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England will lose a major source of fun if Beckham leaves

If the soccer star David Beckham leaves England, along with his exotic hairstyles, his feuds with his boss, his multitude of endorsements, his fancy sarongs and his slinky fashion plate of a wife, what will there be left for people here to discuss?

"He's grabbed the interest of the nation," said Philip Warburton, 67, a retired minister who was visiting the Manchester United football grounds, where Beckham plays, on Wednesday afternoon. "He's a talking point wherever you go. I've talked about him halfway up the Eiffel Tower, in Sri Lanka, in Greece. If you say you're from England, they say `David Beckham.'"

Not for long, perhaps. In a move that has sent waves of grief, outrage and inchoate anxiety across England, Manchester United announced on Monday that it had conditionally agreed to send its star player to Barcelona for a reported US$50 million transfer fee.

While the deal is contingent on too many factors to be considered anything more than an opening salvo in a complicated chess game involving a number of teams, it is clear that Manchester is committed to getting rid of the flamboyant Beckham, 28, who has played there since he was a teenager.

Now the country, and particularly Manchester, are facing the bleak prospect of a Beckham-free future.

"The city would be gutted if he left," said Gemma Edwards, 20, a sales assistant in downtown Manchester, growing misty-eyed as she recalled her one face-to-face meeting with Beckham, in which she tried to block his car but he drove away without giving her an autograph. "It would be devastating.

It wouldn't be the same team if he went."

This is Beckham country. But the public's obsession with Manchester's most famous resident extends far beyond the city's borders, to all of England, and Beckham's nimbleness on the soccer field is only a small part of his considerable allure.

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In a tabloid-saturated nation hungry for celebrities with outsized, newspaper-selling personas, Beckham's smallest move qualifies as front-page news. Anything is fair game: from the frothiest utterances of his wife, the former Posh Spice; to whether Beckham's new hair band makes him look like a wuss (sadly, yes); to whether he needed actual stitches -- or just an ostentatious Band-Aid -- after a soccer shoe petulantly kicked by his coach, Sir Alex Ferguson, unfortunately struck him in the face several months ago.

Andrew Eves, 34, who runs a mail-order soccer-shirt business, said that Beckham had single-handedly revolutionized men's style in Britain.

"I bet you can count the amount of men wearing sarongs on one finger," Eves said.

"But each to his own. I mean, if you think that 10 years ago in England men didn't even wear deodorant, and now there's a whole new market devoted to men's grooming."

In downtown Manchester, where Beckham and his wife, Victoria, are well-known habitues of upscale stores like Armani and Vivienne Westwood, Gemma Davidson, a sales assistant in one of the fancier shops, said that she found Beckham "extremely good looking" and an asset to the city.

"He's a beautiful man," she said. Not only that, but he loves shopping, is dripping with cash, and is never rude, which makes him a most desirable customer. "It's very easy to sell to them," Davidson said of the Beckhams.
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