Surprisingly addictive and heartwarming: Netflix’s Beckham reviewed

If you’re not remotely interested in football or celebrity, I recommend Netflix’s four-part documentary series Beckham. Yes, I know it’s about a famous footballer who happens also to be a celebrity and who, furthermore, is married to the famous model/celebrity/whatever who used to be in the world’s most famous girl band, the Spice Girls. But trust me, you’re going to be hooked.

One of the things that hooked me was the way it enables you to play catch-up on all the David and Victoria Beckham stories you pointedly ignored during the past three decades because, damn it, that pair were quite overexposed enough already without needing any of your attention wasted on whatever nonsense they’d got up to lately – Beckham’s goal, for example.

Previously my inexpert opinion on Beckham was that while he was probably a decent-ish footballer, he wasn’t nearly as good as the best foreign ones (Zidane, Ronaldo, etc). But then I watched the footage of the amazing – nay legendary, I now learn – goal he scored while a 21-year-old with Manchester United and realised: ‘No, hang on. Maybe some of the fuss was justified.’

The goal, against Wimbledon, was scored from the halfway line, which is unusual in football because by the time the ball has covered that distance there’s normally a goalie ready to stop it. Pele once tried this trick but never achieved it. Beckham succeeded because he’d been practising for it his whole life. Self-confessedly thick academically and with zero interests beyond football, young David had spent every spare hour that God sent playing with his ball in his Chingford garden and learning to curve it on target with unerring accuracy. Hence that film title Bend It Like Beckham.