The principle of this series is simple: one day, one player, one gesture.

And all the rest.

The rest

On 18 May 2013, Paris Saint-Germain took on Stade Brestois at the Parc des Princes in a match that had no reason to exist, given that PSG, launched by their new owners into a race for stars and titles, were already champions of France. The Breton side’s lacklustre performance on the pitch was the embodiment of this premonition, which the rest of the game would confirm: an era of profound boredom was beginning for Ligue 1, with the biggest budget in France set to win every year. With the number 32 on his back, just as it was at AC Milan, where he had spent a couple of years distracted from soccer made in the USA, David Beckham played the 843rd and final match of his career. With his hands on his hips or on his thighs, it was as if he had been split in two by the end of a career that had been running out of steam for several years, until his bizarre five-month contract with PSG. Or how to try and prolong the beautiful story, but the story, it limps low every other Sunday, now, and it still pulls in the ischios two days later. « Becks » wanders more than he runs, with neither gestures nor words to match. For his last match, he experienced the rest: for a few minutes, he was still on the pitch of the Parc des Princes, the man he had so long wanted to become, a world-famous football player, but above all he saw the immensity, the excess that he could neither say nor understand, and which assailed him while he was still on the pitch. The rest of his life is made up of things he can no longer say or do, things that overwhelm and disarm him, who is now immobile and petrified by the rest of his life, which at this moment is devoid of all meaning. David Beckham experiences the stupefaction of someone to whom a secret, excessive by nature, may be revealed. In the 82nd minute, he gave way.

A brief theory of the game of football, often accused of illegitimacy: why should running 100m on a tartan track or 42.195km in the streets of New York be considered admirable feats when running 90 minutes after a ball is infamous? Because the ball is precisely that: a sphere of derisory dimensions, it seems out of all proportion to the efforts it arouses, to the passions it engenders, immediately suspect of only being attached to this avatar of early childhood toys: how can we take seriously adults playing with a ball? Of course not. But what if, for all the footballers in the world, to whom we should add their supporters by the billions, the game of football was justified precisely because it chose the most derisory of objects in an attempt to make its followers subjects capable of experiencing themselves as such, for the duration of a match? Of course, Friedrich’s The Wanderer above the Sea of Fog may be considered to embody metaphysical anguish better than any other representation, and to offer privileged access to Kantian’s conception of the sublime and his appetite for a grandeur capable of putting man back in his modest place. But we can also recall Albert Camus’ fondness for the footballer and his ball, as for Sisyphus and his rock. The fact that each season, the champions tirelessly challenge for their title might even be absurd, were it not for the fact that what is at stake is precisely this tiny sliver of the original rock that they struggle to carry from one goal to the next with their passes and dribbles.Faced with that which exceeds both perception and intellection, that famous remainder, each of us is free to take refuge in the romantic mists, a metaphor for the inaccessible, or, conversely, to choose the minuscule form of a football, weighing barely more than 400 grams and measuring 70 centimetres in circumference, a derisory concretion of that which, in any case, cannot be represented on a human scale. So it’s not enough to assert that every footballer, ball in hand, revisits the famous Pascalian pastime, giving it a specific and universal meaning. We still need to give the mediation of the ball, a ridiculous sphere but the only relevant one when we are presented with something that by its very nature exceeds any physical dimension, the essential place it deserves and which gives the game its profound meaning. Jorge-Luis Borges would probably have seen in it an ‘Aleph’, « a microcosm of alchemists and cabalists (…) the multum in parvo » supposed to contain the whole of the world and which the Argentinian writer rightly described as « a sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere ».

Only the ball can give substance to this remainder, the unthinkable and unthinkable of the human condition, with which I can try to play; or which I can try to control. The ball is this Sisyphean pebble, a metaphysical clot.

Spectrality

Every Christmas morning, David Beckham receives the same three presents, with no single year being an exception. The Tottenham kit, grandfather Joë’s favourite club, for which the young prodigy would try out, narrowly missing out on becoming a Spurs player. The England shirt, chosen by his mother, as much as a sign of patriotism as of neutrality, in an attempt to pacify relations between the two men in the family, both staunch supporters of rival clubs. Finally, the Manchester United shirt, shorts and socks, which father Ted would never let anyone choose for him in the club’s London shop in early December. The evolution of the sizes of the three ritual outfits served, year after year, as a yardstick for David Beckham’s childhood. From his seventeenth birthday onwards, Alex Ferguson himself, as a good substitute father figure, will provide him with all his red shirts, which will no longer be replicas flocked to a shop counter, but the originals flanked by the mythical crest.

When he scored against Galatasaray in the European Cup, on his first real professional appearance, his shirt was actually covering dozens of others, invisible ones at that, tunics accumulated over an entire youth that were also those of the absentees, those former MU glories whose exploits his father liked to recount night after night.

David would play for the Red Devils, Manchester United would be his club. How could it be otherwise? Ridgeway Rovers, where he was learning his trade as a footballer as a child, were already sporting a bright peony-red jersey that augured well for the future. Ted could see in his young son, already wearing the number 7, a reflection of his idols, notably Denis Law and George Best, MU’s two legendary number 7s. The red youth jersey holds out the promise of a future career at Old Trafford, the home of the Mancunians, which seems only too eager for the long crosses and impeccable crosses of which his son is already capable. But he is also the shroud by which the disembodied ghost still finds the material to manifest himself, beyond the years of shadow. The potential for the future and its possibilities is matched by an accomplishment that refuses to disappear altogether, resurfacing every time Ted recounts the Munich air disaster in great detail. On 6 February 1958, the Airspeed AS.57, renamed « Elizabethan » in honour of the Queen Mother, suffered multiple incidents as soon as it attempted to take off. Captain James Thain battled through snow and blizzard to save the 25-tonne plane from collision and death. The spectral words of David’s father, obsessively filled with an impossible mourning, borrow from prosopopeia its magical virtues and bring back memories of the Manchester United players and their mentor, the famous, the incredible, Matt Busby. The crash wiped out a generation of talented players, whom Manchester Evening News journalist Tom Jackson had dubbed the ‘Busby Babes’. Trained at the club in the cult of effort, they embodied the identity of a working-class community of which they quickly became the totemic figures. Eight of them, « Unlucky Boys of Red » as Morrissey, a leading figure on the Manchester music scene, would later sing, died on the runway at Munich airport. Father Beckham’s favourite player miraculously survived: Bobby Charlton led the national team to the 66 World Cup title. David’s middle name was Robert, in honour of Charlton. At the age of eleven, in Manchester United’s own stadium, Old Trafford, David won the summer school organised by Sir Bobby Charlton with his juggling, dribbling and pinpoint passing.

When David signed his first contract with United on 2 May 89, in Alex Ferguson’s office on the very day he turned 14, he had already been under the expert eye of their head scout, Malcolm Fidgeon, for three seasons. It was he who, month after month, delivered detailed reports to the boss, praising a technical precision and a sense of the game reminiscent of Glenn Hoddle. But for ten years now, » David dares to whisper in the coach’s ear that day, « he’s been wearing the Red Devils jersey at home, which he unquestionably prefers to the other two. David dreams of being Bryan Robson or Mark Hughes, the star striker who helped MU win their first Cup Winners’ Cup. When he left his London neighbourhood of Chingford to join the Manchester squad for good, he was warmly welcomed and put up by a couple devoted to the Red Devils’ cause, the Kay family, Anne and Tommy, who gave him the room that Mark Hughes had occupied a few months earlier. So here he is, following in the footsteps of many others before him. Even to the point of vertigo, when he realised, almost at the end of his career with the Los Angeles Galaxy, between 2007 and 2010, that the name of the club’s major sponsor on his shirt, ‘Herbalife’, refers to a famous brand of dietary supplements founded by an American businessman called… Mark Hughes.

Repetition

« All the qualities of my game come from what I learned from my father, » writes David Beckham at the start of his autobiography. In the middle of Chase Lane Park, in the heart of a graceless London suburb, Ted waits, his face closed in concentration, for the centre his son is to address him. The thirtieth of the afternoon, more or less. No speed and almost no momentum, no need to go over the top as there were no opponents present: just the father and son, who retained the ability to curl the ball around the full-backs without needing to challenge them on the run. Glued to the penalty spot, what his father wants is for the ball to arrive in his arms every time. « You know what I want » would be his mantra. A few centimetres apart means that David hasn’t curled his shot or tilted his torso enough. The left arm should be spread wide, as if to draw the longest possible diagonal to the tip of the right foot. Do it, and then do it again, as if to say it all over again. Becoming a footballer is built not so much step by step as in the spiral of repetition, like a discourse caught in the net of repetition, concerned with progressive adjustments, but whose ultimate goal is to achieve the technical reproducibility of the perfect word or gesture.Yves Citton, drawing on the work of Judith Butler, distinguishes precisely the ‘performative’ dimension of these incessantly repeated gestures of self-establishment. For the American philosopher, we become men, women, policemen or stewardesses by « performing gestures » culturally identified as belonging to men, women, policemen or stewardesses. The same is undoubtedly true of the footballer, and training sessions take on a new meaning, accessing this power that is properly poetic, i.e. capable of shaping the player through his gestures: « It is through performances », writes Citton, « that our identities are constituted, through sedimentation, repetition, quotation and resignification ». Or, even more clearly: « every gesture I make contributes to making me in return ». So David lengthens his passes, works on their precision, then shifts to the side and rolls up dozens of crosses. And the hard work was beginning to pay off: David was only ten years old when he was already leading his mates from the local team, Ridgeway Rovers, through the mud on Saturday afternoons in an unprecedented saga, having played 92 games without a single defeat: enough to start building a reputation in the county championships.

The well-known talk of a vocation, which the retired Beckham still likes to sing, therefore conceals many underlying issues. If he loved the game of football so much, it was first and foremost because he belonged to one of those families identified by sociologists as an archetype, characterised by the overwhelming presence of a father keen to pass on his love of football to his descendants :

[…] the family generally plays a central role in developing an early taste for football. It is often within the family that the majority of apprentice footballers are introduced to the sport, an introduction that is strongly gendered and influenced by the father figure. As a football fan, often a player, coach or manager himself, the father helps to anchor this cultural practice in the family universe. As a result, it is usually quite natural for children to join a football club at an early age […]. (Stéphane Beaud & Frédéric Rasera, Sociologie du football, Paris, La Découverte, 2020.)

The transmission is structured and anchored in repetition, since the two systems are closely linked. The father is not content with simply worshipping the Red Devils of the past and present: he is himself in the process of completing a career as a Sunday footballer with the modest Kingfisher team. When the son is not playing, under his father’s watchful eye and incessant advice, he accompanies him to the vaguely orange and clearly pissy Kingfischer pitch. Long before the adults kick off, the son has to go through his paces, pass after pass, over and over again. Week after week: « Time after time », remembers Ted, « hour after hour, we would go through the same routines ». In exchange, he has the right to always be at his father’s side, at the heart of the virile community of adults, who adopt him and find nothing wrong with his constant presence, even in the dressing room. David, too, belongs to a « football family », as sociologist Nicolas Renahy puts it, a special place where father-son bonds are forged. The example drawn from the field study conducted by participant observation, that of little Romain, whose father took him to each of his own matches, opening the doors to an « early socialisation into the male world of footballers », can only echo David Beckham’s youth. However, as soon as he joined the Manchester United team taken in hand by Alex Ferguson a short time earlier, David naturally reproduced the relationship pattern that had brought him to the football field at such a young age. The charismatic coach of the Red Devils, on the cusp of a vertiginous career, quickly took him under his wing to assume a paternal role in his own right. Just as Ted had done, he opened the doors of the big boys’ dressing rooms to him, surprised to see the frail blond boy striding into the middle of dirty shirts and discarded pants. In living memory, no other player had ever received such favourable treatment from the austere Manchester coach.

The training complex at Madham Lodge, with its haphazard whitewashed lines and patched-up nets, provided the same setting for the matches of the father, Ted, since it was there that his Kingfisher team played on Friday evenings, and for the exercises of the son, David; although the two were not always clearly distinguishable. On Friday evenings, David watched his father’s matches, scrutinising his father’s movements and technical moves from behind the fence, just as, in perfect symmetry, on Saturday afternoons the father, behind the same fence, used to dissect the son’s game. He can’t help but wonder if every cross and every pass Ted makes in his own matches, with his pub buddies as team-mates, isn’t primarily intended for him, the spectator fascinated by his father’s gesture, even though it’s already tarnished, but in which he only wants to see a collection of examples to follow. It even seems as if Ted is deliberately breaking down his movements on the pitch, at the risk of slowing down his partners’ play, so that his son has time to imprint them on his memory: it was as if he was playing himself, live but in slow motion, a phantom VHS tape, similar to those piled up by the hundreds on the shelves in the living room, preserving the memory of MU’s feats of arms. As his father had decided, David had to become a virtuoso of the pass, if possible a decisive one, as can be one of its most common forms on British pitches, the cross. But virtuosity is acquired – and this is what makes it special, notes Yves Citton – less by following instructions than by imitating a model through a system entirely devoted to repetition. So « acquiring virtuosity consists less in learning than in practising », a practice capable of forging an apparently antinomic alloy of alienation through almost slavish imitation of others on the one hand, and discovery of one’s own identity on the other: « I acquire my skill by imitating others. Training consists of fighting against yourself to become what you aspire to be. The gestures of his father and of admired players, while distancing young David from his first subjective aspirations, gave him the mastery with which he would assert what stadiums the world over would recognise as his style. From then on, » continues Citton, « can’t we say that I am more ‘the place of transmission’ of the learned gesture than its ‘author’ in the strict sense ? Transmission, repetition and spectrality intertwine here in a complex that is as much physical as it is conceptual. It’s no coincidence that the film in David’s honour reproduces this injunction to imitate, while recounting the gradual emancipation of a young girl through and for football: « Play it like Beckham »

Floating

David, slightly out of position on the right, red shirt and number 10 on his back, then number 7 when he gets Cantona’s number back, has that leap backwards, like a rugby player about to kick, just before rolling the ball in for one of his crosses, high and out. The curved trajectory still surprised the defenders and a few flippant goalkeepers. Yet it never deviates an inch, match after match, when every deliberately aborted run down the wing is suddenly transformed into a training session in the middle of an official match, so that the learned repetition inculcated by his father through precision drills takes precedence over the temptation to dazzle or dazzle. There are no mythical volleys or acrobatic scissors in the best of David Beckham’s best moves on YouTube, just passes and crosses, always the same, sometimes terribly effective, often pointless. For every one that is remembered in the summary of the day’s match because it turned into a decisive pass, ten or twelve that did not meet the same happy fate will remain out of focus, as if crossed out. Instead of the stinging uniqueness of the dazzling shot, the overhead scissor kick or the senseless back-heel, the centre prefers a relationship of resemblance erected as a functional value, when each of its occurrences takes up the essential technical characteristics that already determined the previous ones. Since it is not a definitive gesture, as a goal can be, capable of breaking the linearity of the match to the point of requiring a restart, the centre can only be realised on the scale of a transitory gesture, that of repetition.

It opens up the field of possibilities, which it helps to limit by its trajectory or the speed imparted to the ball. When David kicks one, the profound nature of the centre appears, to be this suspension, waiting for a coincidence, both in the temporal and spatial sense, which will take the form of a head or a flat foot. Opposites come together, when the ball’s slow ascending parabolic trajectory is countered by the acceleration of its fall, and when the gentle curl of the inside of the foot meets the harshness of the striker’s forehead or toe-poke to conclude in « action » what until then had remained a proposition. Everything, from the effort put in during training sessions to the most refined passing combinations during matches, converges towards a single objective: to score. The goal is death. In the sense that, unlike the centre which made everything possible, it freezes the outcome in a single gesture which will have imposed itself to the detriment of all the others. And since this gesture is the last and has proved victorious, it is inevitably right. Slow motion will make it unmistakable, showing it again and again, him and him alone, and the image will eventually become oracular, announcing to the viewer the inevitable outcome of this definitive gesture. If the intrepid striker can then instantly achieve glory with a single stroke of genius that looks like the coup de grâce, like Panenka with his penalty in the Euro 76 final, the path that the passer must take is much longer, paved with dozens of copies of his gesture. His previous pass is already gone, and the next, so close in its execution, reminds us of its now absent presence. Between these two ontological vacillations, that of the past gesture that is no longer and that of the gesture to come that is not yet, there is a single fixed point: the author of the gestures. The great virtue of repetition lies in its ability to retain as an ‘absolute reference point’ only one person: the author of the gesture. The great virtue of repetition lies in its ability to retain only the subject as an « absolute reference point », in the midst of these variations around a gesture, and thus to consecrate him in the very discontinuity of his activity. In the sense that, unlike the centre which made everything possible, it freezes the outcome in a single gesture which will have imposed itself to the detriment of all the others. And since this gesture is the last and has proved victorious, it is inevitably right. Slow motion will make it unmistakable, showing it again and again, him and him alone, and the image will eventually become oracular, announcing to the viewer the inevitable outcome of this definitive gesture. If the intrepid striker can then instantly achieve glory with a single stroke of genius that looks like the coup de grâce, like Panenka with his penalty in the Euro 76 final, the path that the passer must take is much longer, paved with dozens of copies of his gesture. His previous pass is already gone, and the next, so close in its execution, reminds us of its now absent presence. Between these two ontological vacillations, that of the past gesture that is no longer and that of the gesture to come that is not yet, there is a single fixed point: the author of the gestures. The great virtue of repetition lies in its ability to retain as an ‘absolute reference point’ only one person: the author of the gesture. The great virtue of repetition lies in its ability to retain only the subject as an « absolute reference point », in the midst of these variations around a gesture, and thus to consecrate him in the very discontinuity of his activity.

Becks, as he is known to his friends from the golden generation of ’92, and especially Scholes, Giggs, the Neville brothers, Gary and Phil, has made a speciality of crossing and, once the ball has been struck, he never takes his eyes off it, a statue worried about what will happen next, following the elegance of its curve with his eyes. If David shines at taking corner kicks and free-kicks, it’s because, in reality, he always crosses. David scores as he crosses, and crosses as if he were scoring. His free-kicks follow the same trajectory, brushed with the inside of his right foot, as his crosses, which curled delightfully around a Dwight Yorke or an Andy Cole in the early 2000s. On a jubilant day in October 2001, with Old Trafford at the end of its tether, he qualified England for the World Cup at the last minute by snatching a 2-2 draw with Greece with a free-kick that he decided to curl in like a cross, whereas Teddy Sheringham, who had initially offered to take the kick, had imagined a dull, straight shot better suited to the almost desperate urgency of the situation. You don’t blame the man who misses the target by putting all his heart into a mule kick, » he thought, « but you blame the man who wanted to refine in a fit of perhaps gratuitous preciousness. But Beckham’s free-kick was his redemption, after the disgrace of a clumsy claw-hook at the World Cup…

David, it goes without saying, crosses at a standstill, as if he were hitting a corner kick kick; his corner kick kicks are his favourite crosses. But not all corner kick kickss have the same intention, or the same destiny. At 0-0, with only four minutes left to play in this 1996 FA Cup final, the cross from the quarter circle was obviously charged with unprecedented tension. The trajectory of the ball was reminiscent of training sessions, with the help of the great Peter Schmeichel, always ready to intercept crosses from Giggs or Irwin on the left, Gary Neville or David Beckham on the right. However, at such decisive moments, such rigour meant that it was impossible to target a particular team-mate, so hectic was the situation in the penalty area, which was transformed into an anthill of unpredictable movements by the intensity of the money time. David could therefore only cross « into the box », but with a mischievous effect as the ball was whipped and brushed to height, giving excessive confidence to the keeper, who was quickly punished. David James, Liverpool’s excellent goalkeeper, could only box out this cross from the right with an insecure fist, which then came up against a defender surprised by the goalkeeper’s semi-blunder, and finally crossed the line of King Eric’s sight.The outbound effect that David Beckham wanted to impart to this last-chance corner kick kick certainly stretched James’ run beyond reason, as he was convinced that he could easily seize a ball that ultimately eluded him. Cantona had the intelligence to let the ball come to him, including the rebound, before volleying it backwards. David’s corner kick kick gave Manchester United the league and cup double.

These same corner kick kicks would consecrate 1999 as the historic year of the treble. All that remained was the most difficult trophy of all, the European Champion Clubs’ Cup, renamed the Champions League. The Camp Nou is a basilica dedicated to the cult of Catalan and world football, packed with one hundred thousand people perched up to fifty metres above the pitch. On this evening in May, Barça celebrates its centenary, and while Maradona has left with all his baggage, Rivaldo, who replaced him, is on the verge of winning his own Ballon d’Or. The stadium played host to Bayern Munich, led by Matthaüs, who were certain of defeating the Mancunians, who had narrowly beaten Juve in the semi-final and were still reeling from an interminable season. Mario Basler’s goal in the sixth minute, coupled with the English side’s obvious lack of direct play, convinced the Germans that they would win the game. Neither Cole nor Butt managed to beat the great Kahn. Schmeichel, for his part, enjoyed a fragile reprieve, saved in normal time once by his post and again by his bar. Two Beckham corner kick kicks followed, both in injury time.

We hadn’t realised that the end of the match was so close. We had an opening. I outflanked an opponent and opened up on the left. Ole, who had just come on, won the corner kick kick. I sprinted to take it. I remember that, despite the size of the Nou Camp, there’s hardly any room to take corner kick kicks. I saw Peter Schmeichel, our goalkeeper, running towards me. I tried to control myself. « Don’t waste this. Float it towards the danger zone ». (David Beckham (avec Tom Watt), Mon but, Paris, Chronosports, 2003, p. 183.)

Who could take such a cross? Here, the technical mastery so patiently acquired meets the risk inherent in the floating trajectory imparted to the ball, which has become a dice on the green rectangle of a game of chance. As Michel Pastoureau reminds us, the pitch is not so far removed from the green carpet that is always given over to chance :

The cultural link between the green of the sports arena and the green of games of chance and parlour games is undeniable. In both cases, the idea is to use a colour that is rarely used in social life and in the everyday world of the city to delimit and mark out a space where activities that have to do with chance, and sometimes even with a certain idea of ordination, take place. Destiny is played out « on the meadow ». (Michel Pastoureau, « Les couleurs du stade », Vingtième siècle. Revue d’histoire, no26, « Le football, sport du siècle », 1990, p. 12.)

Playing with disorder, or better still, playing disorder: the corner kick kick, like any centre, has an instituting power, since the unbridled agitation of the attackers inextricably mixed up with the defenders will suddenly come to a standstill and take on meaning through the execution of a gesture, which will be of the order of a « catch »: a smashed header, an acrobatic turn or a vile point. If no one intercepts the cross, the player will be decried or mocked for having opted for the vain preciousness of a curve rather than a straight pass or shot that might have been more useful. That it gives rise to an ‘occasion’ or even a goal, and there it is legitimized in its supposed primary teleological intention. The cross thus evolves ontologically in the neutral, suspending its meaning, entrusting to the gesture that will follow to attribute it to it afterwards. Floating is indeed one of the possible incarnations of the neutral, as revealed by Barthes, summoning, moreover, a sports example, that of rugby. Floating, ‘that is to say, inhabiting a space without settling in one place’ (Roland Barthes, Le Neutre. Cours au Collège de France (1977-1978), Paris, Seuil-Imec, 2002, p. 45) allows the crosses dispatched by David Beckham to escape predictability, to positions well distinct and frozen in the pre-match on the chalkboard of the talk, to achieve the paradox of a repeated gesture but still capable of preserving its originality each time. The neutral allows one to escape semantic house arrests always both hasty and potentially definitive. Not to oppose (the tackle) or even to constrain (the marking), but rather exactly as proposed by the curved trajectories of Beckham’s crosses, ‘to slide, to drift, to flee’. (Ibid., p. 89).

Like in pinball, Beckham’s ball, in the last seconds of the European final, enters the box, wanders, bounces, Giggs extends almost involuntarily, Sheringham inherits it by chance and awkwardly pushes it into the back of the net. Fans are still celebrating this unexpected goal, while Becks has already delivered a new corner kick kick, identical in every way to the previous one. It’s a match that stutters: it’s indeed another goal, another Beckham cross, barely a minute after the first. This time, Sheringham deflected the cross with his head and Oli Gunar Solskjaer had the happy reflex to stretch his leg to finish off a stunned Bayern. Two corner kick kicks have learned from the father’s lesson, of course, present in the stands. The second corner kick repeats the first, almost identical; but together, they replay those of childhood: as he confides in front of the camera in the Netflix series dedicated to him, Becks saw himself as a child at that moment, stumbling against the uneven cobblestones of the park where he practiced his crosses, and when he unleashed his two decisive corner kicks, he did not seek the perfectly mastered gesture but rediscovered a very old sensation.

The right gesture

Complex, the football gesture paradoxically radiates with both premeditation and spontaneity that, for once, make a good match. Precise and risky, « the product of training, it consists of producing the natural with the constructed, the spontaneous with the reflected. » It alone possesses this astonishing ability to reconcile the endured work during long hours of training and the fraction of a second sufficient to stop a crucial penalty or score a decisive goal. The beautiful gesture more easily marks the minds, as the unpredictable star gesture performed by the exceptional player, who may give it his name, like Rabah Madjer, author of a proverbial back-heel. Such gestures contribute to making football both the most popular sport and a major aesthetic experience. The bad gesture, on the other hand, is of the same ilk, a « masterpiece in reverse » capable of transforming Éric Cantona into Bruce Lee or Thierry Henry into Kobe Bryant. 

In his study devoted to these « hands of God » and other headbutts, Ollivier Pourriol elicits a third category, made necessary by the new acceptance he offers to the bad gesture: the « dirty gesture, » stemming from a « voluntary transgression, » which characterizes « the real bad gesture of a bastard, » to which no doubt one can assimilate Vinnie Jones‘s entire body of work, the terror of the Premier League in the 90s, the man with 104 yellow cards capable of being sent off after just… 3 seconds of play. (Ollivier Pourriol, Éloge du mauvais geste, Paris, NiL éditions, 2010, p. 15 and 94.)

The logical square used to categorize football gestures into binary oppositions has thus far had a blind spot, as the « dirty » gesture roughly corresponds antinomically to the « beautiful » gesture, while the « bad » gesture seems to call for its logical complement, which we would consequently call the « good » gesture. But what is a good gesture on a football field? It seems at first to pale in comparison, unable to claim the uniqueness of the masterpiece forever anchored in a match, a day, an atmosphere, an image, a name, as the other three can. The gesture of exception, beautiful, dirty, or bad, somewhat pretentious in any case, is readily seen as a cup gesture, of direct elimination, of prime-time finals: a gesture where emotion reaches an almost unbearable climax, capable of spreading by contagion in a fraction of a second, from the player’s ego to the stands ready to ignite. The good gesture is reproducible, because if it signifies a style and undoubtedly designates an aesthetics of football, it can illuminate any Saturday night of the championship and does not hesitate to serve the collective. Like the pass, the cross, it is what suits the moment, the state of fatigue or freshness, the score as well as the expectations of the public. It is therefore profoundly a relational gesture. The fictional coach who monologues throughout François Bégaudeau’s first novel, « Playing Fair, » condemns certain gestures, not so much for themselves as because of their inadequacy to the context :

« The tackle is counterproductive because it is blind to the situation in which it occurs. Every situation carries its correctness, it remains to produce the formula and to conform to it in actions; I call this doing justice to the situation. »

The good gesture, the one that allows one to play fair, will do justice to Sartre’s notion of « situation. » If David Beckham’s crosses fall into this category of gestures, it is precisely because they only make sense relative to a set of data, which are the respective positions of teammates and opponents, as well as the distance to be covered and the time necessary for the execution of the gesture. Where the beautiful gesture shines by being nothing but a rupture from pre-existing bonds, a flash of brilliance against all odds, the good gesture accommodates the context with which it interacts, even if it means reconfiguring it by offering it a new order, born from its appearance. The intrusion of the ball into the penalty area thus requires its potential recipients to make strategic choices translated into physical postures capable of transforming chaotic agitation into a meaningful living tableau. If the goal retrospectively legitimizes the cross, as we’ve said, the cross symmetrically informs the existing to order it by giving it an end. Such a forward who had consented to fade behind a solid defender marking him closely until then will suddenly decide to assert himself by passing in front of him to cut off the ball’s trajectory at the near post.

A gesture in context, the good gesture therefore carries a clear though tacit message to those it targets. What is this message composed of? In the case of the pass or the cross, it contains information that it is up to the recipient to decipher, and which could be formulated simply: if I send you this opening, this cross or this through ball, you can and should deduce that you are unmarked, that therefore you are in a favorable position to advance the team’s action, even score a goal. The good gesture not only considers others but, through its reading of the situation, attempts to reveal to them their immediate potentialities. The pass is better understood if we place it within a classic information theory. Consequently, the ball becomes, not so much the information itself, but the dynamic channel through which it reaches a teammate. Thus, the flat surface of the pitch at Old Trafford or Santiago Bernabéu is streaked with as many threads of silent conversations as David Beckham delivered passes, crosses, or corner kicks.

Working Pass Hero 

Ted, who roamed the streets of London seven days a week in his technician’s van – a vehicle whose red color was no accident – instilled in his son the fundamentals of passing, demanding from him pinpoint openings and perfect crosses. He thus prepared him to integrate into a collective rather than to shine through individual technical exploits, combining the modest social status of this family from Chingford, where David understood very early on that hard work was necessary, with a century-old football history. Football, contrary to popular belief, is not of low extraction. It was during the immense wave of industrialization that profoundly reshaped the sociology of the United Kingdom during the second half of the 19th century that this sport became the emblem of a working class in full demographic expansion. The ways of playing evolved then, to consecrate precisely the passing game :

These working-class footballers [of the late 19th century], as Michael Correia explains, quickly developed a distinctive style of play, the passing game, which merges the passing game typical of Scottish clubs with the spirit of cooperation and solidarity prevailing in factories. Reflecting working-class culture, marked as much by mutual aid as by division of labor, the passing game consecrates football as a team sport, where the founding gesture is no longer selfishly dribbling to attempt to score but to give the ball to a teammate and collectively build the game. (Mickaël Correia, Une histoire populaire du football, Paris, La Découverte, 2020 [2018], p. 46.)

The passing and crossing game characteristic of David Beckham’s style thus harbors an undeniable social, even political, dimension, which also sheds light on his Manchester-centric tendency. The United team was indeed built at the heart of this working-class city chosen by Engels for his autopsy of the emergence of the working class in the mid-19th century. In the work he drew from his exploration of the insanitary alleys of Manchester, « The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, » he identifies the city, with its 350,000 workers, as « the second city in England, the first manufacturing city of the world, » the heart of an Industrial Revolution synonymous with massive proletarianization :

In Lancashire, and especially in Manchester, English manufacture finds at once its starting point and its centre. The Manchester Exchange is the thermometer for all the fluctuations of trade. The modern art of manufacture has reached its perfection in Manchester. (Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, Legare Street Press, 2022.)

The attachment of the population to the club is thus rooted in a historical reality whose ramifications extend to the beginnings of Becks under the colors of United. He will be chaperoned by Alex Ferguson, a son of a worker, a long-time member of the Labour Party, and a friend of Tony Blair, who will watch over his lifestyle in the manner of an insular Guy Roux. His reservations, expressed many times, in private conversations or even in the press, towards David’s peripheral activities, quickly becoming a commercial icon, resonate indeed with hindsight as acts of resistance to an evolution towards football business, of which Beckham, a « walking billboard, » soon became the embodiment, or the brand. His transfer to Real Madrid, partly following successive rifts with the substitute paternal figure that Fergie represented, marked, by opening the world of « Galacticos » dear to Florentino Pérez, the advent of this « liberal revolution » that began precisely within the Premier League, which had become a laboratory for the economic jungle of what must now be called the « modern football. »

However, by leaving Manchester for Madrid in 2003, Beckham left behind not only a family narrative but also friendly and professional structures that anchored him, as a player, as a passer, in the legacy of this « mass proletarian sport. » One example alone, bearing the name of Gary Neville. Himself from the typical working class of Manchester, he accompanied David’s entire English career on the right flank of MU. A conscientious defender, he accepted without hesitation to put all his energy at the service of his teammate’s creativity, playing the perfect role of the indispensable supporting actor. Interviewed during the filming of the Netflix series dedicated to Beckham, he describes himself as « the mustard » accompanying the main course, « the steak, » to which he assimilates David. By designating himself, still in the first of the four episodes of said series, as the « side dish, » the accompaniment, he unwittingly revives the dual structure defining the working-class hero. Indeed, this hero is never built without the support of an accomplice, as demonstrated, for example, by Anne-Lise Marin-Lamellet’s study. The « sidekick » systematically accompanies the hero of the working class, with his unwavering loyalty and loyalty, in British literature as in cinema, allowing him to access the ambivalence that defines and tears him apart: anchored in a community by his popular origins, he tends to extract himself from it through an increasingly individualizing trajectory that willingly adopts the pattern of heroization. Becoming a symbol of sporting success but also, or even especially, economic success, the Beckham of the last months in Manchester and the Madrid years assumes the social plasticity typical of class transplants. And this, until the staging that shows, at the opening of the TV series, a David Beckham who has transitioned from the ostentatious consumption of his football years to the production, now aristocratic, of honey on his property, surrounded by his children and his wife, herself a former pop star and archetype of the WAGS.

This social journey resonates with the stylistic elements that remain David Beckham’s imprint on football in the 1990s and 2000s. From his early months at the Manchester training cross, he stood out for his penchant for passes of over 30 meters, which he tended to favor over short-range play. Assimilating this recurrent gesture to a misplaced desire to shine, Eric Harrison, the reserve team coach, openly reproached him for abusing what he called his « Hollywood passes. » The coach hit the mark by stigmatizing the intrusion, on the field, of somewhat flashy tastes by which David already distinguished himself off the pitch, and unfolded in a simple sideline formula the socio-cultural complexity of a gesture, the pass, that David would often convert into crosses or corner kicks. By excessively lengthening the distance of his passes, demonstrating an unparalleled precision, Beckham indeed revisits, as one would say of post-modern pastry chefs, the good old « kick and rush, » emblematic of a rough English football directly linked to its working-class history, to aestheticize it and offer it a meteoric social ascent.

The pass and the cross, as practiced by Beckham, are indeed parables. Physically, first, since he manages to bend them – « Bend it like Beckham » is the original title of the film – and to elevate them enough to avoid all opponents, but also to fly over his own teammates positioned in the middle of the field as potential relays. Symbolically, the cross as well as the pass therefore bypass all intermediate stages, crossing in one go, in one gesture, an unusual distance in order to reach directly for the goal; to achieve, period. For journalist Tony Parsons, Beckham’s case illustrates in a privileged way the trajectory of those « children of the working class [who] do not want to join the middle class, [but who] want to become rich. » Such is indeed the significance of the cross as well as the pass, to skip steps to divert the very meaning of the assist, or « key pass. » Do we not remember more, indeed, Beckham’s two successive corner kicks against Bayern, as if they alone had handed MU the European title, than the two goals that followed them, admittedly not very elegant but which changed the fate of the match? Such is the instituting power of these gestures that subject a socio-historical legacy, in this case the passing game and the kick and rush, to an aesthetic reinterpretation, diverting the original transitivity of a good gesture supposed to remain in the shadow, at the service of the goal scorer, towards an autotelism capable of almost crowning it a beautiful gesture, admirable in itself. It is indeed this tension that has spurred David Beckham’s entire career, and more broadly, this pivotal era of modern football.

The Unique

This match between PSG and Brest, on May 18, 2013, is nothing but the spectacle of an unpredictable realization. David Beckham discovers the unbearable that arises when the multiple becomes one, when the plurality of possibilities has no choice but compression and crushing towards unity, heralding the solitude to come. A brutal pruning of game choices: shoot, cross, or pass? which until then awaited, available, and no longer to be solicited. A definitive drying up of life choices as well, which reminds the man of his finite condition, compelling him to step away step by step from the playground, to give the final embrace to his companions who, unlike him, will stay, and then to leave the uncertainty, sometimes glorious it is said, of the sport, to head for the locker rooms one last time and the outcome which, it, leaves no doubt. No more evasion possible, no more new cardboard contract for strange stints to delay the deadline, here at PSG, earlier at AC Milan. The countdown is indeed this, which converges all previous possibilities and their endlessly renewed promises towards a single exit door, that of the coerced self-coincidence, when in this 82nd minute of a meaningless match of the French championship sounds the death knell of the professional career of a certain David Beckham, hitherto a professional footballer, once nicknamed the « best crosser in the world ». Deserting the pitch, abandoning the game, is leaving behind an arsenal of rules that until then were sufficient to frame the situation and with which one could trick, by cunning and opportunism, unnoticed, hand of god or offside that could escape the referee. And entering the other world, apparently close but distinct nonetheless, the one ruled this time by laws, as inexorable and intangible as gravity or entropy, those which age the skin, the muscles, and the tendons and which can hardly be denied or transgressed.

The Unique that descends in this way also signifies the thwarting of a lifestyle erected as an ideal, that of repetition. Matrix of training sessions to which David Beckham was accustomed from his earliest years, under the guidance of his father, it accompanied him throughout his career to become his very signature: always the same long passes, the same stationary crosses without even needing to beat the direct opponent, the same identical corner kicks that follow one another, like that now legendary evening of the Champions League final against Bayern Munich… The end of David Beckham’s playing career says much more than renunciation: it tells of the loss of repetition as a mode of self-inscription in the field of play. Freud in his study of the « repetition compulsion, » in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, shows that repetition, that of the Fort/Da coil, ancestor of the paddleball as well as of the repeated bell balls, blocks the possibility of consciousness. But now inaccessible to this player at the end of his career, repetition de facto opens the door to a repressed that was too blinding to be looked at directly until now. For the first time, here is David facing the idiocy of reality, which is precisely what appears to him, stunning him, during this PSG-Brest match, and which can be heard Clement Rosset articulate, as if he had seen everything from the stands of the Parc :

« Everything, everyone is thus idiotic as soon as they exist only in themselves, that is to say, incapable of appearing otherwise than where they are and as they are. » (Clément Rosset, Le Réel. Traité de l’idiotie, Paris, Minuit, 1977, p. 42.)

However, Becks does not return to reality and its uniqueness: he will have to discover it, he to whom it was given to traverse his career as protected from a deadly linearity, ours in common, precisely by this ability to always, everywhere, repeat, gestures and postures :

« Uniqueness implies […] both triumph and humiliation: triumph in being the only one in the world, humiliation in being only this one self, that is to say, almost nothing, and soon nothing at all ». (Clément Rosset, Le Réel et son double. Essai sur l’illusion, Paris, Folio, 1984, p. 80.).

The voice of the Parc des Princes announcer, calling for his exit, in the 82nd minute of this PSG-Brest match and demanding a standing ovation for the departing star, thus became an oracle, and the working-class hero revealed himself as a tragic hero. The intoxication of the match, the trance of the unexpected victory against Bayern, the simple joy of the game belong to the heirs of Dionysus, the deity of bliss, whom the historian Jean-Pierre Vernant directly opposes to Gorgô, aka the Gorgon Medusa, « the extreme otherness, the terrifying horror of what is absolutely other, the unspeakable, the unthinkable. » (Jean-Pierre Vernant, La Mort dans les yeux, Paris, Hachette, 2002, p. 12.) Repetition and play indeed delimit the space of the football field as well as that of the theater stage, a stage populated since Greek antiquity by masks and statues like so many petrified gazes reminding the crowd of spectators of its inevitable common destiny. However, at the 82nd minute of his last match, Beckham crosses paths with a man who freezes like a statue to indicate to him with outstretched arm that it is time to leave the pitch. « The referee has just blown the whistle, » wrote Henry de Montherlant with prescience, « petrified, arm outstretched, like a statue in the midst of the swirling melee, he points to the place of destiny. »  (Henry de Montherlant, « Parfum du citron », Les Olympiques, Paris, Grasset, 1924 ; cité par Stéphane Baumont, Le Goût du football, Paris, Mercure de France, 2006, p. 42.).

David Beckham, on May 18, 2013, finds himself closer than ever to the shadows: those of the Munich crash in ’58; his own, especially, « dark, blurred, indistinct shadow, head hooded in night, now a faceless, gazeless specter » (Jean-Pierre Vernant, L’Individu, la mort, l’amour. Soi-même et l’autre en Grèce ancienne, Paris, Gallimard, Folio, 2007, p. 119.) which seizes all those who contemplate the face of the Gorgon… of which it will be understood that it actually reflects back to each their own image, as a mirror would, that in pop Narcissus, David Beckham finally decides to contemplate and then traverse:

Facing Gorgô is the privilege of the tragic hero. The tragic hero could be defined as one who is capable of facing Gorgô, of facing death. (…) By facing Gorgô, he saw himself in the face of Gorgô, he saw not only death but also his own death. (Monique Borie, Le Fantôme ou le théâtre qui doute, Arles, Actes Sud, 1997, p. 41).