She might not be famous for smiling, but Victoria Beckham knows when to laugh. After nearly three decades in the spotlight as a Spice Girl and 24 years spent married to one of the world’s most famous footballers, she’s learned to develop a thick skin and a good sense of humour when it comes to public opinion. That's what we leaned from Netflix’s four-part documentary series about David Beckham, which offers exclusive insight into his family life, relationship with Victoria and the toll fame has taken on their lives. As is often the case with revelatory documentaries, it proved that things weren’t always as perfect as they seemed.
Despite David and Victoria having fairly robust reputations in the eyes of the public, that hasn’t always been the case. One thing that stands out most in the documentary is the way in which Victoria Beckham was unfairly treated by the media – especially in the early noughties. It’s a tale as old as time, but whenever David’s team was underperforming, he made a mistake on or off the pitch, or he was getting distracted by the world of celebrity, it was always said to be his wife’s fault.
At the start of David and Victoria’s relationship in the late nineties, they were both accustomed to a certain level of fame. He was a prodigal Manchester United player and she one fifth of the world’s biggest girl band. But fast forward to the early noughties, once the Spice Girls had split up and the couple had started their own family, and David’s fame began to eclipse Victoria’s for the first time. She was quickly reduced to the role of WAG by the media and was relentlessly criticised for being ‘controlling’ or distracting him from his career. Even when he was doing well, she was hit with misogynistic headlines and accused of being jealous of his attention.
It was around this time, in 2003, that David left Manchester United and transferred to Real Madrid. He called Victoria to tell her that she and their two sons had to uproot their lives and move to Spain the next day. She remembers thinking, ‘We don’t have anywhere to live. We don’t have schools for the children. What do you mean?’ Before adding, ‘But the reality was: we’re moving to Spain.’
Despite how disruptive the move proved to be for her, Victoria was villainised by the tabloids for not ‘supporting her husband’s career’ or enthusiastically embracing her new home. She even remembers an interview she did with Spanish Vogue when the cover line said she ‘hated Spain because it smelt like garlic’ – something she laughs about now. But headlines like that contributed towards a bigger tirade of abuse. Soon she was on the cover of every newspaper for being difficult, ‘hating Spain’ and having an unacceptable aversion to garlic.
Looking back at this period, it’s easy to recognise that she was just a mother of two who didn’t speak Spanish, didn’t particularly want to move her children until she’d found schools for them and wasn’t overly keen on abandoning her life in the UK. ‘I was always the villain,’ she says in episode three, ‘and I was a mother. This is what nobody was taking into consideration.’
This became a pattern in their lives – every time David’s job brought him to a new place, people turned to Victoria for a reaction. Before he retired in 2013, the Beckhams had moved from London to Madrid, then to LA where they enrolled their kids in schools, then David moved to Milan for six months, then they moved back to London and then David transferred to Paris Saint Germain. Oh, and now he’s the owner of Inter Miami FC in Florida.
Victoria started to call the constant moving around the ‘David Beckham special’ and obviously learnt to deal with the turbulence in her own way, but she admits in the series that it was incredibly destabilising and often caused difficult periods in their lives. In order for David to prioritise football, Victoria and their family had to make a lot of sacrifices.
Beckham does a great deal to show us a different side to the couple – especially Victoria, who has become somewhat known for her inability to look like she’s having fun. But it’s clear that the way she’s been mistreated by the media throughout her life has had a lasting impact. She says at one point that she ‘barely recognises’ herself from the early days of their relationship, and that she was ‘much more outspoken’ than she is today. Looking back at the fanfare around their relationship and the relentless criticism she was subjected to, it doesn’t seem like that was a choice.