The ad machine: how David Beckham conquered America

The first are adverts for units of generic food-substance, each one essentially the same hand-sized grenade of glossy and salted micro-minced matter; but each also with its own industrialised repertoire of colours and noise and packaging required to dress it as a distinct genre of actual human food. Try the delicious new Flame Sauced Philly Cheese Taco Wing Waffle Dog Deep Dish MegaDeath Burger Grenade-Shaped Eat Thing. You won’t be disappointed. Or you will be. Whatever.

The second type is healthcare adverts, which invariably show a happy, active, quietly troubled person throwing a frisbee or playing chess, while a concerned voice talks about the transformative benefits of Omni-Pill.

Although because Omni-Pill is also a violent chemical, the second half of this montage must be accompanied by a list of its many potential side effects, which include, with startling regularity, suicidal thoughts, depression and genital warts. All of these are referred to in the same warm voice and over the same upbeat imagery, so that for about 30 seconds you’re basically watching a glossy and persuasive advert campaign for suicide, depression and the genital warts lifestyle.

The third type is adverts for David Beckham. All Beckham. Any kind of Beckham. The Beckham-verse in all its deeply moreish forms.

An Australian TV show has already made a funny clip that notes Beckham is basically the hardest working man in America, furiously retailing every moment of his waking life, from morning coffee, to breakfast pancakes and taking a shower in his pants (he’s 52 years old: here is his arse crack); to shopping for DIY stuff, eating grenade-shaped matter for lunch, having a beer, having smouldering thoughts about his watch, driving really fast, presumably to the bar where he is now having to hastily neck whisky, and then turning into some kind of unspecified sun god before falling asleep finally on a really expensive mattress (you don’t see his arse crack).

Making money is art, Andy Warhol said. As this most hungrily transactional World Cup enters its final stages Beckham’s own real-time masterpiece is pretty much complete.

Do people in the UK really know quite how massive he is now, not just as one of the most famous people in America, but in his reach and power? Already a billionaire, Beckham will reportedly make up to $25m from this World Cup, more money than any other single person, while also taking zero active part in it. The hydration break alone, during which he drinks a beer, drives a crisp van and urges you to go back to school, is an endless giving hand of walk-around money.

As the tournament shifts to Beckham’s Miami power bunker with England facing Norway there on Saturday, the underbelly through which he has virilised himself around the world’s biggest leisure economy, the scale of that presence can feel overwhelming. There have been times during games where Beckham exists simultaneously on three separate planes: on the big screen as part of the staging, offering up that empty imperial fist-wave; then present also in TV advert form, eating crisps, buying a sander; and thirdly there in real life too, actual Beckham, disturbingly animate, like a pizza is suddenly driving a car.

This feels like saturation level, Total Beckham. There is even a counter narrative that we may be reaching critical mass. Forbes published a troubling article this week warning gravely of overreach. Maybe Beckham is too famous now. Are we facing market meltdown, subprime Beckham, empty Beckham bonds, the collapse of entire industries?

This doesn’t seem likely. There are two elements in play here. The first is the US’s apparently boundless capacity to absorb this stuff. The second is the remarkable hunger of Beckham himself, the will to make this happen, to become a living brand. Warhol also said: “I want to be a machine.”

How has this happened? And will it ever stop? Perhaps the most remarkable aspect is that Beckham has achieved this despite coming to this country towards the end of his career in his primary skill.

Beckham was a very good footballer, and a strangely underrated one too now, hard working and high craft, something that is often lost a bit in the glare of his persona. Nobody here really knows about the preternatural accuracy of his corners or that free-kick against Greece.

In this sense Beckham stands alone among Brits who have cracked America. He has done this by basically doing nothing. This isn’t the Beatles selling back rock and roll, or JK Rowling writing books. He is just incredibly good at being famous. And something in this meets an apparently insatiable need.

You can try to rationalise it. There are three obvious elements. The first is Beckham’s own unique personal iconography, his remarkable quality of having some remarkable quality. On the face of what we’re looking at here is a handsome tattooed man in an expensive T-shirt. There is an indefinable star magic in his smile, that hammy old Hollywood sweetness. But he could still be a charismatic plumber.

OK then, you try doing it. In reality the Beckham presence is very carefully metered, beautifully stark, oddly cloudless. There is almost no energy, then also a huge amount of very still, compact energy. Plus there is a kind of surface guilelessness to him, a tabula rasa effect on to which any quality can be projected. As one fond Miami hairdresser put it: “He’s rough, but he’s also soft.”

Beckham seems vaguely Latin at times. He loves and channels aspects of black culture. He is of course also a Sir, which he plays very well. For all its transformative wealth of influences, America is still a place that craves the feeling of being told what it is. It wants, if not your approval, then your affirmation, confirmation of its righteousness from sea to shining sea. A supportive and handsome Sir who loves you back. This must feel pretty good, pretty safe, pretty soft right now.

More simply, think about what everyone else in US public life is like, the constant shouting, anger, noise, wonkiness. Beckham is not this. He’s mute but also approving. He’s America’s dad, America’s DILF. In some of his representations he is portrayed now as quietly inspirational, with a very American kind of you-can-do-it vibe. Look, I’m just like you. I’m the mega-handsome billionaire you.

So much for soft power and soft signifiers. How about hard power and hard money? The thing that really made Beckham was the acquisition as co-owner of the Inter Miami franchise. And the thing that made that happen was his billionaire business partners, the Cuban-American brothers Jorge and José Mas Santos.

The exact ownership share is not public knowledge. Beckham is clearly the face. And the Mas family are the engine, hugely powerful pillars of Miami’s Cuban exile community. The most interesting Mas is still the two brothers’ deceased dad. Jorge Mas Sr fought on the US side at the Bay of Pigs, then came to Miami and worked as a dishwasher, while getting involved in various armed plots to overthrow Fidel Castro, to the extent he was called a terrorist and a mafiosi in Cuba right up to his death aged 54.

Mas made the family money in communications and construction. He was a patron of Boris Yeltsin, backed various anti-Castro guerrilla leaders, and famously challenged one former Miami mayor to a duel. At one point he drove around the city in a bombproof Mercedes with a Magnum in his glove box.

He also passed on his power. It can be hard to get things done in Miami if you don’t know the right people. Mastech Industries are the right people. On World Cup rest day the company offices by the airport were largely deserted, with just the odd person in an Inter Miami lanyard buying a coffee then disappearing inside the company doors. The pavement is baking hot. Everything here is baking hot. Power is parcelled out, as ever, inside chilled and mirrored rooms. And a new stadium is rising not far from here, the Freedom Park Arena, completing the Mas-Beckham local supremacy, and providing another piece of weaponry for generating for money, power and status.

Leveraging Cuban-American energy and geopolitics: this is how Beckham has done this in practical terms. He found the right guys, and the right guys saw what he could be. The Inter Miami franchise is estimated to be worth almost $1.5bn (£1.1bn). And Beckham has become the embodiment of football in this country. His family is feted, elevated to that tier where celebrity becomes a form of royalty, followed like a court drama.

This has required one final element in play, another shot of fuel. And that third aspect is Lionel Messi, who arrived at Inter Miami in 2023, is contracted until 2028, and has supercharged both the commercial elements and the wider electricity.

In Wynwood, central Miami, the huge Messi mural has become a place of sporting pilgrimage, a tourist must-have, and a monument to his own Beckham-esque blankness, corollary to a genuine cross-demographic appeal in a city packed with Central and South Americans. The Inter Miami shirt is now the fourth most purchased in football, an extraordinary, single-source outcome.

Beckham actually painted a small part of that Messi mural, up there in a cherry picker. And Messi is now inextricably linked to his own ascent, an affect that runs on now into the last knockings of this World Cup. Beckham has worked at this for 30 years, the brand-expansion that began even in his early playing days.

There will never be another English footballer quite like him. In part because Beckham got there first and has occupied the zone; but also because this is such an extraordinary footballing life, with such apparently boundless power in that opaque, endlessly consumable public presence.