. “There’s just no other way to put it.”
The second time they met — this time at one of his games — Victoria wrote her phone number down on a plane ticket and told David “you better call me”.
She explained: “The fact I went to the games really was to — some might say I stalked him, I would say see him,” the fashion designer said of their early beginnings. “When I saw him in the footballers’ lounge, all the other footballers were at the bar, and he was standing and talking to his parents, and I’m very close to my family, and I loved that side to him.”
Meanwhile, her 48-year-old former footballer spouse added, “There was something there just straightaway. It was just like, OK, this is it, and it’s going to move fast.”
First kiss in a carpark
Not everyone was happy about their blossoming relationship, particularly manager Sir Alex Ferguson. “He wanted me married to a local girl who wasn’t a superstar,” Beckham said. Likewise, Victoria’s manager also told her to “keep it under wraps” and advised them not to be photographed together.
This meant they spent a lot of their early relationship meeting up in carparks, and even had their first kiss while parked in his BMW.
The extraordinary lengths David would go to to see Victoria
“He was on the phone to Victoria every second. He would stay on the phone until one in the morning,” revealed former teammate Neville about their early courtship. “It was like an addict. He’d drive four hours to spend 20 minutes with her.”
Ex-teammate Paul Scholes added: “We knew David was p***ing the manager [Alex Ferguson] off. I think he was probably going down to London at times when he possibly shouldn’t have been. And the manager wouldn’t have liked that.”
Later on in the documentary, Victoria also revealed he once chartered a tiny two-seater plane to visit her whilst on tour for a few hours.
On how he spent his first pay cheques
With a net worth of £425 million, Beckham is no stranger to cash. However, he recalls being a Cockney working-class boy who first started earning serious money. “My first contract with Adidas was £50,000 and, soon after, I bought an M3 for £50,000.”
Neville added: “He’d get his salary on a Friday, spend it all on Saturday, and wait for a week until his next pay cheque to buy the matching jacket to a pair of jeans he’d already bought.”
Victoria told David she was pregnant the night before red-card incident
It’s perhaps the darkest moment of David’s football career — it was certainly the most controversial. When the young sporting star received a red card in the 1998 World Cup against Argentina, it evoked nationwide outrage for months afterwards and is still a sore spot for the 48-year-old.
Looking back at the fateful kick towards Diego Simeone that resulted in him being sent off, Beckham revealed that he had received a life-changing piece of news the night before.
“Victoria phoned me and told me she was pregnant,” he said, adding that he, “could not have been happier”. At the time, they had been apart for more than seven weeks — with the Spice Girls on a world tour during the World Cup. “It’s the first thing I wanted to do. Get out there and see Victoria,” he explained on hearing the news.
When asked if Victoria thought it was the right thing to do, to tell him the night before the biggest game of his life that she was pregnant, she said: “I don’t know. I didn’t think about it, I just wanted to tell him.”
Upon returning home, he told his dad, Ted Beckham, who replied: “Oh blimey, you couldn’t have picked a worse time.”
The abuse he received afterwards made him ‘clinically depressed’
After the incident, both the media and public turned on Beckham. One particularly harrowing moment even saw a pub hang an effigy of Beckham outside, before it was taken down by police.
“He was absolutely broken. He was in pieces. He was really depressed, absolutely clinically depressed. It pained me so much, I still want to kill these people,” says Victoria.
"I don’t think I have ever talked about it, just because I can’t. I find it hard to talk through what I went through because it was so extreme,” disclosed David, who explained that, “Wherever I went, I got abused every single day.
“To walk down the street and to see people look at you in a certain way, spit at you, abuse you, come up to your face and say some of the things they said, that is difficult. I wasn’t eating, I wasn’t sleeping. I was a mess. I didn’t know what to do.”
They were so scared of kidnap threats David slept against the hospital door
In March 1999, their first son Brooklyn was born in London’s Portland Hospital. The footballer was still at the centre of a storm of abuse following his World Cup red card.
“The moment he came out, I all of sudden thought, ‘How am I going to protect him?’. That night, Brooklyn slept next to Victoria. Victoria was like, ‘Come on, squeeze on the bed with me,’ and I was like, ‘Absolutely not, I’m sleeping with my head against the door’. Because I was paranoid that someone was gonna steal him.”
“It’s meant to be a happy moment. And it was a happy moment, of course. But I was worried. I didn’t want him to come into this life, at a time where I was going through what I was going through.”
Victoria added: “We were getting kidnapping threats, right from when we had Brooklyn. I mean, you can’t even explain how that feels, because we couldn’t hide.”
David has some strange but wholesome hobbies...
The first episode opens with a candid segment of the Beckhams at home, specifically in the garden where David keeps his bees. He reveals that he’s been learning to make honey, which Victoria wants him to call “DB Sticky Stuff”. When asked if he has any other unexpected hobbies, David replies: “Lego”.
...and some unusual pet hates
“I can’t stand smoke around the side of a candle. Every night before bed I’ll go around every candle, cut the wick, and make sure it’s clean.”
They don’t regret the purple wedding dresses…
… but David wasn’t totally sure exactly what they were thinking. “I think I just took Victoria’s lead on it but what were we thinking?!”
“It was fun!” interjected Posh, who added: “We weren’t worried about what people were going to say. I mean, Christ, how lovely to be that way when you just don’t really care, you just want to express yourselves.” Though she did confess, “I don’t know where the thrones came from.”
Gary Neville’s rude best man speech
“David said the Spice Girls requested the Bayern Munich team be present today and David was puzzled at this request and asked why. The Spice Girls replied that they’d like to meet any men who could stay on top for 90 minutes and still come second!”
Victoria was ‘p***ed’ David nearly missed son Cruz’s birth
In 2005, the couple welcomed their third son, Cruz. At the time, the Real Madrid footballer had fully embraced the world of celebrity — sometimes to his family’s neglect. One of the most pertinent examples of this was when David nearly missed the birth of his third son because he accepted a photoshoot alongside pop star Jennifer Lopez.
“I was like, ‘Seriously, I’m about to burst, I’m on bed rest. Are you kidding me?! You’ve got a damn photo shoot with Jennifer Lopez who is gorgeous and not about to have a baby,’” Victoria explained. Although he made it to Madrid’s Hospital Ruber International for the big moment, the headlines all criticised his decision.
The fashion designer elaborated, “So I had my C-section and I remember lying there, I don’t feel at my most gorgeous, let’s just say, and I remember someone showing me the front page of the newspaper, which was a gorgeous picture of David between Jennifer Lopez and Beyoncé, and the headline was, ‘What would Posh say?’
“Let me tell you what Posh would say. Posh was p***ed off!”
