David Beckham

David Beckham's actual career is not on this page. He was a right midfielder with a passing range and a set-piece technique good enough to define an era, he won nineteen major trophies, and he took league titles in England, Spain, the United States and France. He is now president and co-owner of Inter Miami and co-owner of Salford City, which means the football has outlasted the playing.

What is on this page is the second life: fame as a medium. He appears as himself in the two Goal! films, at the London 2012 opening ceremony and the Beijing 2008 closing, at One Love Manchester and One World: Together at Home, on Sesame Street, on Friends: The Reunion. The documentary work is the interesting part, because The Class of '92 and the 2023 series Beckham are two different accounts of the same story, the second considerably franker about what the fame cost the people around him.

The acting is a footnote and he appears to know it. Guy Ritchie has used him twice, once as a projectionist in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and once as Trigger in King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, and the second, which gave him actual lines, made a decent case for keeping the cameos silent. There is also a 2003 book credited to him, which belongs to the same operation as everything else here: Beckham as content, produced at scale, for thirty years and counting.