Netflix’s Beckham series is the best sports doco since The Last Dance

Beckham, Netflix
★★★★★

It’s a docuseries about Posh and Becks, you know? I expected a silly puff piece, an obvious attempt to extend their “brand”, and now here I am teary-eyed, thinking of David Beckham, a decade since his retirement from professional football, silently tending to his beehives with a hole the shape of Sir Alex Ferguson still in his heart.

That Netflix’s Beckham is directed by Fisher Stevens is just another bizarre wrinkle in this remarkable series. The veteran actor, most recently known for his turn as Waystar Royco’s wily communications executive Hugo on Succession, is also an Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker. He’d previously filmed Before the Flood, the 2016 climate change doco, for Leonardo DiCaprio, a close friend of Beckham’s, who connected the two. He’s an inspired choice.

Stevens’ approach is no fly-on-the-wall cinéma vérité. He gets himself heavily involved in the process, gaining intimate access to the Posh and Becks household and posing probing questions to Beckham in the manner of a deep-and-meaningful drinking session with a close friend (or armchair therapist).

He also has an actor’s flair for the dramatic. By this point, any half-arsed football fan knows how the 1999 Champions League final ended, but Stevens draws out footage of Beckham’s on-pitch heroics poetically, every floated corner backed by soaring strings or, like, Oasis’ Supersonic. Like the Gallaghers I can’t stand Man United, and yet the effect is gloriously emotional.

The four-part series, which reportedly took four years to complete (it closes with Lionel Messi’s triumphant debut for Beckham’s Inter Miami just months ago), involved over 45 hours of interviews collated over a two-year period. It shows.

Revealing and compelling: David Beckham sat down for over 40 hours of interviews for the series.Credit: Netflix

Perhaps speaking to Beckham’s notorious likeability, the number of interview subjects who turned up for the project is astounding. Sir Alex Ferguson! Eric Cantona! Diego Simeone! Luis Figo! Fabio Capello! Even New Order’s Peter Hook drops by to explain Madchester’s Hacienda scene, while Gary Neville should be a talking head on every football documentary ever. And, of course, there’s Posh Spice.

Shoes off, sprawled across a divan, eyes perennially rolling at David’s entitlement at having moved the family from continent-to-continent for his career, Victoria Beckham is a highlight. Across the series, she’s ripe for the meme-ing in the best way: strong-willed, supportive, emotionally forthright and self-deprecatingly hilarious. “I am not into football at all. I wasn’t into football then, I’m not into football now,” she says in her first appearance onscreen, and immediately I was in love.

Posh’s enduring indifference to the inanities of football is fantastic. I’ll save the revelations for your own discovery, but here’s one I can’t resist sharing: the night before England’s match against Argentina in the 1998 World Cup, the infamous game that so maligned Beckham’s public narrative for years to come, Victoria reveals she’d called David to tell him she was pregnant with their first child, Brooklyn. “So you tell him right before the biggest game of his life?” Stevens asks incredulously, echoing every viewer’s thought.

Posh and Becks, at the height of Spice Girls mania.Credit: Netflix

And then, after David flew to NYC to be with Victoria following his sending off and England’s dumping from the tournament, she’s like: “I remember really not understanding how serious it was, what had happened.” I laughed for about 10 minutes. I’ve said it before, she’s perfect.

The series is filled with such candid delights. But Stevens also does a solid job unspooling the disparate threads that made Beckham such a fascinating figure: a people pleaser with an “I do what I want” rebellious streak, who struggled to assert his own individuality against the tough-and-controlling father figures (his football-mad dad Ted, and Sir Alex) whose love he so desperately sought; a likeable airhead with a compulsive drive and dogged perfectionism around his game, his brand and, well, his hair.

While streaming’s love affair with sports documentaries has flooded the landscape with mediocre content in recent years, this might be the closest we’ve come yet to Michael Jordan’s maniacal The Last Dance, the genre’s pinnacle. Beckham is a definitive and compelling portrait of a pop culture icon, as satisfying as one of his curled free kicks.

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