There was nothing exciting about David Beckham's hair.
After England's 1-0 victory in its World Cup opener against Paraguay on June 10, won by a free kick mistakenly deflected into the goal by the opposing captain, the team was exhausted. A bigger disappointment, for aesthetically minded soccer fans, was that Beckham's tresses -- normally the beau ideal of the soccer world's array of aggressively directional haircuts -- were just tired. His previous dos have included a frosted fauxhawk, blond cornrows and a confection of rooster's peaks, but on June 10 Beckham's hair was, like his game, neatly prostrate and minimally styled. Mere gel, in soccer, is a letdown.
"The British players are tidied up now," said Howard McLaren, the creative director of the Bumble & Bumble salon in New York. Was there a tinge of disappointment in his voice at the recollection of what Beckham's fauxhawk did for men's grooming during the last World Cup in 2002, when the look was widely imitated?
"If you look at the long hair of players from Argentina and Brazil, they are constantly pulling it out of their mouths, which can be distracting," McLaren added. "But they are willing to pay that price for the way their hair looks."
When you are viewed from overhead on a television set for hours on end, hairstyle is substance.
American sports fans are largely unaccustomed to the personal style that is routinely on display at the World Cup. But from now until the final game on July 9, the soccer peacocks will be difficult to ignore. Viewers will see glimpses of Angola's defender, Loco, who wears only a beanstalk patch of braids sprouting from his forehead; Christian Wilhelmsson, a midfielder from Sweden, who has unruly blond spikes and a retro rat's tail; Danijel Ljuboja, a forward from Serbia-Montenegro whose dye design recalls the white stripes of a skunk; and Fernando Torres, a forward from Spain, who arrived in Germany with a bleach-mottled mullet. When the Japanese team lined up against Australia on June 12, the field looked like a hairstylist convention -- progressive dye jobs versus chippy spikes.
That so much attention is paid to players' hair and to the customary post-game swapping of jerseys no doubt contributes to soccer's standing in the US as a vanity sport, even though it is the most popular sport in other parts of the world. But with the global exposure of the World Cup, players who are famous in their home countries are now influencing style around the world, setting trends, endorsing designer brands and appearing in advertising campaigns.
"There's a euphoria about soccer players like I've never seen here before," said Timothy Everest, the London tailor who outfitted Beckham for his wedding. "When they were doing the walkabout here before the World Cup, it was reminiscent of the Beatles."
Soccer players are passionately studied on and off the field by billions of fans, and designers and athletic clothing brands have responded by courting the most stylish ones. Beckham has been both celebrated and reviled as soccer's most famous clotheshorse, capable of igniting debates on diamond earrings and multistrand beaded necklaces for men, but he is not alone.
There were fashionista footballers before him -- George Best and Charlie George in England and Charlie Miller in Scotland, to name a few. And many more have since turned up in the front rows of fashion shows and posed seductively for men's wear designers, pushing Beckham, the once unrivaled star of metrosexuality, to fashion's equivalent of the bench.
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