Unless your Wi-Fi has been down this week, you’ll be aware that David Beckham has got his kit off again. He’s back in his underwear for a ‘steamy’ (Daily Mail) ‘full frontal’ (Daily Mail again, though it really isn’t – and I had to watch it, dispassionately I stress, three times for the purposes of this article in order to be sure) campaign for Hugo Boss which, in that hackneyed and usually inaccurate phrase, ‘broke the internet’. Did you have problems putting your Ocado order through? Me neither.
In the advert by photographers and fash-mag-slags Mert and Marcus, Becks pulls up to his industrial, glass cube of an apartment in an Aston Martin, walks in, disrobing as he goes, eats a bowl of cereal, writhes around on a nasty World of Leather sofa, before getting in the shower (still, bizarrely, wearing his Hugo Boss pants). After clocking some revellers checking him out from the building opposite, he drops his keks, giving them a cheeky wave. I think his expression here is meant to be ‘hot and smouldering’, but it’s more George Formby. I half-expected him to say, ‘Turned out nice again’ in that squeaky voice.
But he is bronzed and manscaped, his six-pack so defined and oiled it could go straight on the barbecue, and there is a deep V line pointing to his crotch which is technically, I now know, called the ‘inguinal crease’, but colloquially the ‘love line’ or ‘moneymaker’. All of this has unleashed extraordinary, unedifying ejaculations from both (straight) male and female commentators. ‘Still got it at 49!’ squeals one. ‘It’s time to give the man a gong!’ shrieks another. While in the Times, Harriet Walker asked, breathlessly, ‘What does this tell us about what women want?’ At this point, I had to scream and call in VAR – because as far as I’m concerned, it says absolutely bugger all.
Becks has never done it for me. There’s that voice for starters; a quick straw poll of my girls and gays reveals that, crucially, any Becks-based fantasies involve him keeping his gob shut. Then there’s the weird lack of body hair – I haven’t encountered a chest that smooth since I was about 16. The man embodied, and may even have inspired, the most woeful trends of the 1990s: metrosexuals, himbos, male grooming.
But my main problem – and this is why, quite apart from describing them as ‘a bunch of cunts’, the Honours Committee will never approve the knighthood he so craves – is that this is a man who has apparently played away more than Fulham when they had to hot desk with QPR for two seasons. He seemed a wounded puppy in that carefully curated 2023 Netflix documentary, Beckham – ‘There were some horrible stories that were very hard to deal with,’ he whimpered. But he didn’t deny the affair with Rebecca Loos when he was at Real Madrid, which presumably totally wrecked her life.
There’s nothing sexy about being one half of a token marriage. Despite VB’s regular Insta pics of her husband in his undies – ‘Saturday morning workout with this fit guy, you’re welcome’, presumably signed off by three corporate comms firms – does anyone still believe in the Beckhams’s marriage?
Naturally, I can’t speak for the desires of millions of women, but I can tell you categorically what women don’t want:
He is bronzed and manscaped, his six-pack so defined and oiled it could go straight on the barbecue
- A man who indulges in any of the following: fake tan, neck tats (unless she’s heavily into thrash metal), intimate waxing, having an aesthetician on speed dial. (I spent much of the Netflix series in a nine-way WhatsApp conversation with friends speculating what he’d had done to his face and why his hairline looked so weird.)
- A man who’s so useless that the only thing he can fix himself to eat when he gets in late is a bowl of the kids’ Shreddies.
- And, crucially, a man who, when he drops his keks – however ripped he might be – leaves you wondering if he’s had to stop off at a clinic on the way over.
As a player, Becks may have had all the flicks and tricks, but for me, he’s the figurehead of the ‘golden generation’ of England who never got beyond a quarter-final. He couldn’t even bring the 2018 World Cup home, despite teaming up with Prince William; Fifa gave the tournament to Russia. This is why I won’t hear a word against Gareth Southgate: he put a stop to the psychodrama that began with Italia 90, meaning that my young sons, aged 9 and 10, can watch England go into a penalty shootout without the need to tee up counselling.
Perhaps it’s my age – I’m sandwiched between Millennials and Gen X – but I preferred footballers when they were more rugged, rough and ready. Basically, as Becks is so fond of saying, these were real men, funny, fierce, charismatic and flawed. Quite a few were French. All are long, sadly, retired. They were the sort of player who’d take a flying kick at a yob screaming abuse in the stands, rather than lashing out petulantly at a provocative Argentine midfielder. ‘Isn’t he marvellous,’ breathed my deputy headmistress as we schoolgirls swooned over the coverage of Eric Cantona’s boot to that angry oik. ‘That frightful man has BNP written all over him.’
And I’ve always had a soft spot for Tony Adams, who’s not only read a few books but has written perhaps the best sporting autobiography out there, Addicted. Of his performance on Strictly Come Dancing, his lovely, clever wife, Poppy, declared, ‘I’ve never been more proud or more in love with him.’ Now that is attractive.
Yet I realise my immunity to David Beckham’s charms may put me in the minority. Checking out listicles of the current ‘hottest players in soccer [sic]’ left me similarly cold at the realisation they’re all seeking to emulate him. Ridiculously ripped, enamel-toothed, often heavily inked with over-styled hair and pecs like cling-filmed supermarket chicken breasts inflated with antibiotics, the likes of Marcos Llorente, Jesse Lingard, Jude Bellingham and Marcus Rashford resemble fake profile pics on Grindr.
The only fantasy I can conjure up about Becks involves his well-documented OCD. Get over here and clean my kitchen. It’s dirty and it needs doing. There’s just one hard limit I need to set – you must not say a word.
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