King Kaufman's Sports Daily
Is David Beckham worth $250 million to the MLS? He is if the U.S. soccer league plays it right. Plus: NFL playoff picks.
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Jan. 12, 2007 | NFL playoffs? Secondary sport. It's all soccer, all the time around here. The free market at work.
English superstar David Beckham announced Thursday that he's leaving Real Madrid and joining the Los Angeles Galaxy of Major League Soccer in August for a reported $250 million over five years. That would make him the highest-paid player in North American sports, more than doubling the salary that's gone a long way toward making Alex Rodriguez a pariah.
That almost certainly won't happen to Beckham, who's every bit the smooth, charming international celebrity that A-Rod will never be. He even comes complete with a fashionable wife, Victoria Beckham, whom the British press amusingly refers to as a pop star. That's sort of like calling Sally Struthers a TV star.
Sports fans in Los Angeles reacted to the stunning news Thursday by saying, "the Los Angeles who?"
Well, now they know. In the same way that Pelé signing with the New York Cosmos in 1975 helped put the North American Soccer League on the map, however temporarily, Beckham coming to the States will put MLS in the spotlight. But there are major differences.
MLS has been a lot smarter fiscally than the old free-spending NASL, and Beckham at 31 is a lot closer to his prime than the 35-year-old Pelé was in '75. Soccer is also a lot farther along in popularity in the United States than it was in 1975.
On the other hand, Beckham, for all his fame, isn't the player Pelé was, which isn't exactly an insult but is true nonetheless. He has never been a dynamic playmaker. He's a complementary player, the guy who sets up the dynamic playmaker, a species that's rare in MLS, to put it kindly. There's some speculation he'll move to central midfield with the Galaxy and become that type of dominant player against weaker competition, but that's not a sure thing.
Still, he's good enough that the reaction to Thursday's news hasn't been "$50 million a year for him?!" It's been "Wow, David Beckham's going to MLS."
He'll certainly score tons of goals in the MLS, which is practically tailor-made for his chief skill, scoring on dead balls. He'll put fannies in seats in MLS's group of soccer-only stadiums -- the best idea the league has had. And he'll put the league in the headlines, on the highlight shows and in the bar-stool conversations in a way teenage sensation Freddy Adu has not done.