David Beckham: My Side

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Soon after his arrival at the Bernabeu, former Manchester United assistant coach Carlos Queiroz was appointed head coach. I’ve never been through what David and Victoria went through. I tried to put myself in David’s head. I felt at times I was going through what he went through. I wanted the audience to feel what he felt. I hope that comes through.” The third reason is most telling. Stevens isn’t just some mug who doesn’t know the beautiful game. Although the Chicago-born Stevens will be a fan of the Cubs (baseball) and Bears (American football) until he dies, he also has something in his wardrobe that marks him out as a soccer stan: a collection of Ivory Coast football shirts. “I went to Stamford Bridge [home of Chelsea FC] and fell in love with Didier Drogba.” What were you doing there? “The first documentary I produced was Once in a Lifetime: The Extraordinary Story of the New York Cosmos in 2006. At the time I didn’t know football. Then the producer, John [Battsek], takes me to see Chelsea play and, well, I fell in love. Fame followed, but manager Ferguson had growing concerns about his celebrity lifestyle and his relationship with Spice Girls singer Victoria Adams. One minute he has curtain-shaped hair, as though his angelic face were a stage, the next he has a mohawk that transforms his head into an exclamation mark

I was aching," he said. "I was hurting. I'd roll out of the bed in the morning because I was in so much pain." There's good stories about how he (awkwardly) began dating Victoria, the sending off in the 1998 World Cup against Argentina, then some death threats and kidnapping plots. Getting the attention and becoming a celebrity was different to what I wanted," Ferguson said. "Getting David to keep his feet on the ground became more difficult." It was the first time that me and Victoria had been put under that kind of pressure in our marriage," he added. He just loved being a footballerDavid met a lot of new people. Some of them thought he was a show off but later they became friends. "We were all about sixteen, on a tour together The Real Wagatha Story: Most interesting aspect of new documentary is the woman at the centre of it ]

What Stevens didn’t realise when he took the gig was what a diverting cast of characters he had at his disposal. Not just the perma-surly Keane, but French philosopher Eric Cantona and Manc motormouth turned wannabe Labour MP Gary Neville. “I wish I could have made 20 episodes, there’s so much great stuff. I mean, some of those guys. Paul Scholes – what an absolute dude.” That is a sentence I never expected to hear.

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But it was in 1996 when he announced himself to the football world by scoring from the halfway line against Wimbledon. Hold on. Fergie? But isn’t the former Manchester United manager an avatar of Succession’s Logan Roy? “You’ve got him all wrong,” says Stevens. “I was really scared to meet him. But I came to love the guy.”