Football fans are so chill, you know? You've never met a calmer group of people!
In 1999 year, when David Beckham welcomed his first child with soon-to-be wife Victoria, he also recently got a red card in the 1998 World Cup match against Argentina, an event that made everyone in England go, “ugh."
As recounted in the new Netflix docuseries on Becks's career, Beckham, the nation lost its mind with hatred, and the young family got actual kidnapping and death threats. As the footballer himself recounts, “The moment [Brooklyn] came out, I all the sudden thought, 'How am I going to protect him? What am I going to do to protect him?'”
The night of Brooklyn's birth, David adds, the newborn slept next to Victoria. “Victoria was like, ‘Come and squeeze on the bed with me,’ and I was like, ‘absolutely not. I’m sleeping with my head against the door.’
Because I was paranoid that someone was gonna steal him,” the footballer says. "You know it’s meant to be a happy moment. And it was a happy moment, of course. But I was worried. I didn’t want him to come into this life at a time where I was going through what I was going through. But when there was kidnap threats, that’s when it got scary."
Adds Victoria, “We were getting kidnapping threats right from when we had Brooklyn…imagine having a baby and having death threats. David had to play knowing this was all going on. And I was on my own in an apartment with a baby. I’d go to the games with Brooklyn, and the abuse was… it’s hard to explain.” She also recalls a cruel song fans would sing at her. “We did not know what to do. It felt like we were drowning.” All over a game!
The four-episode series also sees David talking about his rise to footballing fame as well as the sequence of events that led him to become a British pop culture phenomenon, which also includes his highly published relationship with former Spice Girl Victoria– who he is still happily married to and shared four children with.
“It was the first time that me and Victoria had been put under that kind of pressure in our marriage.”
After news of the doc was announced in September, a nearly three-minute-long trailer released by the streamer described it as an "unfiltered story of one of the most celebrated and scrutinised athletes of all time". And since the show has finally aired on Netflix, those ‘unfiltered’ moments already have viewers talking – namely about a number of new comments made through honest interviews with both David Beckham and Victoria, and their close family and friends. This includes, surprisingly, the relentless 2004 headlines about David's alleged affair with Rebecca Loos.
This article was originally published by GLAMOUR (US).
