David Beckham won league titles in four countries, a first for an English player
David Beckham's parents regularly travelled about 200 miles from London to watch Manchester United at home. Their son grew up to wear the club's number 7 shirt, win six Premier League titles there, and later become the only English player to claim league titles in England, Spain, the United States and France.
Born on 2 May 1975 in Leytonstone, London, he was given the middle name Robert after Bobby Charlton, his father's favourite player. Small as a boy, he missed out on England Schoolboys, but he attended one of Charlton's soccer schools, won a training session with Barcelona through a talent contest, and served as a United mascot in 1986. He signed schoolboy forms with United on his 14th birthday and joined as a trainee in July 1991.
Alongside Ryan Giggs, the Neville brothers, Nicky Butt and Paul Scholes, he won the FA Youth Cup in 1992 and made his first-team debut at 17 that September. A loan at Preston followed, where he scored straight from a corner, before Alex Ferguson gambled on his youngsters in 1995-96 and they won the league and FA Cup double. On the opening day of the next season he lobbed Wimbledon's goalkeeper from the halfway line, a strike a later poll rated the finest ever scored on a Premier League opening weekend. He inherited the number 7 once worn by George Best and Eric Cantona, topped the league with 13 assists in 1997-98 and was part of the 1999 treble.
Four seasons at Real Madrid ended with a La Liga title in the last of them, and in 2007 he joined LA Galaxy in a move seen as historic for American football. Loans at AC Milan made him the first British player to reach 100 Champions League games, and he won the MLS Cup in 2011 and 2012 before retiring in May 2013 after a short spell at Paris Saint-Germain.
For England he won 115 caps, 58 of them as captain over six years, and played at three World Cups. Runner-up for the Ballon d'Or in 1999, he has been a UNICEF ambassador since 2005 and is president and co-owner of Inter Miami, which began playing in 2020.
Source: David Beckham
