Soccer fans are so chill, you know? You’ve never met a calmer group of people! In 1999 year, when David Beckham welcomed his first child with soon-to-be wife Victoria, he had also recently gotten a red card in the 1998 World Cup match against Argentina, an event that made everyone in England go, “ugh, that’s disappointing, but it ultimately doesn’t impact my life in any real way, now let’s go hang out with Paddington.”
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Except they didn’t! As recounted in the new Netflix docuseries on Becks’s career, Beckham, the nation lost its mind with hatred and the young family got actual kidnapping and death threats. As the footballer himself recounts, “The moment [Brooklyn] came out, I all the sudden thought, ‘How am I going to protect him? What am I going to do to protect him?’”
The night Brooklyn of Brooklyn’s birth, David adds, the newborn slept next to Victoria. “Victoria was like, ‘Come and squeeze on the bed with me,’ and I was like, ‘absolutely not. I’m sleeping with my head against the door.’ Because I was paranoid that someone was gonna steal him,” the footballer says. “You know it’s meant to be a happy moment. And it was a happy moment, of course. But I was worried. I didn’t want him to come into this life at a time where I was going through what I was going through. But when there was kidnap threats, that’s when it got scary.”