Upon arriving in the United States to play with the Los Angeles Galaxy, David Beckham was suffering from an injured ankle. The injury was enough to keep him out of several games, which caused a sports media stir. In this day and age of expanded media coverage, this type of reaction is to be expected, especially when dealing with an athlete of Beckham's stature. The term that was commonly thrown around was "Bench It Like Beckham", a spin on the film Bend It Like Beckham.
The picture above was taken from the August 27th issue of ESPN The Magazine, and shows a satirical take on the Bench It Like Beckham phrase. While the criticism is a bit extreme (it's not exactly easy to play 90 minutes of soccer on a bum ankle), it isn't completely unexpected that sports commentators like Jim Rome and Tony Reali have been having a field day with Beckham's lack of playing time.
Look closely at that picture again. Even though it jabs at Beckham, it still shows seven children wearing his jersey, which leads to the business angle of this blog entry. An article on Examiner.com, which is a collaborative website of three seperate newspapers located in San Francisco, Washington DC, and Baltimore, recently reported that Beckham's jersey is the best selling in the United States. This is an amazing feat for a soccer player to outsell other, more American sports, especially with fans in an uproar about his lack of playing time. By selling more than 200,000 jerseys in a little over a months time, it looks like the decision to pay Beckham big money is already starting to pay off.
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