SPECTATOR SPORT
A golden couple
Simon Barnes
STRANGE to say, I don't think football has reached its peak. I think it has a few more months to go. But all the same there really is no doubt about it, this is one of the great- est and most important stories in the history of human civilisation. David Beckham, aged 22, has, in a thoroughly old-fashioned way (and timed nicely to catch the Monday papers), announced his engagement to a lady called Victoria Adams, aged 23.
For those of more trivial minds, those Who have been distracted over the past week or so with such irrelevancies as the possible impeachment of a president, Ted Hughes's poetry or Stevenage's draw against Newcas- tle, I had better explain. Beckham plays football for Manchester United, and his play is an against-the-odds triumph of substance over style. Adams is a Spice Girl — the one called 'Posh Spice' —who is no doubt even now wondering if my colleague below can solve new problems of etiquette and place- ment. Does Alex Ferguson have precedence over a member of the royal family?
According to reports this couple, whose ages total 45 years, commands a combined fortune of £16 million. You can say what you like, but they really do have the most wonderful timing — useful attributes in a singer and a ball-player both. Each chose the right moment to be famous.
Meanwhile, Beckham's team, Manch- ester United, are, as I write, about to sign a deal for shirt sponsorship with Cable & Wireless that will be worth £12 million a Year for the next five years. This is not to be confused with the sponsors who make the shirts. Umbro, who manufacture kit as opposed to just having their name written on it, are, it is said, about to close a deal with Manchester United for £40 million over six years. It is raining money, football has never known such a time.
Those with extraordinarily long memo- ries can remember that there was a time before the Spice Girls, and those with a taste for historical perspective can probably envisage a time without them. There has never — not in living memory, anyway — been a time without football, and I doubt if any of us will see a time when football is past. But the Beckham-Adams alliance is, perhaps, the last camp before the final ascent to the peak of popularity. This sum- mer's World Cup in France, in which Eng- land have a decent chance, may take foot- ball to the summit. And after that, of course, it is downhill all the way.
And those of us with not long memories, just memories, will remember a dozen years back when football was the least fashion- able aspect of national life. No intellectuals, no middle classes, no multinationals, no pretty little millionairesses. Football had the implacable enmity of the Prime Minis- ter, the not unspicy Margaret Thatcher, and most of the country followed her lead.
There was the unending story of the identity card scheme. British clubs were banned from Europe. There were the suc- cessive nightmares of Heysel, Hillsborough and Bradford. The game was a hissing and an abomination, condemned everywhere, its followers loud with self-justification.
Now football is a dedicated setter of fash- ion. My Christmas book-reviewing kit brought me a footballing offering from a kind of non-League spice person, Zoe Ball, with the subtitle The Beautiful Game's Most Beautiful Boys'. Beckham is one of her cover chaps: 'Beautiful brown eyes. . . sponsored by Adidas.'
Fashion and sporting careers are not long-term matters. National love is as capri- cious as a midfielder's form, as fragile as a footballer's groin. The Spice Girls have already felt fashion's backlash; it will be football's turn soon enough. The game will not go away, but Zoe Ball will not write a follow-up.
Smiling, carefully dressed and looking alarmingly like their own dolls — both of which you can buy at any toyshop — Beck- ham and Adams face the future with new and frighteningly expensive rings on their fingers. There is something terrifying, something endearing, about their worldli- ness, their innocence.
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