There’s no debate that Lionel Messi is having the tournament of his life. Aged 39, at likely his final World Cup, he continues to win matches on his own.

With 78 minutes on the clock and Argentina 2-0 down against Egypt, they were staring at a round-of-16 exit and a meek defence of their crown. At which point, enter Messi.

The captain made the first goal, headed home by Cristian Romero, and then scored the second four minutes later, before Enzo Fernandez headed in the winner in stoppage time — the latest a team has successfully staged a comeback win this big inside 90 minutes in tournament history.

In the previous round, Argentina also won 3-2 after an engrossing game, twice being pegged back by Cape Verde, the tournament’s surprise package. Two outswinging Messi corners in extra time led to two goals. This was after the Inter Miami forward had put them 1-0 up mid-way through the first half after some clever movement. He walked back slowly from an offside position to avoid being marked, then sprinted forward to latch onto Lisandro Martinez’s ball over the top, taking one touch to control and another to score.

Argentina’s results make for good reading: 12 straight wins and, in the four-year cycle since winning the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, just four defeats.

That includes the 2024 Copa America, also hosted in the United States, which they won by conceding just once in six matches. Such continental success is significant given they were on a 25-year drought when head coach Lionel Scaloni took charge in 2018.

Then, in 2021, he led Messi and Argentina to the Copa America title, beating fierce rivals Brazil in Rio de Janeiro. Now they have back-to-back titles after previously having been serial losers of finals, and are just three wins away from back-to-back World Cup trophies. Messi, with eight goals, is leading the golden boot race, one away from France’s Kylian Mbappe and Norway’s Erling Haaland.

So, what’s there to be concerned about?

Well, they are starting to see some flaws exposed. A lack of athleticism in midfield showed when Egypt counter-attacked in Atlanta. Julian Alvarez helplessly tried to trigger a counter-press when Martinez lost the ball by the corner flag — he’d been boxed in two-vs-one.

Haissem Hassan, Egypt’s right midfielder, threatened with dribbles all match, and carried the ball into the final third past Fernandez. He gave it to Mohamed Salah, who split two defenders to find Mostafa Ziko. The striker chipped Emiliano Martinez, and, momentarily, Egypt were 2-0 up, before VAR controversially disallowed it for a foul early in the move.

Nine minutes later, it happened again. A Messi inswinging corner was headed clear and, somehow, Salah found himself in space, leading a counter-attack. Leandro Paredes made a recovery run but mistimed his tackle, and the ball was worked to Hassan on the edge of the box.

The overload — four-vs-three — was in Argentina’s favour, though they stood off Hassan too much and he hit the byline again. This opened up a cutback for Ziko, who ghosted in to fire a second past Martinez. There was no problem with that one.

The comeback owed to Argentina doing something they did less than everyone else in the group stage: crossing. Scaloni’s side attempted 26 crosses in total and 18 in open play against Egypt, the latter their most in a major tournament game under the 48-year-old.

This is a team without wingers, save for Thiago Almada.

“He gives us a little more one-vs-one (quality),” Scaloni told reporters during the group stage. “Before, there were four midfielders… which was much more about play and footwork.”

Almada is the closest player in profile to Angel Di Maria, the 38-year-old former Real Madrid and Manchester United winger who scored in the last World Cup final but has since retired from international duty.

So the crossing burden, like all others, falls to Messi. He picked out Romero, a centre-back playing emergency striker, to make it 2-1.

The equaliser was much scrappier. Messi had two goes at the inswinging cross. Mohanad Lasheen blocked the first and then deflected the second, which sent it looping towards the back post. Lautaro Martinez hooked it centrally, where Gonzalo Montiel set up Messi for a half-volley.

Argentina’s reliance on Messi, and desire to be unstoppable rather than unpredictable, may bring future problems.

The shape is a narrow 4-4-2 to overload the centre with No 10s rather than wingers. Scaloni wants to make passing lanes through midfield so Messi can receive to feet, or for his side to counter-press when moves break down.

Often the midfield resembles a box, especially in the deep build-up. Messi has licence to roam. Egypt disrupted this with good man-marking in central midfield, and had centre-back Rami Rabia step to Messi when defending in a mid-block.

Flying full-backs provide the width. That came from left-back Nicolas Tagliafico against Egypt.

Egypt pressed Argentina high and defended in a 4-4-2 — sometimes dropping to a 6-2-2 by bringing their wingers down.

Tagliafico’s forward dashes almost brought two first-half goals. He ran onto Paredes’ long ball and hit a low ball to Alvarez, who forced an excellent save from Mostafa Shobeir.

A similar move led to the Argentina penalty. Messi dropped deep, split the Egypt midfield to find Fernandez, and the Chelsea man threaded a through ball for Tagliafico, who was bundled over by Hassan.

Messi, for the second time this tournament (and fourth in total from eight World Cup penalties), failed to convert from the spot. Shobeir dived low to his left and parried the effort away. Scaloni’s simplest decision is to put Alexis Mac Allister or Fernandez on penalties instead.

Compare Scaloni’s side to France, the losing finalists from 2022, and they have fewer open-play solutions, beyond giving the ball to Messi. They even owed their 3-1 win against Jordan in the final group-stage match to direct free-kick goals from their star man and Giovani Lo Celso, plus a Lautaro penalty.

Eight of the teams who had been left in the round of 16 have made more final-third regains than Argentina, while they rank second for tackles — a sign of defending much more reactively than proactively. They rarely press to conserve Messi’s energy, and he bemoaned how Cape Verde played through their gaps when Argentina tried to smother them.

For Scaloni to be reduced to tears in an on-pitch interview after the Egypt win, completely overwhelmed by the late comeback, was telling.

Their Messi-orientated tactics are working, but cracks are starting to show.

Erling Haaland is the hottest ticket in town. Whether it is because he sits just behind Lionel Messi in the World Cup goalscoring charts with seven goals, or for his human side when joking around with the mascots in the tunnel before matches, the Norway striker is emerging as the biggest draw of the summer.

He has been invited on the Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, a sure sign of his popularity in the United States, but the logistics of trying to help his country win the World Cup will probably rule that out.

Could Norway actually win it? When Haaland appeared on the cover of Time magazine last year, he said his country had a 0.5 per cent chance, and that felt about right. They are far from favourites now, but you could not fully rule them out, either.

The fact Haaland was featured on Time magazine’s cover, one of a handful of footballers to reach that crossover, shows his rising stock. People beyond football have been captivated by one of sport’s most engaging characters.

It has not always been like this, though — far from it.

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When Haaland signed for Manchester City in 2022, he carried a reputation for being a serious guy with not a lot to say. He was even known for being rude, thanks largely to a section of an interview when he gave a string of one-word answers.

At the end of that year, he watched Messi and Kylian Mbappe slug it out for the World Cup in Qatar from beneath the glass ceiling that Norway never looked likely to smash through. They had not been at a World Cup since France ‘98, four years after Haaland’s dad, Alf-Inge, played in their midfield at the U.S tournament.

Erling scored 16 goals to help his side qualify for the finals this summer and that run has not stopped — he has scored in each of his past 14 competitive games for Norway, netting 27 goals in those 14 matches. His double against Brazil on Sunday, sealing an unexpected passage into the quarter-finals, has catapulted him to another level of fame.

He was already regarded as a superstar when he signed for City from Borussia Dortmund — Real Madrid also wanted him, and probably always will — and he was already highly marketable. But in hindsight, he felt off-limits.

He has always scored goals, always looked like a Viking, and, since a growth spurt at 15, been tall, broad and fast. But there was not the depth to his image that there is now.

On the City beat, he generally did one big media appearance per season. He first spoke to journalists at the very end of his first season, before the Champions League final that he helped them reach. He was part of the club’s media day, and it was treated as if Elvis were coming along to give seven minutes of his time.

The first couple of times he gave press conferences before Champions League games, it was considered so rare and interesting that The Athletic published special articles on the experience of hearing him talk.

To some extent, the change in Haaland is simply down to growing up. He was 19 and 20 when he was thrust in front of microphones and asked to offer his thoughts, but if he had any, he did not really want to share them. Now, he is a 25-year-old man who has won everything worth winning at club level, three out of a possible four Premier League Golden Boot awards, and in January 2025, signed a nine-and-a-half-year contract.

He has captained City and was trusted by former club manager Pep Guardiola. With Norway, he is among friends, as many of the team came through the youth ranks together. In December, he became a father, adding a different perspective on life.

But for a while, Haaland and the people around him have wanted to change the perception that he is a robot who scores goals and has little personality.

Those close to him knew he was a ‘goofball’, to borrow American parlance, and City fans were already familiar with him from the club’s own content, but that did not travel much further.

There can be no greater proof of those goofy credentials than the rap video he and two of his Norway youth team-mates put on YouTube in 2016 — they called themselves the Flow Kingz and the video shows them messing around at a kids’ playground. He is not hugely different now, it was just a question of showing it.

Haaland, according to sources close to him who wished to remain anonymous to protect relationships, recognised that, and wanted to offer fans more than can be achieved through routine pre- or post-match football interviews. When he was growing up and watching Premier League football as a young boy, he would have loved the opportunity to see inside a player’s house, to learn about their routine, to see what they are really like, and that is what he wants to offer people through his own YouTube channel.

That launched in October last year with a behind-the-scenes look at his home life, showing him buying steaks and cooking them on a barbecue, and going through his recovery process with massages and ice baths. Since then, he has surprised fans by turning up at their houses in Halloween fancy dress and shared videos of his golf game. He developed a keen interest in the sport over the past 18 months, often duffing the first tee shot before hitting the second one 300 yards.

The channel was already big enough to attract a partnership with a blockbuster film, The Odyssey, before the World Cup. Haaland’s people wanted to source a sponsor to fund the process of following Haaland around the U.S., and the agreement was made by his agent, Rafaela Pimenta.

The movie, directed by Christopher Nolan, sponsored the first two episodes of his World Cup diaries and would have enjoyed massive exposure — there have been more than nine million views across three episodes. This summer, total views on his channel passed 100 million.

Haaland and his team’s desire to give people the full experience explains their approach to shooting pre-World Cup content with English comedian James Corden for TV network Fox. The striker gave two hours of his time to get fully involved, which included playing table tennis, shuffleboard and decorating a cake.

That said, the closest thing you can get to the full Haaland experience is to follow him on Snapchat, where he, basically, ‘s***posts’ (intentionally, and perhaps ironically, sharing low-quality content) and appears to have less of a filter than he does elsewhere.

As the Time magazine interview suggests, his stock was already high Stateside. Last summer, at the Club World Cup, fans in Philadelphia rushed to the front of the stands to see him warming up for City.

Over the past few days, his camp has been told that social media algorithms are being geared towards Haaland content, because that is where the demand is among users. They have been told his boom in popularity has been likened to when Travis Kelce began dating Taylor Swift and then won the Super Bowl.

Pimenta has already said she believes Haaland could one day be worth £1billion ($1.3bn) and, having cracked America, they have started to branch into the Chinese market. Just before the World Cup, he appeared in a commercial for herbal drink brand Walovi, and set up accounts on the Douyin and Weibo social media platforms.

His marketability is nothing new — he became the ‘Barbarian King’ in popular mobile game Clash of Clans in 2024 — but he could be entering a new chapter of his career given how well his summer has gone to date.

In many ways, he is still the same as he always was. He believes in the marginal gains he was taught by his coaches while playing for his hometown club in Norway — he wears glasses that filter the light, he only looks at his phone at certain times of day, he buys tomahawk steaks from a local farm and drinks raw milk.

Funnily enough, he was probably more approachable in his early days in Manchester. Then, he was photographed in a Sainsbury’s supermarket buying stuff to fill his new city-centre flat, and there was a video of him walking to one of his favourite Italian restaurants in neighbouring Salford. Now, he is too big — physically and figuratively — to go into town, and he has moved out to Cheshire, like many footballers, to set up a home for his young family.

His playing style, too, is something everybody in Manchester is familiar with, but is perhaps captivating to new audiences. It was subtly nodded to in Nike’s big commercial for the tournament, in which Haaland stars despite an endless list of appearances and cameos, including Mbappe, Cristiano Ronaldo, LeBron James, Travis Scott and Kim Kardashian.

Haaland is still the main figure and he sits, unmoved, next to a body double — Channing Tatum — for the most part, as the chaos develops elsewhere. It is only in the final scene, when all of the main football stars of the advert, and a small child, chase down the ball and try to score, that he suddenly springs into life. Even Vinicius Junior and Ronaldo himself step aside, providing shocked expressions to add drama, as Haaland, in slow motion, appears from nowhere to tower above the child and volley into the net.

There is a video shot from the stands of MetLife Stadium on Sunday that is not much different: he is strolling around the pitch as usual, head down, showing no inclination to touch the ball, until it is about to be played into the box. Then, he takes a few steps to build up his speed, jumps and powers above Gabriel to crash in one of the best headers of his career.

“People maybe talk that I don’t touch the ball enough and this and that but I don’t care about this. I know what I have to do and it is exactly what I will keep doing,” he said in September 2022, in the spiky way that he had back then. “My dream is to touch the ball five times and score five goals. That’s my biggest dream.”

There is still a searing honesty about him sometimes, as he highlighted during the group stage when he said he did not care about Norway’s game with France, because the French would probably win the match, and the whole tournament.

Erling Haaland carries his team-mates aloft after the win against Brazil (Al Bello/Getty Images)

He is doing his best to change that. The fact he is shining alongside Messi and Mbappe, who are playing for two of the world’s strongest teams, should not be taken for granted, even if he seems to be taking it all in his stride. When he slammed home his second against Brazil, he strutted around with two team-mates on his back.

It is not that Haaland is carrying his country — they are a good team in their own right — but he is certainly the star man, and the figurehead. That is nothing new, but neither he nor Norway have ever experienced anything like this.

Flags flutter in the summer breeze. The number 250 is writ large. As the United States celebrates its independence from the UK, the pre-eminent superpower of the past century continues to be culturally co-dependent on its former ruler. Our talk-show hosts, our chefs, our pop stars are relevant and revered here in an outsized, supersized way. They like carpool karaokes, kitchen nightmares, love islands, brat summers, the crown and, most unnervingly of all, Arsenal. 

At a time when the special relationship is going through the motions and seems downright weird in political terms (take the “fat foxes” mentioned in calls between the White House and No. 10 Downing Street), one bond seems stronger than ever. Arise, Sir David Beckham.

During my time playing Championship Manager in the 1990s, a pastime New York City’s mayor Zohran Mamdani enjoyed too, I do not recall clicking on Beckham’s profile and seeing on his list of attributes: soft power: 20, cultural relevance: 20, entrepreneurial flair: 20. 

Sir David is tier one in transatlantic transcendence. Bend it. Brand it. Become it. Beckham’s manifest destiny is clear. A Brit living the American dream to the fullest.

He’s not quite flooding the zone. But filling the blank space meant for a soccer star America can call its own. This was presumably supposed to be Freddy Adu’s time as co-host attache. Alas, the only Freddy that Americans have been talking about this summer is the mysterious X user @FreddyLa7, a German tourist on a World Cup road trip. Or is he? 

While @FreddyLa7 has disappeared along with his country’s national team, Beckham has not.

At times, it feels like he is the everywhere everyman. Beckham at the USMNT game. Beckham at the England game. Beckham in Miami for Messi and Argentina’s game. Beckham in the TV ads when the game goes to commercial breaks. Beckham, the English face of a (North) American World Cup. Beckham, the World Cup statesman.

As a fellow Brit, you can’t help but marvel at it. 

Beckham (and Tom Cruise) are shown on the stadium’s big screen during the American national anthem at the opening game of this World Cup on U.S. soil (Stu Forster/Getty Images)

After all, the UK has done a lot worse recently when appointing its ambassadors to the United States.

If this is as breathless as England playing at altitude in Mexico City the other night, it’s because Beckham’s prevalence in the U.S. does take your breath away. They even teach a class on it at Harvard Business School. More on that later.

That Beckham is big isn’t news. But this big? At yet another inflection point? Juice still left in the squeeze? No wonder they study the phenomenon.

The near ubiquity is down to Beckham’s own uniquities. Here is an East Ender who loves Americana. As a kid growing up in the London district of Leytonstone, he was tuning into Knight Rider and The A-Team when he wasn’t watching Bryan Robson play for Manchester United. “But you could also find me on the sofa, watching the iconic Golden Girls with my mum,” Beckham reminisced.

He has been coming to the States for years, long before his move to LA Galaxy in 2007. “I first came to America when I was 16, on a soccer tour to Dallas,” he said. “A couple of years later, I came to Los Angeles for the first time on a coaching trip, which coincided with the 1994 World Cup. The fact that my beloved England hadn’t qualified wasn’t enough to dampen the excitement of me being in the town for the greatest show on earth.”

The day after his infamous red card at the 1998 World Cup in France, where did Beckham go? He flew by Concorde to New York. Barely 23 at the time, he was hardly an unknown to Americans even then.

Backstage at a Spice Girls concert at Madison Square Garden, his face was familiar to Madonna when she walked in. “Oh, you’re the soccer player, aren’t you?” she said. The one who scored from the halfway line against Wimbledon. One half of the defining celebrity couple of the era: David, a member of United, the club that considered itself the biggest in the world. Victoria, a member of the biggest girl band the world has ever known. Your TLCs, Destiny’s Childs and Pussycat Dollses never got near the 100 million records sold by the Spice Girls.

American motifs are everywhere in Beckham’s life. They’re like breadcrumbs leading to America.

David and Victoria were expecting their first child at the time of that concert at the Garden. They named him Brooklyn. Their wedding anniversary is on July 4. The No 23 shirt Beckham chose to wear after he moved from United to Real Madrid was an acknowledgement of his passion for American sports and revealed much about his own aspirations.

“The more I saw, the more I became obsessed with America, its stars, and especially its sports,” he said. “In the USA, sports was box-office entertainment. I love the ambition, the scale, the sheer entertainment value of U.S. sports, American football with its Super Bowl, and the NBA with the superstars who transcended the game and dominated popular culture, like rock stars. No one was more powerful than Michael Jordan, the greatest of all time.

“I loved everything about him, his talent on the court, his style off it, and his impact far beyond the game. What Michael Jordan did had a huge effect on me then, and still inspires me to this day. He is the reason that I wore number 23, and he showed that you could be more than just an athlete.”

Beckham was 31 when he decided to move to America.

Madrid’s club president at the time, Ramon Calderon, could not understand it. He did not possess what distinguished Beckham as a footballer. The vision not only to play a raking diagonal pass for Zinedine Zidane to volley home, but to see the future of the game itself. “David Beckham will be a B-list actor living in Hollywood,” was Calderon’s reaction to his decision to join LA Galaxy, one of the founding members of MLS.

The comment did not age well at the time. Marginalised at Madrid, Beckham tenaciously played himself back into Fabio Capello’s team and left for the U.S. as a La Liga champion. Almost two decades later, Calderon’s prediction continues its exponential decay.

On the first weekend of this World Cup in the United States, Canada and Mexico, Beckham walked a special green carpet on Hollywood Boulevard. (The fake turf looked better than the natural playing surface laid at the arid MetLife Stadium in New Jersey for this tournament.) Beckham knelt, as he did last November for his knighthood, in recognition of a different honour. A star on the Walk of Fame. Introducing Beckham on the podium for his acceptance speech was none other than Tom Cruise.

Beckham poses next to his newly unveiled Hollywood Walk of Fame star (Lisa O’Connor/AFP via Getty Images)

The two of them go way back, as Beckham’s former Galaxy team-mates know only too well.

One day, in July 2007, they turned up for training at the Home Depot Center and found red velvet invitations outside each of their lockers. Cruise and Will Smith requested their presence for a party welcoming the Beckhams to town.

All these years later, Beckham still found it “quite frankly mind-blowing” that “the greatest movie star of our time” wished not only to share this moment with him but to preside over his Walk of Fame ceremony. His first film night with Victoria was to watch Cruise’s Jerry Maguire together. As such, this ranked as a “pretty mad full-circle moment”.

And yet Cruise left the impression he saw Beckham as no different from himself. They were the same. “His is a Hollywood story,” Cruise said. Not straight-to-DVD either. Beckham, in Cruise’s telling, was “a boy who believed in something bigger than himself”. That something wasn’t limited to making it as a player at United, the club he supported as a kid growing up in East London. Otherwise, his profile would be no bigger than the other members of United’s Class of ’92, a group of podcasters. 

David’s first film night with Victoria was watching Tom Cruise’s Jerry Maguire (Lisa O’Connor/AFP via Getty Images)It wasn’t limited to being the most galactico of the galacticos era at Madrid either, or the other conventional though rarefied football choices he made in Europe, such as playing for the last great Milan team and ending his career at Paris Saint-Germain, then a superclub in-the-making, whose president Nasser Al-Khelaifi attended his Walk of Fame ceremony. Beckham, as Calderon’s reaction shows, did the unorthodox. 

To paraphrase the celebrated American poet Robert Frost, his was the road not taken. Maybe even the road to nowhere in soccer terms. What Beckham saw, however, were signs pointing towards the Walk of Fame. “To achieve my dreams, I knew I would one day make the leap across the pond, to make the U.S. my second home.” 

More than a regular signing, his Galaxy move was presented as a socio-cultural experiment. In his book about Beckham’s time at that club, the late journalist Grant Wahl wrote: “For the Beckham Experiment to be successful, it wouldn’t be enough for Beckham to become an American celebrity or to earn boatloads of dollars. He had to change American soccer. He had to leave a legacy that would exist long after he was finished playing for the Los Angeles Galaxy.”

By now, enough time has passed to be able to form a judgement.

Cruise is in no doubt. “What happened next changed this sport in this country,” he said.

MLS launched six months before the previous World Cup held in the States, back in 1994. It has lasted longer than its forerunner, the North American Soccer League, which folded after 16 years, despite the efforts of Pele and the New York Cosmos to grow the sport here.

Unlike the great Brazilian, Beckham stuck around after he retired. He was committed to making MLS a success. “There is no Messi in this league, if not for David Beckham,” Cruise continued, “if he doesn’t decide to come here first. That’s the impact we’re celebrating today, not just an extraordinary career, but a legacy that changed the trajectory of a sport.”

Hollywood hyperbole? Not really. Beckham is the through-line.

The designated-player rule introduced a couple of months before Beckham’s commitment to join the Galaxy gave each team one slot for a player earning unlimited wages above the league’s salary cap. It was the brainchild of Tim Leiweke, the CEO of the Galaxy’s owners, Anschutz Entertainment Group, and became known as The Beckham Rule.

“When David arrived, Major League Soccer had 13 teams,” Cruise argued. “Today, it has 30. This is partly down to a pledge Beckham made to Leiweke and MLS commissioner Don Garber. The first was to win championships for the Galaxy. The second was to help build soccer in the U.S. — ‘I simply couldn’t see why the greatest sporting nation wouldn’t embrace the biggest sport on earth, but we believed. We fought the obstacles, and we have seen incredible growth’.”

If the number of teams is up, it is because Beckham wanted to become an MLS owner too, just as Jordan had done in the NBA. When he agreed to join Galaxy, he negotiated an option to buy an expansion team at a fixed price whenever he stopped playing.

It calls to mind an old Joe Di Maggio anecdote, told by the renowned sports cartoonist from the New York Daily News, Bill Gallo. Long after Di Maggio stopped hitting baseballs for the Yankees, Gallo asked him about the subsequent inflation in player salaries, “If you were to negotiate with the Yankees today, what salary would you ask for?” Di Maggio replied, “I would walk into (owner) George Steinbrenner’s office, extend my hand, and say, ‘Hello, partner!’”

In Beckham’s case, it wasn’t an after-dinner wisecrack. The Mas brothers are his partners at Inter Miami.

Beckham watches Lionel Messi prepare to make his Inter Miami debut in July 2023 (Photo by Stacy Revere/Getty Images)

At the time Beckham negotiated that option, no one could imagine what it might look like today. But if you see a pink jersey in your neighbourhood, it’s more likely to be an Inter Miami shirt than a Palermo one. You could be on South Beach or in South Asia, it doesn’t matter. The choice of Miami as a location to start a team was also remarkably prescient on Beckham’s part.

The move established him on both U.S. coasts. East and West. It anticipated and participated in Miami’s boom not only in sport, with the city adding a Formula 1 race and the NBA’s Heat this week acquiring Giannis Antetokounmpo, but in art too, with Art Basel holding an annual fair in Miami Beach. Not to mention tech and finance, as favourable tax rates allowed firms to attract talent from New York and elsewhere.

There have been ups and downs for Beckham in Miami, as there were with the Galaxy. Building a football-first stadium in the Florida city, which was inaugurated over Easter, was not easy. But it has been worth it. The $25million option Beckham secured now looks a bargain. Sportico’s annual MLS valuations claimed Miami are now the league’s most valuable at $1.45bn.

The rule he gave his name to and the franchise Beckham helped found delivered Messi to the U.S. in 2023. He helped make MLS credible as a destination. Of course, Beckham still remembers where he was when that initial deal got done.

“I was in Japan with the family and woke up at 5am because my phone kept vibrating,” he recalled to The Athletic shortly after Messi was announced. “My wife was like, ‘Really?! Turn your phone off!’ I look on my phone and I’m like, ‘What’s happened? Something’s happened!’ I put my glasses on and I’m like, ‘Leo’s coming! It’s done! He has announced it!’ My wife was like, ‘What do you mean he has announced it?’ I said, ‘He has gone on TV and said he’s coming to Inter Miami!’

“I get goosebumps talking about it.

“I phoned Jorge (Mas) straight away and got emotional, because I know what we’ve gone through over the last few years. Trying to build this club, the obstacles, the challenges — trying to get land (to build a stadium), going to legal battles… for all of the problems we’ve had, this one moment changed everything. It changed our whole club. Once Victoria woke up properly, she hugged me, and that’s when I got emotional again.

“I have come in every single morning at 7.30 to just see him (Messi) — to just know it’s real.”

Beckham, alongside fellow co-owners Jorge and Jose Mas, hugs Messi at his Inter Miami unveiling (Megan Briggs/Getty Images)

A winner as a player and an owner in MLS, Beckham is now watching Messi, his player, score in every game at the World Cup, as Argentina play in the United States. This separates him from the likes of Thierry Henry and Zlatan Ibrahimovic, players who followed in his footsteps to MLS. They provide opinions for FOX. Beckham owns a piece of the game. After the Walk of Fame ceremony, Beckham and Cruise went to SoFi Stadium in LA for the USMNT’s group-stage opener against Paraguay. They got into their private box early and, over the lip, signed American flags and jerseys together.

Eleven days later, just outside Boston, Beckham enjoyed a glass of wine as he watched England draw with Ghana. Down in Miami, he witnessed arguably the game of the tournament so far, the five-goal, round-of-32 thriller between Argentina and Cape Verde. With him in the VIP section was Diego Simeone, the Argentine player he kicked out at in Saint-Etienne, an act that led to his red card during the 1998 World Cup and subsequent vilification in England.

“Bumped into an old friend in Miami,” Beckham posted on Instagram, the two smiling. Peace in our time, struck many years ago. World Cup heritage.

If Beckham seems able to enjoy the World Cup more than ever before, it is because a lot of the hard work is done. When he was an ambassador for the 2022 edition in Qatar, the host country’s small footprint meant he was engaged in multiple events and partnership activations. This tournament, by contrast, is far too big for the same strategy to work. When FIFA president Gianni Infantino described this World Cup as “104 Super Bowls”, he was trying, in a grandiose way, to relate it to an American audience.

Switzerland-Qatar in Santa Clara was not a Super Bowl. But the advertising around it was comparable. Spending on ads was down in Qatar in part because it was happening in the northern hemisphere’s winter and considered a controversial host. There was plenty of scepticism over whether it would work or not. That ad-spend has rebounded in the U.S., Canada and Mexico, skewing, in particular, towards TV with the World Advertising Research Center forecasting the injection of $10.5billion into the ad market.

This is, after all, a once-in-four-years opportunity in the world’s biggest media market and FIFA isn’t the only one interested in making this work. How many U.S. investors have bought into MLS and European football over the past decade? They need this to be a success too if they, along with Beckham, are to keep growing the sport.

If it feels like Beckham is in every other commercial, it’s because partnerships with long-term sponsors such as Adidas and Pepsi have been overlaid with some of your archetypal World Cup brands and newer endorsers, including Lenovo and Bank of America. Beckham isn’t alone in being chosen for these ads. McDonald’s has used him, Lamine Yamal, Christian Pulisic, Ronaldinho, Son Heung-min, Thierry Henry, Alphonso Davies and Santiago Gimenez. Messi is all over the place, too. But Beckham is pre-eminent.

When Harvard Business School decided to make a case study out of Beckham in 2023, it was because of the strategic partnership he was about to engage in with Authentic Brands Group. That company, founded by CEO Jamie Salter, owned the rights to iconic brands, like those created by Muhammad Ali, Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley.

After meeting at an event in Miami with another client, NBA star Shaquille O’Neal, the pitch to Beckham was as follows. Salter wanted ABG to have 55 per cent of David Beckham Ventures, the vehicle through which Beckham manages his commercial activities. He believed ABG could scale up Brand Beckham even more and enhance the company’s ability to operate globally.  The deal would include Studio 99, the production house behind Beckham’s Netflix documentary, but exclude his Inter Miami investment. Profits generated would be split 55 per cent to Authentic, 45 per cent to Beckham.

“Maybe it is not fair to compare the two, but David Beckham is effectively Mickey Mouse,” Salter told Harvard Business School. “Just as you go out and buy a Mickey Mouse T-shirt when you love Mickey, you’ll go out and buy a pair of David’s eyeglasses when you love him. You’ll say to yourself, ‘If those eyeglasses are good enough for David Beckham, they are good enough for me.’ I know one is a character and the other is a living person, but they are both a GOAT (Greatest of All Time).”

He added: “In our eyes, Beckham is a GOAT, just as Muhammad Ali, Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley are GOATs. And we think we can help him significantly increase his business, just as we did with Shaquille O’Neal.”

Last year, Beckham’s holding company, DRJB, reported a $45million pre-tax profit. Revenues reached $92.3m and an initial $52.5m dividend was paid out to shareholders, with the accounts showing that a further $23.2m was allocated after the end of the financial year. Smart money.

And to think when Beckham was sent off at that World Cup in 1998, UK tabloid The Mirror’s front-page headline the next day was “10 heroic lions, one stupid boy.”

Almost 20 years since it began, the Beckham experiment appears to have worked for him and America.

“To see soccer in this country finally take its place on the main stage makes me extremely proud of the small part that I have played,” Beckham said, “and I truly believe that it can only get bigger and better.”