On a personal level, it’s all extremely sad. A once close family ripped apart by feuding and bitterness. A much-loved son blocking all contact with his parents and siblings.
From another perspective, however, for those who have followed the movements of David and Victoria Beckham in their 30 years in the (carefully curated) spotlight, the public falling out this week of Britain’s alternative royal family has been a car crash from which it is hard to look away.
After months of bubbling bad blood between the Beckhams on one side and their eldest son, Brooklyn, and his wife, Nicola Peltz Beckham, on the other, fed by briefing and counter-briefing on both sides, Brooklyn finally dropped a bomb on Monday by releasing an 821-word statement on his Instagram page.
“I do not want to reconcile with my family,” he wrote, laying out his reasons via a succession of unhappy and at times faintly farcical accusations about his parents’ alleged wrongdoings, which included Victoria pulling out of designing her daughter-in-law’s wedding dress “at the 11th hour” and hijacking the first dance at their wedding to “dance very inappropriately on [sic] me”.
While the detail of his claims has been debated in the days since, perhaps the most wounding parts of the 26-year-old’s statement were his remarks about his parents’ obsession with manipulating their public image. His childhood in the public eye had caused him “overwhelming anxiety”, he wrote, while “performative social media posts, family events and inauthentic relationships have been a fixture of the life I was born into”.
“Countless lies” were placed in the media by David and Victoria “to preserve their own facade”, he said. “But I believe the truth always comes out.”
This would be a tragedy for any family – but because it involves the Beckhams, it is also a potential PR disaster. The couple’s status as globe-bestriding mega-celebrities has been attained, in no small part, through their decades-long focus on shaping, promoting and controlling their image. Whatever the truth of Brooklyn’s individual accusations, their careful portrayal of a harmonious family unit has been comprehensively blown apart.
How much will it matter to brand Beckham, however? No parent gets through life without getting things wrong, but when it comes to managing their image, the Beckhams have built a half-billion pound fortune on not making many mistakes.
The months of feuding between Team Beckham and Team Peltz Beckham may have been unedifying at times, but this high stakes spat has been carefully handled on both sides. After many years working with 19 Entertainment (later XIX), founded by the former Spice Girls manager Simon Fuller, David and Victoria brought their personal publicity in-house in 2019. They established a single powerful team inside his overarching company, David Beckham Ventures, to oversee not just their PR but their commercial and brand partnerships, marketing and financial management. (Publicity for Victoria Beckham’s fashion brand is overseen separately.)
Day to day, the couple’s press operation is led by Nicola Howson, formerly the head of the PR company Freuds and communications director of ITV. Much more than a PR, she also heads Studio 99, the Beckhams’ in-house film production company which made both their recent Netflix documentaries, very much to their specifications. (It was Howson who persuaded Fisher Stevens to present David’s documentary in 2023, she told the Edinburgh TV festival, after he turned her down three times.)
If the Beckham parents have a formidable team in their corner, the same can be said of California-based Brooklyn and Nicola, whose father, Nelson Peltz, is a billionaire investor and Republican party donor. As hostilities escalated last summer, the younger couple hired Matthew Hiltzik, described as an “attack dog” crisis PR who once represented Harvey Weinstein.
The months since have been shaped by tit-for-tat claims and denials to reporters in London and the US. The younger couple had, or had not, been invited to David’s 50th in May. Brooklyn was being controlled by his wife, who is five years his senior, or that’s what his parents’ friends were saying to break them up. David and Victoria had “unfollowed” Brooklyn on Instagram, or they had been blocked by him on the same platform. He had sent a cease and desist letter via his lawyers demanding they stop tagging him in their posts.
However, David and Victoria have made no official public acknowledgment of a feud, either before Brooklyn’s bombshell or since. “The Beckhams are built of sturdy stock,” says Julian Henry, who handled PR for Brand Beckham between 2003 and 2019. “They’re well used to self-inflicted drama, to exaggeration and different shades of hysteria.”
Henry was working with the couple when David had a traumatic falling out with his own father, Ted, which largely remained out of the public eye at the time. While the current frenzy of media interest rages, Henry says, “they’re wisely letting the public and the media absorb what their son has said while their representatives quietly go to work placing ‘distraction’ stories to move the drama on to more controllable ground”.
How serious a crisis is the current moment? “It’s just another chapter in the brand Beckham book.”
The couple’s nose for publicity and image control was evident almost from their earliest days together. The awkward 23-year-old footballer and blushing Spice Girl may have revealed their engagement, in January 1998, to a group of photographers in the driveway of a Cheshire hotel, but that was one of the last major milestones in their relationship that was not disclosed entirely on their terms, or at a price.
Their first pregnancy, Brooklyn’s first baby photos and their wedding in 1999 were all sold to OK! magazine, the last of those for £1m. Late on their own wedding night, while guests were still partying, the couple were to be found in their dressing gowns and slippers poring through photographs with picture editors to approve which images could be published.
By the time David was playing at Real Madrid several years later, he was building an unusually sophisticated media operation around him. By 2004 he had appointed a “global media director”, Simon Oliveira, responsible for all aspects of his image, reputation and endorsements – a highly unusual move at the time.
In April that year, David’s former assistant Rebecca Loos told the News of the World she had had an affair with him. The footballer issued only a carefully worded rebuttal – calling her claim one example of “ludicrous stories about my private life” – then said nothing further for 19 years, before making a very oblique reference in his self-commissioned documentary.
“I think what you see with iconic individuals is it’s not just [about] when things go well, it’s also how they cope when things don’t go so well,” Oliveira has said of the player’s response at the time. “And those moments can be just as impactful in how they grow their IP, their iconography and their fame globally.”
As the dust has settled since Brooklyn’s bombshell, “friends” on his side have briefed reporters that he has “no regrets” about speaking out. “We’re glad we did it,” the couple reportedly told pals, who told the Sun. But some PR experts think it is likely Brooklyn will sustain more lasting damage from the episode than his parents.
“I think he was quite ill-advised in speaking out the way that he did,” says Lou Kelly, the head of consumer at the branding and PR agency Boldspace, arguing that by being highly specific in his accusations against his parents, Brooklyn lays himself open to factchecking which could undermine his credibility. The move would have been discussed by his PR advisers, she says, “but I think there was not enough due diligence and scenario planning around how all of his statements would be then broken down and questioned”.
Lauren Beeching, a PR and crisis management expert, agrees that the older Beckhams’ brand will weather the storm. “From a reputational point of view, the damage is quite limited. That doesn’t mean there isn’t genuine upset behind the scenes, of course there will be.”
She has noticed a generational split in responses, she says, with younger people warming to Brooklyn’s emotional honesty, while those who have followed David and Victoria for decades are more likely to instinctively support them.
“That split I think actually disperses reputational impact rather than concentrating it,” she says – with Brooklyn’s accusation about his mother’s cringeworthy dance being a good example. “While embarrassing for Victoria personally it’s largely been treated online as a meme, and I think once something becomes a source of jokes rather than outrage it stops functioning as a serious reputational threat.”
(One might add to that the ironic social media campaign, following Brooklyn’s post, to drive downloads of Victoria’s indifferent 2001 single Not Such An Innocent Girl, which has this week given the former singer her first ever solo UK No 1.)
The business of being David and Victoria Beckham, meanwhile, has continued this week unchecked. On Tuesday, head-scratchingly, David appeared at the World Economic Forum in Davos alongside the chief executive of Bank of America. On Thursday he posted a slick video to his Instagram promoting Adidas, with whom he has a lifetime commercial partnership. (Other posts to his 88.5m followers – of which recent examples include endorsements of a coffee machine brand, Boss clothing, the art fair Art Basel Qatar, and a beer dispenser – are reported to cost £300,000 a pop.) Victoria is expected at the 50th birthday party of Emma Bunton, Baby Spice, on Saturday. No comment on the Brooklyn affair is likely.
The couple, says former Beckham brand manager Henry, “have a natural instinct for posing silently in the public eye and like to toy with the apparatus of fame. They fully understand the difference between their own reality and what the outside world projects on to them.”
How does he see the family dispute playing out in the long term? “More drama, more moody glares from the family until an eventual kiss and make up, with [the] entire sobbing crew get-together sold to Netflix for big bucks.”
