Beckham’s status as national labrador has gone to the dogs

Is it finally curtains for football’s golden boy, David Beckham? The man who could hitherto do no wrong; whose general demeanour is sugary sweet but also achingly bland whose personality is the exact same as a puppy’s: one you have to scold because it’s nicked one of your slippers and won’t let it go, but you don’t care because it’s so fricking adorable.

- VICTORIA RICHARDS

That’s Beckham the man who loves his wife, Victoria Beckham, so much that he constantly posts cute little vignettes of their lives behind the scenes on Instagram, and somehow, impossibly, makes them seem normal away from the catwalks and fashion shows and make-up brands and you know, average Friday night family dinners at Nobu and hanging out with Alisters and casually living in what amounts to a Disney palace).

He’s not just proved himself a legend of football but he’s a family man, Beckham the guy who posts videos with the title, Captured by Mrs. Incredible Victoria Beckham”; the man who’s always been defiant about kissing his kids, about hugging them at the school gate, and you know they find him embarrassing but Beckham doesn’t get embarrassed; he can’t have you ever seen the Andrex puppy get embarrassed? No, and it is Beckham’s spiritual interspecies doppelganger. I mean: the man even posts about how much he loves his dogs. Of course, he does.

Beckham is, by now, probably quite used to being universally beloved I remember when I lived for a brief stint in Japan, and every single British man was greeted with delightful calls of Beckham-u” even if they bore more of a passing resemblance to... well, Bill Oddie. Revered, respected, shut-the-front-door handsome: Beckham’s star, it seemed, simply could not fizzle or falter. Until now.