Money over morals in David Beckham’s bid to be a billionaire
Here in Qatar, David Beckham has even been asked to sell sand in the desert. Clearly cash is important to the former England captain, but the deal comes at a heavy reputational cost.
“I love being in the middle of nowhere,” David Beckham declares as he looks out from beneath a Bedouin tent across the Qatari landscape. Here in Qatar, Beckham has even been asked to sell sand in the desert.
It is among a number of heavily scripted lines that the former England captain delivers in a video that features on the Qatar Airways flights transporting tens of thousands of people to Doha for the World Cup. “It’s one of the best spice markets I’ve ever been to,” says the man who married a Spice Girl, before suggesting that “the modern and the traditional fuse to create something really special” in this Gulf state.
While estimates of exactly how much the Qataris are paying Beckham to be an ambassador for this tournament seem to range from £10 million ($17.6 million) to £150 million ($263 million) over ten years, the 30-minute film provides a measure of what he is prepared to do for money.
Clearly, cash is important to him. This year’s Sunday Times Rich List estimated the value of the Beckham family fortune at £425 million ($746 million), and there are some who believe that he is driven by a desire to more than double that number and become the first billionaire footballer.
But this deal with the Qataris appears to be coming at a heavy reputational cost, judging by the criticism he has received for assisting the World Cup hosts in what amounts to a £200 billion ($351 billion) exercise in sportswashing.
At the weekend the comedian Joe Lycett issued Beckham with an ultimatum, informing him in a social media post which has now had more than three million views that his “status as a gay icon will be shredded” unless he terminates his arrangement with Qatar before the tournament begins on Sunday. Lycett, an LGBT campaigner, points out that homosexuality is illegal in Qatar, where it is “punishable by imprisonment and, if you’re Muslim, possibly even death”.
https://t.co/FqoC3hSFM8 🌈 pic.twitter.com/EPLVNwmnvV
— Joe Lycett (@joelycett) November 13, 2022
Eric Cantona tore into his former Manchester United teammate in an interview with The Athletic in September and this week Gary Lineker told the BBC that it was not something he would have signed up to.
“I would say about David, he’s never really voiced his concerns about where the World Cup is,” Lineker said. “So, it’s not something he’s ever got involved in. So can you accuse him of being … he’s not hypocritical.
“If I’d have done it, I was very, very anti the bid when it was first revealed in 2010. I was in the room and I was very vocal against it, so if I was going to do something like that, I’d feel hypocritical. I don’t think you could accuse Beckham of that. But you might accuse him of doing something that you might feel is fundamentally a wrong thing to do. And a lot of people will think that.”
Lineker has perhaps forgotten that Beckham was also in the room. He was part of England’s bid team for the 2018 World Cup that went to Zurich in December 2010, only to lose spectacularly to the Russians on the very same day that the despicable members of the Fifa executive committee also voted for Qatar to host four years later.
I can still recall Beckham appearing alongside Prince William and the prime minister at the time, David Cameron, at the top of the grand staircase inside Zurich’s Baur au Lac hotel, having just emerged from the court of Jack Warner, the corrupt former Fifa powerbroker who intimated his support for England but was already on side with the Russians.
The following day the English delegation, one that also included Boris Johnson, then the mayor of London, and Jeremy Hunt, at that time the secretary of state for culture, media and sport, was utterly humiliated, receiving two votes from a Fifa executive that would eventually become the target of those dramatic police raids at the same Baur au Lac hotel.
The former England midfielder has chosen to ignore such detail and instead allowed his image to be exploited here in Doha. Anyone heading into the city from Hamad International Airport will soon be confronted by a giant poster of “Goldenballs” hanging from a skyscraper.
Beckham’s position in the heart of some England fans is such that it is likely to be insulated from any political furore, and he endeared himself to the public in general by queuing for hours in central London to pay his respects to the late Queen Elizabeth II. However, there is no doubt that the 47-year-old’s image is being tarnished.
It would be interesting to hear him explain himself, but a request from The Times for an interview has been ignored – beyond confirmation of receipt of an email from his representatives – and Beckham’s World Cup itinerary is proving no easier to obtain. It seems when he has made appearances as an official ambassador, he has not taken any questions from the media. He has posed for plenty of photographs, including with those fan leaders also being paid by the Qataris to be here. All very cosy.
We have seen Beckham perform like a seal in the past. Back in 2003 he embarked on a ten-day tour of the Far East with his wife, Victoria, even juggling a ball in front of 60,000 fans in Ho Chi Minh City.
Those contracts involved selling chocolate to the Japanese and two-stroke motor oil to the Vietnamese, but the £10 million that the Beckhams made was regarded simply as an indication of their status as one of the most marketable couples on the planet. It was actually en route to Tokyo that news broke of Beckham’s transfer from United to Real Madrid.
This time, however, brand Beckham is taking an almighty battering, and rightly so.
“It is really disappointing that he is promoting Qatar in return for a lot of money, given its dismal human-rights record,” Peter Tatchell, the human rights activist, said.
“He has made a huge mistake. I hope he will think again. This doesn’t square with his professed support for women’s and LGBT+ rights.”
The Times
