Forget the emotion, the fashion, the Rebecca Loos response – what stuck with me most after watching Netflix’s David Beckham documentary was the haircuts. As the film-makers trace the footballer’s life and cultural impact through new interviews, archival photographs and footage, one thing that they really impress upon you is the man’s ever-changing barnet.
Throughout his years at the top of English football in the 1990s and 2000s, Beckham variously wore his hair long, blond and angelic; shaved and rugged; with Jamie-from-EastEnders curtains; in a spiky bleached almost-mullet; in a mohican. At one point, there were even some ill-advised cornrows. And whenever the style changed, boys all over the country – including some, as I vividly recall, in my class at school in Birmingham – would follow suit. No matter the style, whatever Beckham was doing with his hair became the male equivalent of “the Rachel”, the much coveted and much-emulated long layers that Jennifer Aniston wore onscreen in her Friends role.
Beckham’s hair is the perfect symbol of the cult of celebrity that surrounded him in his footballing heyday as Manchester United and England’s No 7. A product of pre-internet monoculture, Beckham’s ubiquity was a type of fame we don’t really associate with footballers any more – these days they are athletes first and foremost, not entertainers – and I think on some level that’s a shame. I am, of course, at risk of romanticising a paparazzi and tabloid culture that was even more cruel and invasive than it is now, but you have to admit: even if you didn’t like them, at the turn of the century, English football players made great celebrities.
For his part, Beckham was as much of a showman off the pitch as he was on it. The hair was all part of it: he knew we were looking at him, so he gave us something to look at, and it made him one of the most famous men in the country. But more generally, he was touched by the same stuff that made players such as Wayne Rooney, Rio Ferdinand, Ashley Cole, and,of course, the godfather of them all, Paul Gascoigne, such lightning-rod figures.
Like many of today’s best English players, these men came from very “ordinary” backgrounds; but while footballers in 2023 recognise their social position as role models (and, as such, sweetly and dutifully take part in “time to talk” social media campaigns with Nike or Nando’s or whoever), 20 years ago these responsibilities weren’t even really part of the conversation. As such, there was a “just like us”-ism about football stars that reflected England back at itself. They showed us what we ourselves might do if we were young, gifted and richer than God.
We were and are, after all, a country of high street club nights called things like “MOIST Wednesdays at Liquid” (three Jägerbombs for £10, four if you flirt with the barman); of cheesy chips with mayo; of falling asleep drunk in kebab shops; of walks of shame in 5in heels on a Sunday morning. There was a time when footballers fell into line with the rest of us, pictured as they were falling out of nightclubs at all hours. As Premier League football has evolved since the reign of Beckham and his peers, however, a superficial but nonetheless enjoyable level of relatability has been lost.
Over the last couple of decades, some standards of conduct have (outwardly at least) been raised, football clubs’ PR and legal teams have been tightened up (so that even when messy behaviour happens, the public doesn’t often hear about it), and crucially, demands on players to perform at ever more elite levels of athleticism have grown.
It was this last change in particular that tickled me a few months ago when I visited The World of Gazza, an exhibition chronicling the life and times of Gascoigne at north London’s OOF Gallery. Amid all the Gazza-related ephemera, pinned on one wall was a list sent to a hotel housing Tottenham Hotspur’s first team ahead of a game against Sheffield United in April 1992. On it, each Tottenham player’s food requirements were recorded next to his name. The banality of the dishes – “plain omelette and beans”, “fish in breadcrumbs”, “roast chicken” – delighted me, just because they felt so distant from the Pro-Performance Power Up High Protein meals I’d automatically associate with today’s top-flight players (Gazza went for “lasagne + cornflakes”; Gary Lineker for “spaghetti bolognese”).
These days, footballers (including Beckham himself, as the Netflix series proves) feel sanitised by the sheen of contemporary British celebrity culture, dominated as it is by influencer-esque branding and a rigid control of “messaging”. And while this is a much healthier climate for players who, in public at least, demonstrate better examples for young fans, it does make footballers as cultural figures quite a lot more boring, their ostentatiousness in gameplay no longer matched by their profiles, even where seemingly minor things – like the personal style that was so important to Beckham’s brand – are concerned.
Thankfully, there is one man who bridges the gap between the best of what I will term “the Beckham era” and the present. Jack Grealish – kind to children, but also lusted after en masse and so hungover after Manchester City won the treble at the end of last season that photos of him having to be held upright by two grown men circulated online – the mantle falls to you.
Lauren O’Neill is a culture writer
