David Beckham has a ‘fierce temper’ and runs everything, book reveals

(NewsNation) — For decades, most of the public assumed Victoria Beckham was the ice queen who never cracks a smile and wears the trousers, while her footballer hubby, David, was the lovely, slightly dim football god along for the ride.

Total fiction, says Alison Boshoff, the Daily Mail senior reporter who has covered the Beckhams for nearly 30 years and just wrote the definitive biography on the couple, "Brand Beckham."

"The more I got into reporting this, the more I realized that the opposite is true," she confessed to me. The real Victoria? "A very sweet, but deeply insecure person." The real David? "He is a hundred percent in charge and actually quite steely, and has quite a fierce temper."

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Her verdict on her own three decades of coverage: "I actually think I just got them all wrong until I wrote the book."

As for the billion-dollar empire that was David's master plan all along. While Victoria spent years flogging a dead solo career after the Spice Girls split, one insider gave Boshoff the most brutal line in the book: "It's like she won the lottery the first time she bought a ticket. And then she just couldn't get over the fact that the lottery win was done."

David had zero interest in fame for fame's sake. "He was the biggest footballer in the world at the time, pretty much. What he wanted was to be really wealthy," Boshoff said. So he poached Victoria's own manager, Simon Fuller, and "it was the two of them who set up Brand Beckham."

And it worked: Forbes ranks Becks among "only seven sportsmen who are billionaires," and the Sunday Times Rich List puts the couple at £1.2 billion.

"They're like our second royal family in the U.K.," Boshoff said. "We cannot get enough of them."

The Beckhams rake in the dough

But even more bizarre is that the recent family feud has made the Beckhams even more money.

"What all these PRs always say is, oh, scandal's really bad for the brand," Boshoff said. "And with this one, the worse the scandal gets, the more fascinated people are with all the dirty details — the better the brand does."

"David Beckham sells more Stella Artois during the World Cup. He sells more of his overpriced vitamins to you guys in America, more of his honeybee gummies," Boshoff said. "The worse it is, the more people say, oh my God, the fallout with his son — the more stuff he sells."

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"I don't understand how it happens. I'm just an idiot journalist. But this is the way that this one works. The worse it is, the more money everyone makes."

Nice.

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