MAUREEN CALLAHAN: What a load of Golden Balls! David Beckham’s slick Netflix hagiography is straight out of the Sussex playbook… Here’s the Posh and Becks scandals they conveniently forgot

Bend it like Beckham — the narrative, that is.

A new four-part Netflix documentary series, simply titled ‘Beckham’, promises to take us inside the legendary footballer’s private world, with David and wife Victoria, née Posh Spice, candid as never before.

If ever a subject lent himself to such treatment, it’s David Beckham: a once-in-a-lifetime athlete blessed with Greek God looks; whose marriage to Posh created the British power couple of the ’90s, their every move a subject of global fascination; Beckham himself, a boy of modest means made wealthy through a formidable work ethic that borders on obsession.

Little surprise, then, that he has his fingerprints all over this documentary. His apparent obsessive compulsive disorder, as evidenced on screen, explains a lot.

If only it were titled ‘Golden Balls’, after his inimitable nickname. Humor is the one thing in short supply here.

Listen as he lists his nightly ritual of cutting every single candle wick, his bête noire smoky black residue, dimming the lights just so and tidying until the wee hours — even though, he gripes, ‘I’m not sure it’s actually so much appreciated by my wife’.

This is a man who logs complaints and who engineers every detail of his life, no matter how picayune.

Bend it like Beckham — the narrative, that is. A new four-part Netflix documentary series, simply titled ‘Beckham’, promises to take us inside the legendary footballer’s private world , with David and wife Victoria, née Posh Spice, candid as never before.

Yet he has his fingerprints all over this documentary. His apparent obsessive compulsive disorder, as evidenced on screen, explains a lot. (Pictured: Beckham family at Netflix premier).

If only it were titled ‘Golden Balls’, after his inimitable nickname. Humor is the one thing in short supply here. (Pictured: Beckham’s infamous 1998 World Cup final red card).

Do we really think he’s going to give over control of his story, let alone Brand Beckham, to anyone?

Of course not. And director Fisher Stevens, best known as Hugo in ‘Succession’, is happy to toe Beckham’s metaphorical white line.

Recall the unforgettable moment when scion Kendall Roy tells Hugo, ‘You’ll be my dog, but the scraps from the table will be millions’, and Hugo replies, ‘Woof. Woof’.

That subservience seemingly extends to Stevens’s avoidance of anything remotely unflattering, let alone controversial.

There’s plenty of newer, relevant stuff that goes unremarked upon over four-and-a-half hours: rumors of David having multiple affairs, though always denied; the desperate campaign he launched to receive his knighthood (even branding the selection committee ‘unappreciative c***s’ when he was initially overlooked); a once-close friendship with Tom Cruise amid rumors the movie star wanted the Beckhams to join Scientology; a reported falling-out with the Sussexes; alleged conflict with son Brooklyn’s wife, billionaire-heiress Nicola Peltz; Victoria’s failed US reality show and her fashion line, long hemorrhaging money; and most consequentially, David’s recent payday from Qatar, a nation that imprisons gay people and persecutes women, and his refusal to apologize.

What a multi-part doc that would make!

Alas, as we’ve seen with the recent ‘Harry & Meghan’ Netflix series, the 10-part Michael Jordan hagiography ‘The Last Dance’, Jennifer Lopez’s ‘Halftime’ and the four-part Apple TV special ‘The Super Models’, the documentary, as we once knew it, is dead.

No longer the province of respected filmmakers such as D.A. Pennebaker (‘Don’t Look Back’, ‘The War Room’) or Albert and David Maysles (‘Grey Gardens’), today’s documentaries are mere vanity projects.

These famous subjects have likely signed off on their director, their interlocutor, the questions they may or may not be asked – and in some cases, possibly final cut.

Scandals are sanded down or unmentioned altogether, conflict minimized, personal flaws and failings airbrushed away. Legacy is the play, truth fungible, history rewritten.

It can all make for a deadly viewing experience, though ‘Beckham’ does deliver in one unintended way. Our subject, globally famous and worshipped his entire adult life, lacks one key trait: self-awareness.

He spends the bulk of this documentary complaining about the Press – how intrusive they are, how invasive, how he feared for his small son’s life at the height of Beckham-mania.

Never mind that ‘Posh and Becks’ loved the attention: Selling exclusive pictures of their wedding to OK! magazine for one million pounds; David changing his hair week after week, making front page news every time; wearing a sarong over his pants during the 1998 World Cup, an earth-shattering event known as ‘sarong-gate’.

Do we really think he’s going to give over control of his story, let alone Brand Beckham, to anyone? Of course not. And director Fisher Stevens, best known as Hugo in ‘Succession’, is happy to toe Beckham’s metaphorical white line, avoiding anything remotely unflattering, let alone controversial. 

Our subject, globally famous and worshipped his entire adult life, lacks one key trait: self-awareness. He spends the bulk of this documentary complaining about the Press – how intrusive they are, how invasive. Never mind that ‘Posh and Becks’ loved the attention: Selling exclusive pictures of their wedding to OK! magazine for one million pounds.

David changing his hair week after week, making front page news every time – or wearing a sarong over his pants during the 1998 World Cup, an earth-shattering event known as ‘sarong-gate’.

‘I never did [any of] it to create attention’, he says here. ‘I’m not that person’.

Ha!

Beckham also clearly has no idea how narcissistic and controlling he comes across — let alone utterly dismissive, if not contemptuous, of his wife. By comparison, Victoria acquits herself quite well here.

Midway through the first episode, as she says it was their working-class backgrounds that bonded them early on, David — listening from behind a closed door — peeks his head in and interrupts.

‘Be honest’, he says to her.

‘I am being honest!’ Victoria replies.

‘Be honest,’ he says again. ‘What car did your dad drive you to school in?’

‘So my dad —’

‘No… no, no, no, no, no’.

‘In the ’80s, my Dad had a Rolls Royce’.

‘Thank you’, David says imperiously, closing the door behind him. Victoria squirms on the sofa and rearranges her expression. It’s not played for laughs; she’s clearly humiliated.

On it goes: Later in that same episode, Victoria recalls giving birth to their first child via C-section. David has to prepare to go outside and make the announcement.

‘I remember him leaning over as I was lying there in hospital,’ Victoria tells us, ‘numb from the waist down.’

And what did David, who has pitched himself all these years as the ultimate family man, have to say?

‘[I] asked her, “Can you do my hair?”’ he recalls. ‘Which I’m not sure she was over the moon about.’

David also recalls getting pushed out of England’s Manchester United and taking a call from the head of Spain’s Real Madrid, asking Beckham if he’d come play for them.

Beckham’s on-the-spot reply? ‘Yes. No problem. Done.’ He did not consult his wife.

Beckham also clearly has no idea how narcissistic and controlling he comes across — let alone utterly dismissive, if not contemptuous, of his wife. By comparison, Victoria acquits herself quite well here.

This is a recurring theme in the documentary, Victoria settling their growing family into a new country only to eventually be informed by David, with no conversation or forewarning, that they’re moving on to another one. Immediately.

When Real Madrid came calling, Victoria — then a young mother-of-two trying to navigate her own career — was blindsided.

‘What do you mean we’re going to Spain?’ she asked him, ‘When?’

‘In about 12 hours,’ he told her.

‘We don’t have anywhere to live!’ she protested. ‘We don’t have schools for the children.’

Yet she made it work, and Victoria is seen sitting front row at the Real Madrid press conference welcoming her husband. Her reward?

‘Of course, I love my family’, Beckham told the assembled press. ‘But football is everything to me.’

Victoria would initially spend the workweek in England and travel to Spain on the weekends, but this is portrayed as David’s struggle — lonely, so lonely without his family, as if this wasn’t all his own doing, his unilateral decision, his family’s wants and needs be damned.

‘[It] was difficult to not have my family,’ he says. ‘I remember being upset on the phone to Victoria because I was lonely.’

This is the context given to address the ‘affair’ that Beckham reportedly had with their family’s personal assistant Rebecca Loos, its own special kind of betrayal, a cheating scandal to rival Charles and Camilla.

We don’t hear Loos’s name or voice, and Beckham never denies the affair, though he always has in the past.

Instead he blames, yes, the media before offering this bromide: ‘Victoria is everything to me… To see her hurt was very difficult, but we’re fighters… We needed to fight for each other, we needed to fight for our family… But ultimately, it’s our private life’.

And herein lies the hypocrisy: You can’t make a ‘no-holds-barred’ Netflix documentary about how great you are and then blame the Press for making your life a misery.

‘[It] was difficult to not have my family,’ he says. This is the context given to address the ‘affair’ that Beckham reportedly had with their family’s personal assistant Rebecca Loos (pictured), its own special kind of betrayal, a cheating scandal to rival Charles and Camilla. We don’t hear Loos’s name or voice, and Beckham never denies the affair, though he always has in the past. Instead he blames, yes, the media. 

You can’t invite cameras into your home and then complain about people invading your privacy.

You can’t build your brand on being a devoted family man while telling the world that football will always come first — let alone mocking your wife, as Beckham appears to throughout this documentary.

What was meant to be David Beckham’s greatest piece of propaganda yet just might, as the Sussex doc did, backfire.

Beckham, it turns out, doesn’t bend — not for his wife, not for his kids, and certainly not for us, the viewers. Golden Balls, whether he realizes it or not, may have lost his luster.

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