Apr 15, 2021

FT. LAUDERDALE, Fla. – David Beckham steps out of a Cadillac SUV into the dust of a construction site. It was December 2019. In front of him was the shell of a new 18,000-capacity stadium, located deep in Broward County; where Inter Miami would play its first two seasons before moving, if all went well, to a $1 billion venue near Miami Airport. Behind him, a training complex and team offices began to emerge.

After spending nearly seven years fighting for an MLS expansion franchise located somewhere in South Florida, Beckham was eager to implement his vision of a club that started big and only got bigger. "I don't think there is another club anywhere that has the opportunity that we have on the world stage," he told ESPN.

Since then, almost nothing has gone as originally planned. One afternoon, not long ago, Beckham and Jorge Mas, one of his co-owners, were on a terrace on the second floor of the office building and watched the scene. Across the street, the stadium parking lot had been transformed into a COVID-19 vaccination center; cars lined up to infinity.

The stadium was rented for one day to the local Boys & Girls Club, generating revenue that helps pay for running an MLS team during the pandemic. Similar to the training that Brandon Marshall, former Miami Dolphins receiver, organized on a practice field for young players with potential to be chosen in the NFL draft, apart from the decision to lease the stadium to the Montreal Foot Club to play their home games during the 2021 MLS season.

"You have to adapt to the situation," says Mas, who holds the title of Managing Owner (the former CEO of the telephone company Sprint Marcelo Claure and the technology businessman Masayoshi Son, of the powerful Japanese conglomerate SoftBank, own shares in the club). "With the reduced season, with the absence of fans, with the restrictions that we face, last year was a challenge."

On the pitch it was worse.

Inter Miami became the first team in league history to lose its first five games. He finished the campaign with seven wins, three draws and thirteen losses, to be in ninth place in the Eastern Conference, made up of 12 teams; apart from being the worst record with which Beckham has been associated in his professional career. Miami fell two rungs behind the other MLS expansion team that debuted last year, Nashville SC, who entered the circuit with minimal expectations and an owner whose admittedly unromantic financial interests include shipping barges and the custom book printing Nashville won more games than they lost during the regular season; subsequently eliminated Inter Miami from the playoffs by winning by a score of 3-0.

As a player, Beckham was attracted to successful clubs, and they were attracted to him. The midfielder played for four of the biggest teams in Europe (Manchester United, Real Madrid, AC Milan and PSG) and won championships with three of them, as well as in MLS with the Los Angeles Galaxy. Since he negotiated a future option for an expansion franchise in the clauses of his first contract as a player in MLS, the 45-year-old Beckham has had plenty of time to imagine what it would be like to take ownership of a team. Failure, however temporary, never crossed his mind. “We set a high bar for ourselves,” he said. "As individuals, Jorge and I set high standards in our businesses, and that is how we want to run the club."

This is how Beckham, who has the helm in all aspects of football, fired technical director Diego Alonso last January to hire Phil Neville, his former Manchester United teammate. He replaced athletic director Paul McDonough, who was snatched from Atlanta United with much fanfare, for Chris Henderson from the Seattle Sounders. Additionally, Beckham oversaw the acquisition of 13 new players, which involved the reform of almost half of the team. A year after playing Inter Miami's opening game in Los Angeles, seeing so many new faces in the training room was almost as unexpected as the long line at the vaccination center.

Beckham spent the first 10 months of the pandemic in England. He first returned to the complex in late December and hasn't left the region since. Of all the changes Inter Miami has undergone, his presence on the scene could be the most significant. The club has been sculpted in Beckham's image, from the emphasis on a strong youth academy and intense training sessions, to the unique White Herons logo he helped design. With Beckham out of sight, Inter Miami looked like any other expansion team, striving for an identity.

Although he remains one of the most famous people in the world, Beckham surprises with his accessibility. If he sees someone he doesn't know, he will come over to greet him, looking him in the eye. "It's David Beckham, born in Essex," says Neville. “The boy who shows the same respect for the chef upstairs as for the prop man downstairs, as well as for Gonzalo Higuaín”, a striker who had a long stint with the Argentine national team, Real Madrid and Juventus before signing with the Inter-Miami.

As the owner of the club, Beckham appears to feel just as comfortable in the sports wing of the building, where the gym and dressing rooms are located, as he does in the commercial wing. “His daily presence on site, even if he's just upstairs in his office, means there's now a connection between all of us in the club,” says Neville.

And at least until Lionel Messi decides to acquire a team, no other football club owner has the prestige of him. "Having David here is just inspiring," says Henderson.

Previously, Henderson was the architect of much of the Sounders' success, from their inaugural season in 2009 to lifting two MLS Cups. He was attracted to Miami, like so many others, thanks to the opportunity to work with Beckham. Just seeing Beckham in the parking lot is enough to remind his players that what's going on in Miami is no ordinary project. "Only that can make the guys give an extra five or 10 percent," said Scotland striker Lewis Morgan, Inter Miami's MVP in the 2020 season.

With characteristic thoroughness, Beckham has immersed himself in each and every aspect of team ownership. He has been helped by the fact that his frequent trips around China and throughout Europe seeking sponsorships and supporting his wife's fashion company took a break during the pandemic.

“I like to be physically present, watching the training sessions, watching the routines that they go through,” says Beckham. “I talk to our physical therapists, our doctors, our physical trainers, our chefs, the parents of our U-13 and U-14 players. I have been extremely fortunate to have played with the biggest clubs, the biggest managers, with the biggest players, on the biggest stage in football. I would like to believe that my involvement, even if the players just see me sitting here training, has made a big difference.”

That involvement carries a huge potential advantage, especially at a time when the biggest names of the last decade in MLS (Didier Drogba and Frank Lampard, Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Beckham himself) are no longer playing on their courts. “We have an owner who could be considered one of the most famous people on the planet,” says David Bruce, the league's senior vice president. "He transcends the worlds of sport, culture and lifestyle in a way that not many people can." Add the glamor of Miami, and we have the potential to have an iconic American team for the first time since the New York Cosmos of the 1970s. "Miami can be a great franchise and a great market," says Bill Manning, president of the Toronto F.C. “I feel incredibly excited about it.” However, Manning warns, "they have to win."

If they don't, they risk putting to public shame someone who has spent a career meticulously avoiding it. The Beckham brand is at stake. No wonder then that he wants to stay to supervise everything.

The routine was repeated week after week at the Beckham country house, located in Chipping Norton in the Cotswolds, where the family spent last summer to take refuge in the midst of the pandemic. At midnight or 1 a.m., Beckham would curl up on the couch with a son or two, his old friend and business partner Dave Gardner, and high expectations. It didn't take long for the frustration to set in.

Inter Miami's inspired play cycles often included a near miss by Morgan or Mexican offensive midfielder Rodolfo Pizarro; however, they inevitably ended with a successful counterattack from the other side of the field, a penalty awarded, or a red card. “It was bewildering and incomprehensible,” says Ray Hudson, Inter Miami's official broadcaster. Hudson, a midfielder from England who played more than 300 games for North American teams between 1977 and 1981, later serving as head coach of the Miami Fusion, the region's failed attempt at an MLS franchise, and also coaching DC United. He insists that throughout his career playing, coaching and reporting on soccer, he had never seen a season like this. "Every week there was something different," he said. “You hit your head with your hand. What will come next?

In Beckham's case, watching defeat after defeat from a remote time zone was excruciating. He had never wanted to be one of those team owners who called his coach and, as Beckham himself says, "demand that they replace the left back." But there, in the stillness of the night, Beckham could see that his team was not doing well. "It wasn't a question of saying, 'Why don't we play a 4-4-2 formation?'" he said. "It was about the little details, which are actually the most important, because they become bigger problems."

“Being a former player, you can understand things that go wrong in certain positions, or in the way we play, or just in the way we jump on the pitch. You get to know the signs.”

To be fair, few clubs anywhere in the world were affected by the pandemic in the same way as Inter Miami. Unlike clubs like Nashville, who made it to MLS after spending a stint in the United Soccer League (USL), Miami was built from the ground up. The players barely knew each other. Some arrived a few days before playing the opening match. “We weren't able to do any on-campus bonding sessions,” says Morgan. "Afterwards, we couldn't put our season in jeopardy by going out to lunch as a group."

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Not having fans in the stadium evaporated much of the excitement inherent in an inaugural campaign. In September, “Pipa” Higuaín, a world-class gunner whose older brother Federico also plays with the club, arrived as reinforcements; and stylish midfielder Blaise Matuidi. However, the signings arrived from Juventus in Italy, a club used to overwhelming most rivals; and adjusting to the mentality of an expansion team over the course of a season was predictably difficult. Fans were finally allowed in in limited numbers last October; but at that time, the level of Inter Miami was irreversibly bad.

Or not?

When you look at their games in detail, [the players] were incredibly unlucky,” said Jim Curtin, head coach of the Philadelphia Union. The Union beat Inter Miami twice, in July and September, by a combined score of 5-1. "However, they dominated us for long periods," Curtin said. He describes the Florida club as a sleeping giant. "In the key positions, in the back of the field, I think they did well." Curtin himself wanted to have the services of Pizarro, the object of the most expensive transfer in the history of Liga MX to MLS. With a full training camp behind him, the 32-year-old Higuain is “ready to break out,” says Curtin. And the coach voted for Morgan as part of his ideal MLS XI.

Which leaves us with the topic of coaches. Before hiring Alonso, Beckham and Mas held discussions with a list of candidates who seemed more suited to a club with the history and reputation of an AS Monaco, or Aston Villa, than an MLS franchise without playing a single match.

Roberto Martinez, who lifted the FA Cup with Wigan, finished fifth in the Premier League table with Everton and currently works as Belgium manager, was an obvious possibility. Like Gennaro Gattuso, who served as coach of AC Milan and currently works with Napoli; and Santiago Solari, Beckham's teammate at Real Madrid and who now leads Mexico's Club América. Patrick Vieira, a prominent midfielder from Beckham's generation who spent three seasons as NYCFC manager, was "close, extremely close" to arriving, according to Mas. Marcelo Gallardo, coach of River Plate, agreed to go to Miami, but they could not agree on the terms of his contract.

Alonso, the eventual chosen one, couldn't help but seem like a consolation prize. He had coached six clubs (two in Uruguay, two in Paraguay, two in Mexico) and the Uruguay national team. On one occasion, specifically in the 2001-02 season, he scored 22 goals wearing the Atlético de Madrid shirt; however, his name was hardly known to the average South Florida soccer fan. He wasn't hired until after Christmas and aside from his brief interactions in Spain's La Liga, he had no prior history with Beckham. All this would not have mattered, if the season had progressed normally. But last summer, as Beckham desperately tried to communicate telepathically with his coach an ocean away, he couldn't help but feel clueless as to what Alonso was thinking.

Much has been said about the fact that Beckham hired one of his oldest friends to run his football club. From a distance, it looked like an act of desperation. Neville's managerial record is short and non-existent at club level. He took charge of the England women's team in 2018 and did quite well, before finishing with seven defeats in his last 11 games. Before that, he was part of the coaching staff led by David Moyes at Manchester United for a single season, 2013-14, and later with Valencia during the tumultuous 2015-16 campaign with Nuno Espirito Santo and later, at the helm of his brother Gary. It's hard to imagine that his résumé would have fallen into the same pile as those of Gattuso and Vieira, if Beckham didn't know about him.

But Beckham does know him well. "Since we were about 14, 15 years old," Beckham said.

Neville, who is a year younger than Beckham, believes they first met when he was eleven years old. They broke through the Manchester United youth academy together in the early 1990s as part of the 'Class of '92', alongside Ryan Giggs, Paul Scholes, Nicky Butt and Gary Neville, under the supervision of the legendary Sir Alex Ferguson. By 1996, the Red Devils had won the Premier League and FA Cup double. Beckham, gifted with immense talents, honed them through an extraordinary work ethic. The Neville brothers, whose talents were less evident, worked harder. They added so much work time that, according to Beckham himself, “we used to laugh at them”.

But it is precisely that devotion that Beckham feels was missing from last year's squad. “I would watch the games, thinking, 'What did they do during the week beforehand?'” says Beckham. “Did they prepare well? Did the players see videos of the opponent we were up against? Are the coaches seeing the boys from the quarry on the weekends? And why did we fall back in the 60th minute? Why don't we push? Beckham doesn't have to convey his expectations to his new manager; Neville's aspirations come from the same place. “Phil has already told me: 'If a player doesn't reach a certain physical level, he won't come out on the pitch,'” Beckham said. "No matter who he is."

Neville arrives at around 6am most of the time. "And he's still there at seven at night," Beckham said approvingly. What he does throughout that time is adapt Ferguson's tactical philosophy to America today. “Many of the values ​​that David wants to implement within the football club come from the values ​​implemented at Manchester United,” said Neville. These values ​​go far beyond what happens during the action of the match, or even in training. "Humility," he indicates. “Do the right thing, every minute of every day. The way you dress. The way you talk to others. And simply, the basic values ​​that our parents probably taught us. If there's a bottle on the pitch, you go over there and pick it up."

Whether Ferguson's philosophy will work in the world of MLS remains to be seen. For one thing, European managers tend to underestimate the difficulty of the league, not to mention the Byzantine complexity of its player recruitment regulations. Notable disappointments of his include Ruud Gullit, Frank De Boer and Thierry Henry. "We've had European managers come into this league and they didn't really understand the rules, they didn't really anticipate the travel or the weather," says Beckham. The former player is referring, among others, to Gullit, who was manager of the Galaxy during Beckham's arrival. After expressing his astonishment at his inability to sign players in the amount he wanted, Gullit lasted less than a season before returning to Europe.

"It's a unique league, in a lot of ways," Union manager Curtin said. “You have lots of different playstyles. It takes certain elements of the Argentine league, the fight and the intensity; but other matches can look and feel like a Premier League fixture. Travel is tough, and hot weather means you can't always play the way you want. You have to adapt, not just month to month, but week to week."

Neville believes that he is ready to take on the challenge. Fifteen years ago, when Beckham first went to Los Angeles, he started watching television broadcasts of MLS games. "After David, there was Robbie Keane, and Steven Gerrard and Frank Lampard," he said. He insists that he watched every single one of Inter Miami's games last season, long before he had any idea that he would end up taking over the reins of the club. When he arrived he saw them again, although with different eyes. "Last year was a disappointment, but there were multiple factors," he said. "This year, we wiped the slate clean."

Determined not to be caught off guard, Neville surrounded himself with MLS veterans such as Henderson and former NYCFC head coach Jason Kreis, who serves as his assistant. "I know there haven't been many foreign coaches who have been successful," Neville said. “That is my personal and individual motivation. When I go back to my apartment and think about Philip Neville, instead of the team, there's a bit of 'I'm going to show them that a foreign manager is capable of succeeding here'. You know, a little bit of 'I'll show them that it can be done'.

It is a sunny Saturday morning in March, a month before the start of the 2021 season. Beckham is holding meetings inherent to his ownership status within the complex. Neville fulfills his duties with the first team. However, the lure of watching football live is too strong.

Fort Lauderdale FC, an affiliate of Inter Miami in the USL, has a tryout training for semi-professional players on one of the courts located in the back of the complex. At 11 o'clock, the old friends have joined Henderson and assistant coach Anthony Pulis, son of itinerant England manager Tony Pulis, in the nearby corner. Beckham shows off his usual dapper look, dressed in a black Inter Miami training jersey adorned with those iconic, aspirational herons. Neville wears a generic Adidas jersey in Manchester United red. The quality of the game is brisk, if uneven. Beckham believes that some of the hopefuls have potential to play in the professional; he was able to verify it, according to what he affirms, “after two minutes watching them play”.

For someone with such a glamorous reputation, Beckham spends a lot of time immersed in Inter Miami's youth academy. He believes that the way to build a world-class club is to have a recruitment system capable of identifying and attracting talent during adolescence, and then nurturing them into adulthood. "I've said from the beginning that it's not just about the team that plays in the stadium," he said. “It is about the boys of 13, 14, 15, 17, 23 years. Because at the end of the day, we are a club. Right, we have a team that plays in the MLS. But more than that, we are a club. All our coaches, in all categories, must be aligned with what these players do on these two courts located here. If they are not, we are making a mistake.”

Fortunately, the MLS system rewards player development. Players who come from a team's academy are not subject to the league draft and are not considered for salary cap purposes. Teams that have invested resources in their youth teams, such as Philadelphia and Dallas, have been rewarded with a steady stream of talent destined for their first team. "If he can get a few youngsters to become top-tier footballers, that will help a lot," says Bryan Robson, who captained Manchester United during Beckham's first two seasons with the senior team. “And David knows that buying hits is very difficult. Players can become mercenaries at the end of their careers. You must be careful with it.”

The problem is that the world is already watching Inter Miami. Building progressively is not a luxury that podcast hosts and tweeters gave David Beckham when he decided to own a soccer club, especially when he insisted that Miami could eventually "be the biggest club in the world." Virtually every major player over the age of 30 has been pitched as a sensation signing for the next year or two, often by their own agents. Neville receives calls daily. “Brilliant, very brilliant position players in the world of soccer,” he said.

One of them was Higuain, who seems not to have lost conditions at 32 years old. Matuidi, whose signing by McDonough is the subject of a league investigation as a possible salary-cap violation, is already 34 years old. But he acknowledges that many of the big names that circulated as tentative targets exactly a year ago (Edinson Cavani, Dries Mertens) wanted to come. The pandemic ended all hope.

The main acquisitions of the club during the past winter season; namely, Stoke City's battle-hardened defender Ryan Shawcross and Gregore, a defensive midfielder from Bahia, won't be selling many season tickets. Gregore has not played outside of Brazil. The rough-and-tumble Shawcross did it for a number of years on cold, rainy Stoke nights, as the saying goes; but now he must adjust to the duller environment of South Florida, not to mention the sweltering temperatures. Inter Miami is still trying to sign some of the world's leading figures, Beckham insists; however, he does not want them to use the club as a highway out of retirement, in the same way that old stars, from Pelé to Javier “Chicharito” Hernández, have taken advantage of American soccer. "They must be hungry," Beckham said. "Not to come on vacation, but to win championships."

Obviously, it's easier to convince a big international star to bring his talents to South Beach than to Sacramento. However, the main attraction is Beckham, obviously. "In fact, he is a very special person," says Ivan Gazidis, former MLS deputy commissioner, who worked in Arsenal's management between 2009 and 2018 and is currently part of AC Milan. “People tend to underestimate David a little bit. There is a reason why he only played for big clubs: he fought his way there. There will be those who doubt and feel skeptical, but that is nothing new for him. He is thoughtful in what he says and when he makes a commitment, he does it with all his heart. So when he says that Inter Miami will be a world-class club, I wouldn't underestimate him."

But if it doesn't happen, if Inter Miami continues to falter this season, Beckham's meticulously crafted image is likely to suffer. "He will want to win in Miami," says MLS executive Bruce. “That will be extremely important for him, to be successful as the owner of that club.” Today, with his Adidas clothing line, his high-end sponsors and even Inter Miami himself, he sells the David Beckham brand. Just as he did during his playing days, he leaves as little as possible to chance.

Back on the terrace, Beckham sits down for a photo shoot. Watching him get photographed is akin to watching him take a free kick. He has choreographed the result in his mind and from his idea he works to make it come true. On this afternoon, the wind ruffles his hair. Beckham will not allow it. He fixes his hair with his hands, so that it is in a certain way. When the photographer pauses, Beckham repeats the movement. He unzips his pink training jacket, maybe an eighth of an inch. Then he raises her, an inch and a half. The wind blows strongly. With a look, a gesture, a courteous word, he makes his disagreement known. As almost always happens, Beckham achieves what he sets out to do. The photo session moves inside the building.