'They spat on me.' All the details you might have missed in the David Beckham docuseries.

Netflix's four-part docuseries Beckham has stirred up plenty of controversy around David and Victoria Beckham's marriage. 

Almost every headline is surrounding the couple finally discussing David's alleged affair with Rebecca Loos in 2004. The Beckhams didn't exactly confirm the affair, but they did share how they reacted to the rumours, with Victoria describing that time in their lives as "the hardest period because it felt like the world was against us."

As intriguing as this part of the documentary was, the cheating storyline has overshadowed the other revelations shared in Beckham, which are just as interesting. 

The English public viciously bullied David Beckham in 1998.

1998 was a big year for the couple. On the eve of the World Cup, which would see David represent England against Argentina, Victoria phoned her then-boyfriend to say she was pregnant.

The couple were overjoyed, but the mood would dramatically shift after David's infamously got sent off with a red penalty card in the game for seemingly kicking Argentina's Diego Simeone. England would be defeated by Argentina, a loss almost entirely attributed to Beckham by the English public, and not the other 11 players who lost the game. 

The response was overwhelming. David became public enemy number one. 

"What I went through was so extreme. The whole country hated me," David reflected, with the documentary revealing the football star received death threats and was even sent a bullet in the mail. 

"It changed my life. I felt very vulnerable and alone. Wherever I went I got abuse every single day. People look at you in a certain way, spit at you, abuse you, come up to your face and say some of the things that they said. That was difficult."

The public taunted Victoria Beckham with offensive songs. 

As David returned to play for Manchester United, the abuse didn't stop. The crowd would cheer every time the footballer was injured by a competer and boo him constantly throughout each game. 

But then their attention turned toward Victoria. 

When Victoria attended the games while pregnant with their son Brooklyn, the crowd would make up sexist chants directed at her. "Every football fan sang this song," David recalled, which featured expletive lyrics describing the Spice Girl doing a sex act. 

Victoria reflected on hearing the foul-mouthed and misogynistic chants. "I remember sitting down and the lady next to me turned to me and didn’t know what to say," she said. "We did not know what to do. It felt like we were drowning."

Years on from the public hate campaign, Victoria says she still 'wants to kill' those who bullied her husband. She reveals that in the weeks that followed the World Cup, David was "clinically depressed".

For what it's worth, Argentina's Diego Simeone admitted in the Netflix documentary that he exaggerated his response to David's kick at the World Cup, and didn't agree he deserved such a harsh penalty. 

The couple received kidnapping threats after Brooklyn's birth.

Amid the controversy, after Brooklyn was born in 1999, the couple said they were confronted by threats their newborn would be kidnapped.  

“We were getting kidnapping threats, right from when we had Brooklyn. I mean, you can’t even explain how that feels, because we couldn’t hide," Victoria said. 

David grew so paranoid that he slept with his back against the hospital door to protect Victoria and Brooklyn. "The moment he came out, I all of sudden I thought, ‘How am I going to protect him?’. That night, Brooklyn slept next to Victoria. Victoria was like, ‘Come on, squeeze on the bed with me,’ and I was like, ‘Absolutely not'," he said. 

"I was paranoid that someone was gonna steal him.”

The lighter side of the Beckhams.

Scattered throughout some of the darker moments were some sweet moment that showed why Victoria and David's marriage has lasted almost 25 years. 

David joked with Victoria when she referred to both their families as "working class". David poked his head from behind a door, to say "Be honest!" After a bit of back and forth, as Victoria maintained "I am being honest!", she eventually admitted her father used to pick her up from school in a Rolls Royce in the '80s. 

In another moment, the couple reflected on their 1999 wedding which featured a queen and king throne and a bright purple wedding dress and suit worn by the newlyweds. David had some regrets about the outfit choices, but Posh stood by it.

“It was fun!” she admitted, adding “Okay, I don’t know where the thrones came from.”

Beckham is available to watch on Netflix from October 4, 2023.

Feature image: Netflix. 

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