It's Football, but not as we know it

You don't need me to tell you that David Beckham's move to Los Angeles Galaxy is the biggest sports story of the week.








After being left out of the England squad and finding himself on the fringes of the Real Madrid first team, Golden Balls has decided to bend it in America for the next five years.

Today's newspapers have picked up on the small matter that the former England captain will become the best paid sportsman in the world, with a selection focusing on the fact that he snubbed numerous offers from English and European clubs who, in all honesty, could get nowhere near the financial package that the LA Galaxy and MLS have put together.

In truth, it shows how different sport is in the US compared to elsewhere. In Europe, we're just getting to grips with the fact that sport is now a commodity, sports clubs are businesses with a desire to make profit and that clubs no longer had the social responsibility that we once perceived they had.
It used to be that the owner of the local football club was a sheep-skin wearing, cigar chain smoking local factory owner on an ego trip. Today football clubs are run by a consortium of wealthy businessmen looking to sell tickets to other wealthy businessmen - and we hate it. We hate the fact that a season ticket can cost the equivalent of six months rent, we hate travelling across the country at some unearthly hour because a game has been moved for television coverage and we hate sticking a dish on the side of our house and paying some Australian bloke £50 a month to watch football on TV.

In the America though, it's a whole different ball game. Sport stateside has always been about the dollar. Fans in the UK were in uproar when Wimbledon moved to Milton Keynes, proclaiming the death of lower league football and dubbing the new MK Dons "Franchise FC". Stateside, it's common practice. Club, sorry, franchise owners have commonly moved teams across the country looking for the next captive market. Once they've bled that market dry, they'll move to the next town where the mayor is willing to build a state-of-the-art 80,000 all seater stadium.
Even college gridiron is huge. It's unthinkable to think in this country that a clash between Leeds Metropolitan and Preston Polytechnic would attract crowds surpassing those for Manchester United vs Chelsea, but in the US they'd be calling a crisis meeting if that weren't the case.

And that's why Beck's is going to the US. What he'll actually draw from Galaxy for kicking a pig's bladder around a field will be small fry (in a sporting sense anyway). The difference will be made up from exploiting 'Brand Beckham'.
Image rights for a man like Beckham are huge regardless of where you are. Take that image to a nation that lives for celebrity and you've got a massive earning potential. The Beckham's have known that for years. The various pre-season tours to US, the MTV Awards apperance and the Soccer academy have all been efforts to raise his stock in the land of opportunity and LA Galaxy's season ticket sales less than 24 hours after the announcement are testament to that.

There is no denying that the critics will pounce on Beckham for this move. To make the move from one of Real Madrid's 'Galácticos' to a Galaxian in a sport which registers into insignifcance in it's respective country smacks of putting cash before credibility.
But Beckham has realised that his days at the top are numbered. He is making a move to a place where he will be adore just as equally as he was in his days in Manchester and Madrid.

Yes, it may well be a marketing move by the MLS and LA, but that probably says more about the attitude to sport in the US than it does about Beckham.