No social media ‘meant David Beckham was unaware of vitriol during his career’

Football star David Beckham “didn’t know what was being said about him” in the press while he was playing because social media did not exist, the co-founder of his content studio has said.

Nicola Howson, who co-founded Studio 99 with the former footballer, told the Edinburgh TV Festival his manager and father had told him not to look at what was printed about him in the media.

As a result, she said, he had not been aware of the “vitriol” directed against him.

This included an effigy of him being hung in London in 1998 after England’s World Cup semi-final defeat to Argentina, in which he received a red card.

She added that he only learned about the effigy when Fisher Stevens, who directed the 2023 documentary series Beckham, showed it to him.

Ms Howson said: “He didn’t know what was being said about him back then because he had a manager that said don’t read it, and the dad who said it’s all nonsense.

“He hadn’t seen the effigy until Fisher showed it to him. What I’ll never forget about Fisher showing it to him that is that he’d never seen it.

“He’d never seen a lot of the vitriol because there wasn’t social media.”

She added that she did not know how modern players coped with the “vitriol” directed at them on social media.

“I don’t know how they cope now, if you’re of the kids who missed the penalties in the last Euros, or if you’re some of the players in the Euros this year, if you’re reading that on social media, day in, day out.

“I don’t care who you are, and how strong a person David Beckham is mentally. I don’t know how he would have done that.”

Ms Howson explained the background to the hit Netflix documentary Beckham, for which Stevens carried out 50 hours of interviews with Beckham and 20 hours with his wife Victoria.

She said she initially had to persuade Stevens to direct the series, adding: “In fact, he turned me down three times, and he only said yes for two reasons in the end.

“One was that he was on Succession with Jesse [Armstrong] and Tony [Roche], who were big sports fans, who said, ‘You have to do this, the story’s great’.

“Because they knew the back story, which an American didn’t. They all thought David Beckham was invented in 2007.

“And the second reason was because he came to dinner. I said, ‘Just give him a chance, come to dinner’. And he came to dinner with David and Victoria, and Victoria literally looked him in the eye and said, ‘I want to tell you about all the worst things that happened to us’.

“‘If we’re going to do this, we’re going to do it once, we’re going to do it properly’.

“So I think, in the end they made that pact, if you like, that day, and that’s how it continued.”

She added that the former Manchester United star had “blocked” a lot of the memories he was being asked about in the interviews, and that she and Beckham’s ex-teammate Gary Neville had to work to unlock them.

“David wouldn’t have gone there without the trust factor of somebody he knew had his back, in the sense of helping him unlock the memories. It was incredibly difficult. He needed two things: me and Gary Neville.

“He blocked so many of the memories, and he shot them down, as sports people do to keep going. And I’ve learned this. They put it in a box and move on. David would tell a story to Fisher, and then Gaz would see it, and Gary would say, ‘That’s not how it happened’, and he would challenge him.”