At the time there was an internal rumour that “with what David Beckham generated, half the squad was paid”.

His was a strategic signing, which put Real Madrid in another dimension. Now in vogue with the release of his documentary, 13 former team-mates look back at what was probably the most media-friendly footballer in history.

“People waited to see Figo, Zidane, Ronaldo… but Beckham eclipsed them all”, says Paco Pavon, a canterano who gave his name to that generation of ‘Zidanes and Pavones’.

Ruben de la Red, who was present on those Asian tours that Madrid made fashionable thanks to the Briton, is testimony to this.

“Except maybe Lionel Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo, I don’t think there’s been anything like him. I remember we arrived in China and they put 200 flower necklaces on him. It was supposed to be one for everyone, but they put almost all of them on him? You couldn’t even see his face! It was tremendous,” recalls the youth player.

For him, “to have shared a stand with Becks has been one of the best things in my career. It was an honour. He’s an incredible person who always had a smile on his face. And yes, he smelled good – it’s the truth! We called him the handsome guy because he was. And as you can see, time goes by and he’s still the same”.

He was above everyone else in the media, but that didn’t change his figure. “He was aware of his character, but he didn’t change. He would come, he would shake your hand…. If there was no food, he would stay without eating or he would share his own. If there was no stretcher he would stay on the floor. You think that when they get so high, like other players, they are going to change. But that wasn’t the case for him. There was such a generation of great players that I think they helped each other.

The show of private challenges

One of the things that most caught the attention of his ‘exes’ were the private challenges that Becks, Figo and Roberto Carlos would do once the training session was over.

“They would take penalties, fouls or hit the crossbar and it was a spectacle. That alone was worth paying the entrance fee,” says Carlos Sanchez, one of the goalkeepers who tried to spoil the party.

“I rarely stopped them, but they did what they wanted,” says someone who was surprised, for the better, at how he was remembered after a long break.

“I was injured for many months and, when I came back, he approached me and took a great interest in me, that I was a canterano who went my way. That’s why I always tell my kids that he was a really cool guy. Although I didn’t talk to him much, but we always had the feeling that he knew more Spanish than he seemed to”, he says with a laugh.

His refined technique left no one indifferent. “I’ve never seen anyone put the ball so many times where they want it with such precision,” says Antonio Nunez.

“In tactical training, we used to rehearse the long throw. He would make his gesture with his arms, lift his head up and put it there…. He would indicate with his finger where he was going to put it and it would fall like a feather,” says Miguel Palanca.

For Paco Pavon, the most impressive thing happened “when we played three-on-three in tight spaces and he would put it on your head or wherever you asked him to. I’ve never seen a player with that technique again, and there have been some great players…”.

He was such a marksman that, in the games of shooting at team-mates, “the only one who could take 20 shots in a row and hit his opponent was him”, according to Borja Fernandez.

But quality was not his only strong point. “He was the one who put in the most intensity. I think he did cross country when he was young and that helped him. In the pre-seasons he was always the most enduring. The best thing about him was that, even though he was a star or a star player, he didn’t complain when he got kicked. They kicked him and he never complained, he always had a smile on his face. Lopez Caro took me to a lot of training sessions with them because he was also intense, I checked him out and he flipped out,” confirms David Barral.

A twist with the ticket office

Wearing the number 22, Paco often saw the inside of his locker: “It had everything. But there are things that I don’t think were true, like the fact that he only wore his pants once and then threw them away. Of course, he was always a trendsetter. He wore a hat in summer and flip-flops in winter… And then they imitated him! After 15 days, a lot of people were wearing the same thing. But nobody looked as good as he did.”

The pants theory is not proven, but, according to Adrian Gonzalez, “what he did change in every game, or at least in the few games I saw him in, was his boots because he had a mega-contract with Adidas. He used to change a pair every game and then, at half-time, they would leave them clean again”.

The one who had access to his locker without consent was Barral: “We were playing in the promotion play-offs with Castilla and Florentino Perez let us play at the Bernabeu. The first time we went into the first team dressing room I went straight to his locker. It was the only one open! We opened it, saw that it was full of photos of his family as well as the usual toiletries, and we took his cologne. We all went out to the game smelling like Beckham. That scent ended up being silver.”

Despite that treacherous robbery, Becks gave David a piece of advice that he still remembers. “I used to watch a few Castilla games. In a game against Lorca, which he followed on TV, he noticed that, after a great play, I passed it back instead of trying to score. The following Monday, in training, he told me that the play was very good, but that I should have finished it. He was a phenomenon.”

A lesson with the photographers

Another who was lucky enough to change near him was Antonio Nunez: “I had him in front of me. I’ve never noticed anyone’s clothes, but I noticed him. And what surprises me even today is that I never saw him repeat any of his clothes. I always wondered how many clothes he had to have. Would they bring him a truckload of clothes every morning? And everything looked good on him, he had so much style.

“Once we arrived at the hotel in Tokyo and, as soon as we got into the room, a pile of clean clothes arrived from the laundry. I didn’t understand anything, because we had just arrived. There were Adidas T-shirts, trousers…. All freshly washed. It soon dawned on me that it had to be Becks‘, and it was! But how could they have washed his clothes when he had just arrived? He was very conspicuous,” says Nunez, recalling how he quickly understood what it meant to travel with Beckham.

“On the first trip we took with him, I realised how crazy it was that he was in the cities. When we landed at the airport I walked out next to him. Soon photographers were crowding around to take pictures of him and one of them hit me on the head with his camera. From then on, the first thing I did when we had a similar situation on our travels was to look where he was so I could get away from him.”

As for the photos, Palanca experienced another one that was more fun and less painful: “I made my debut with the first team at Mestalla. I was in Salgado‘s place, with Raul and Beckham next to me. It was a straight seat. There were a lot of people taking photos. I thought they would take one of me because I was the young canterano, but they were all for him. What I did was to lean forward but unconsciously. Beckham grabbed me and said ‘get over here with me’. I sat next to him so I could be in the photos – a great guy!”

Smiling in any situation

Despite looking serious, the Englishman was the butt of jokes. “Cesar, Solari, Celades… were all with him for a long time. They were bitter about him for hitting him on the arse in training,” says Oscar Minambres. The Spaniard, who remembers him as “someone very square, not sick, but obsessed with doing things well”, is pleased to have shared a stall with him: “He influenced us all, but he was always looking for excellence with a smile on his face”. Among the historic jokes in that dressing room is the day he was mistaken for Guti because of his blond hair.

Only Borja Fernandez reveals a less cheerful conversation: “One day we were in Las Rozas, less than two minutes from the training ground. We were both walking alone towards the pitch, almost without understanding each other. But I remember that, as we entered the pitch, he made gestures in my direction. I thought he was saying something to me, but it was to the paparazzi to stop filming. Then he explained to me the reason for that gesture. They wouldn’t leave him alone at any time. They had to go with bodyguards, they followed him with his children when he went to the nursery or when he stayed for a coffee afterwards. He was followed all the time. That’s when I realised how much pressure he was under and what he faced every day. Unfortunately, it was something that went hand in hand with his character and shows that not everything was nice and precious”.

Lorena Cos, a sports psychologist, explains what such a situation can entail: “The pressure of being a global icon means that not only sport is evaluated from the outside, but absolutely everything you do in any area of your life, both public and private. That is why David probably suffered immense pressure to develop at that level because of the constant analysis he has faced throughout his career, aspects that would undoubtedly generate high levels of anxiety and stress from having to take care of his image with so many demands.”

A professional who could have triumphed in athletics

The one who was by his side all the time during Beckham‘s worst moment at Real Madrid was Jose Luis San Martin, physical trainer at the time.

“Fabio Capello took him away from him in that season (2007) when he found out that he was negotiating with another team. He was left alone with me and there he proved to be a great professional. Despite being sidelined, he trained to the maximum. Physically he was a beast,” he recalls.

So much so that San Martin is convinced that “he would have been a magnificent 800 or 1500m athlete due to his condition”. For him, he was the “typical competitive English player, very intense and mediatic. Luckily, the players talked to Capello and he came back to the team. What’s more, that squad ended up winning LaLiga, although Beckham didn’t fully enjoy that ending because he had an ankle problem before going to the United States, which for me was his big mistake”.

The ‘prof’ has lived a thousand experiences with him, but “most of the anecdotes are not publishable”. At least he remembers his physical power. “We did a lot of long-distance training, the series of 1,000 metres of four laps in four minutes, what I call 4×4. He was out of his mind. He had a very low fat percentage. He admired the demanding trainers and, despite what happened with Fabio, he always gave his all. It was a delight to watch him train. He stood up in the locker room and was an example to the rest of the team.”

He was exemplary even on the bench, where he often shared the bench with David Cobeno. “I don’t know if it was circumstantial or not, but we were together several times. I think he got fed up with me because he had a lot of commitments and I was always asking him for shirts. Every game he gave me one!” says the former goalkeeper, who admits that his rock star aura faded when he was in the dressing room. “He was just another guy, very shy. He would bring his children to the dressing room and they would bathe in the jacuzzi. A very normal guy.”

Almost flawless

Most are full of praise. Javi Balboa confirms that “he treated everyone the same”. Even if you dig around, no shadows emerge beyond how sour his character was when the press suffocated him.

At most, there are those who call him “excessively flirtatious” or “somewhat absent-minded”. An amusing absent-mindedness, saved with mastery, is revealed by Borja Fernandez: “It was in the run-up to a match against Porto at the Bernabeu, with Luxemburgo on the bench, where I was in the starting eleven. He didn’t realise that I wasn’t in the eleven and went out to warm up. When they told him that I wasn’t in the starting eleven, he said ‘OK, but I’ve gone out to move around a bit’. He hadn’t realised! Even in the mistake he was glamorous.”