Beckham Was Pimped, Dallas Is Screwed

By: Laurie | July 31st, 2007

The quick and dirty news: David Beckham is not going to Dallas due to that nagging ankle injury. And yes, this is the only Frisco trip the post-Beckham Galaxy will be making this year. So if you’re in the Dallas area and bought SuperLiga tickets with the intent of seeing Beckham? You’re hosed.

I’ll be the first to say that this is NOT Beckham’s fault. (Aside from the whole “Insisting on
Playing Injured in La Liga” thing.) Injuries happen in soccer and are pretty much uncontrollable.

What bugs me, though? I am really, truly bothered by the pimping of the Beckham face and image to sell tickets when the Galaxy and MLS had full knowledge that he might not play. I am beyond bothered by the billboards emblazoned with Beckham’s face which announce, “The wait is over!”

Uhh… No, it’s not.

I stumbled on a very interesting post yesterday from a Dallas fan. I encourage you to go in and read the whole thing, because it has a number of valid issues, and if I were to quote it all I would feel as if I were plagiarizing. But here are some of her thoughts:

Several weeks back, around mid-June, tickets went on sale for Tuesday’s game … The catch was that you could not buy a single ticket at that time for the game. You had to be a season ticket holder or a “partial” season ticket holder. For people who don’t understand, the game on Tuesday is part of the SuperLiga tournament, so my understanding is that it was not included in the season ticket holder package.

While the ticket prices varied depending on where your seats were, my friends shelled out about $100 for a five-pack of tickets, including [the Galaxy-Dallas] match, the 4th of July game, and future games against the Kansas City Wizards, Toronto FC, and the Houston Dynamo. Additionally, the ticket buyers did not get to pick which games were in the package, and seats were a constant throughout. Not all that different than what you might expect, but a little out of procedure for trying to buy a single game ticket without waiting for the game to sell out and missing the opportunity.

Whether it’s a good reason to buy a match ticket or not, the premise behind buying these tickets, however, was that fans would get to see Beckham. They didn’t buy the package to see the L.A. Galaxy, who Dallas manhandled back in June, and who might not put up much of a game again despite Landon Donovan and Ante Jazic returning to the lineup. They bought the package to see Beckham in an American kit. For him not to at least make the trip is a huge smack in their faces. A smack that could have been avoided for a game that is still trying to sell “standing-room-only” tickets.

That’s the thing about obsessively promoting one player as the savior of a team, and even as the savior of an entire league. It’s unfair to the team, it’s unfair to the league, and it’s unfair to the fans. Beckham is one amazing player, yes. But it takes eleven players to make a team and twenty-two to make a game. To promote him as THE player in the games, to continually pimp his face and his play to sell tickets and jerseys? It’s not right. It borders on the unethical. This is slotted home to us, the fans, when an injury like this one occurs.

Soccer is a team game. NO single player in the world, including Beckham, can live up to this kind of hype.

I have spent the past few months desperately wanting Beckham as a player on the Galaxy to fill the gaping holes in the midfield. I’ve been desperate for a player who can move the ball forward, and there’s a good chance that Beckham is this player. But the further this goes, the more I am troubled by the promotion of Brand Beckham as the entity which will create the on-field miracles, when in fact these miracles are things that one player alone is incapable of creating.

And most of all, I am troubled by the pimping of Brand Beckham around the league solely to bring in the bucks. It feels as if MLS has sold out.