The Effortless Cool of David Beckham

David Beckham is undoubtedly one of the greatest footballers of all time who has defined style for generations of men growing up across eras.

- WRITTEN BY KANAAD CHATTERJEE

At 50, he is also a prolific entrepreneur. More than a decade after his retirement, his endeavours keep intersecting with culture-defining moments. This year, as he enters his sixth decade as a celebrity who keeps evolving while remaining recognisably himself, we catch up with the icon.

Two decades of watching football will teach you something about constancy—or rather, the absence of it. Players rise and fade. Clubs reinvent themselves or collapse under the weight of their own mythology. Managers are hired to save seasons and sacked before they can finish them. In twenty years, I have watched more than a thousand games, tracked perhaps a hundred world-class athletes, and witnessed only a handful earn the word legend without irony. Through all of it, one figure has remained: not always at the centre, but never entirely absent. Always, somehow, proximate to the story.

David Beckham was there when Manchester United completed the treble in 1999, his corners delivering both goals in that delirious Barcelona final. He was there in 2001, curling England into the World Cup with a free kick that felt like physics being politely overruled. He was there when Real Madrid assembled the Galácticos, when LA Galaxy gambled on soccer as an American spectacle, when Inter Miami—his club, built from a contract clause negotiated eighteen years earlier—signed Lionel Messi and shifted the centre of gravity of the sport once again. But Beckham stretches beyond the pitch: wearing a sarong to a party and generating more columns than cabinet reshuffles, pioneering footballer-as-brand when the concept was still nascent, posing alongside Victoria on magazine covers that redefined what a sporting marriage could look like. He has always been relevant.