Runaway asteroid Rooney emerges at Birmingham as a genuine survivor

There were some excellent bits in the David Beckham documentary, which was genuinely absorbing despite feeling at times like two hours of really good clips of football, music and beautiful people from the 1990s, padded out with another two hours of sombre, auteurish close-ups of current-day Beckham thinking about things.

Just give us more bits where a wired-looking Rio Ferdinand says “fuck” a lot. Plus all available footage of prime years Alex Ferguson where he seems to be bathed in a vengeful cold white light, like a 17th century witch-finding puritanical priest being asked questions about haircuts by sullen men with dictaphones.

Perhaps the most notable part, and a point that always got slightly lost in the fame-haze, was the reminder of what an authentically brilliant, high-craft footballer Beckham was. And brilliant at a time when the game was far less complex tactically, more linear and straight-line, but also more open to flights of fancy. Beckham basically invented his own way to play, bent the game to his gifts, created passing angles, lines, trajectories, right down to a basic way of kicking the ball. His celebrity took him to Real Madrid. His talent carried him through it.

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Equally striking was the absurdity of the public response to his sending-off against Argentina, really one of the most piss-poor weak, nothing red cards imaginable. It seems amazing now that people in the late 1990s didn’t have anything else to get so upset about. But then, it was, apparently, the end of history. Bad things only happened far away. Blur versus Oasis was the headline on the Six O’Clock news. The intensity of human feeling doesn’t diminish. It just finds something to attach itself to.

Otherwise the main energy source in Beckham was the same fuel the Beckham Identity has been burning ever since, the spectacle of his still-startling youthful beauty and charisma, the golden-halo excitement that such a stage and such a personage should exist, a perfect expression of the plastic prosperity of the millennial years.

Nothing the current Beckham has to say on screen is very candid or new. Why should it be? The final scenes seem to suggest he spends most of his time now in a kind of bespoke luxury tent-shed cooking things on his grill and looking like a handsome, whiskery badger. Which is a happy outcome, but perhaps not something it’s necessary to know.

Otherwise, the most interesting thing about the final instalment of Beckham, was the fact it coincided with a far more significant real-world event: the return from America of Wayne Rooney, in his new role as Birmingham City manager. Another reprise, another new chapter. And the two things feel quite naturally linked.

Rooney is 10 years younger than Beckham, although frankly he seems to have spent an age being bruised and buffeted by this world, a man hurtling through time like a runaway asteroid. Nobody knows if this will turn out to be a good appointment, or if Rooney has a genuine talent for management. It is a hire based on the classic intangibles of name and status.

But it feels good. Birmingham is a great opportunity, a club with energy and heart and a vague sense of some Bluesy big-city fit with the new manager, albeit based on nothing more than colours and vibes. And for all his rawness as a manager, Rooney is a persuasive presence at any level. He knows this game so well, has spent his life inside the beast.

It was great to see him back at the press conference table. He looks so wise and sandpapery these days, thrillingly bearded, like a Nordic god wandered down out of the hills. Beyond that he remains a unique figure in English football, and distinct from Beckham, for all the shared staging points. We may be done with the past, but the past isn’t done with us. And clearly this is all still a matter of deep personal importance.

A theme in Beckham’s film is a sense of unfinished business with the football of his youth, a sense that the collateral damage of those early years being monstered by the press and blowtorched with public rage has never really been balanced out, dues paid, accounts settled.

In that sense Rooney and Beckham are uniquely tied together: the first English male footballers to be fully and relentlessly processed through the modern machine of celebrity and mass media.

This doesn’t happen any more in the same way. Footballers have more control of their profile. They’re also richer. Football is enough. Beckham at his Manchester United peak was on almost £100,000 a week. Kevin De Bruyne gets four times that much without having to sell crisps in Japan or appear shirtless on the cover of Ape magazine covered in Tabasco. Why bother?

More to the point, football celebrity was an unusually cruel new world in the Beckham-Rooney years. This was an industry that had run ahead of itself, bloomed into a rapacious human-talent grinder before it had the time or the will to develop support or protection for those at its centre.

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At least with Beckham, there was the sense he had some other place to escape into. He actually wanted to be a celebrity. Rooney was younger and more vulnerable when these forces were applied to him. And that world treated him so roughly, from the early hysteria when he was portrayed as a kind of foundling footballer, discovered crawling out of a Croxteth dustbin, to being rushed back constantly from injury, to mocking front-page pictures of his family on holiday, to having his teenage sexual misadventures gleefully fanfared by the adults of the press (what, seriously, was all that about?), to the sense he was basically left alone to deal with all this.

Rather than a lost talent, Rooney is a genuine survivor. He adapted and evolved, from that perfect galloping teenager skittering about the place, as though some genius-level pitch invader had come barrelling out over the advert boards; through the unmannered brilliance of Euro 2004, when he was, in that moment, the most exciting player in the world; to that sublime period at Manchester United, the Ronaldo years, when all those doors were still open to him.

He remained a wonderful goalscorer before injuries and intake began to bite. He was vilified with England for what felt like an eternity, the most visible face of a decade of structural decline. But there is a genuine well of affection for Rooney out there. The match-going support at Old Trafford loved him to the end. England fans on a train in some distant capital will routinely chant his name before anyone else’s.

Perhaps this is because he speaks to something that has become slightly lost. Arsène Wenger observed recently that there are more players of high technique around now; but fewer untamed talents, players with the kind of brilliance that takes you into strange and exhilarating places. Rooney was one of these. Football, in its modern-but-not-modern state, treated him brutally at times. It feels like a small kind of victory that he’s still here wanting more.