David Beckham ‘didn’t know’ who Victoria was ‘as a person’ when they wed as he reveals secrets to ‘happy’ relationship

WHEN most people talk about marrying a pop star they fancy, no one takes them seriously.

But, then again, David Beckham is not most people.

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Now, 25 years after his fairytale wedding to Spice Girl Victoria, he has revealed some of the secrets behind the staying power of Brand Beckham.

The 48-year-old former Manchester United player and England captain said: “I was sat in my room with [team-mate] Gary Neville, the Spice Girls song Say You’ll Be There came on and I turned around and said, ‘I’m going to marry that one in the short black dress’.

“I just really fancied her, and I really fancied her when I first met her. I didn’t know what she was like as a person, I just fancied her like most of the people did at the time.

“I didn’t know who I was marrying, or who I was going to be with for the rest of my life.

“I didn’t realise what a strong woman she was, and that is what really attracted me to her more than anything, because in all honesty, I like a strong woman.”

Speaking on James Corden podcast This Life Of Mine, he added it would take years to fully discover what he deeply loved about Victoria, 49.

He said: “Yes, she’s beautiful and yes, she’s sexy, but I like the fact that she works hard.

“We’ll be 25 years married in July, we’ve been together 27 years, and we were only saying to each other the other day that we actually quite like each other.

“It’s important to after being together for so many years.

“We can still have dinner and laugh and joke, or not say anything to each other, and that’s the important part of being in a relationship.

“Having quiet moments with my wife and my kids and my family is the place where I’m happiest.”

‘I start crying’

David and Victoria are parents to sons Brooklyn, 25, Romeo, 21, and Cruz, 19, along with 12-year-old daughter Harper.

The three boys have flown the nest, but the family are as close as ever.

And David says he has been much softer on his kids than his own dad Ted, 76, was on him.

Ted coached him in his first youth team, Ridgeway Rovers, before David attended the Bobby Charlton Soccer School in Manchester.

In 1991, at the age of 16, Becks signed with Manchester United, where he won the FA Youth Cup in 1992, before making his Premier League debut in 1995.

Having quiet moments with my wife and my kids and my family is the place where I’m happiest

David Beckham

David explained: “My dad very rarely turned around to me and said, ‘Well done, boy. You did well today’.

“He was so tough on me as a young kid, especially with my Sunday League football team.

“Sometimes he’d say it, but then he’d say, ‘This is what you can do better and this is what you should be doing, and if you just did that, you would be able to score or cross those balls like that’.

“Because of that, I never really sat down and thought, ‘Do you know what, I’m playing for Man Utd, playing for England. I’m great’.

“I would never allow myself to think that.

“He never told me I’d done well really until my hundredth [England] cap. That was the first time my dad turned around to me and said, ‘You’ve made it, boy’.

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“It makes me emotional. We sat at dinner in Paris, and he put his arm around me, and it was the first time he really kind of acknowledged the career that I’d had.

“That was a real moment, because I always knew my dad was proud of me, but I think for him to actually come out and say that to me, he knew what playing for England meant to me.

“I’m definitely not as tough as my dad, I’m a lot softer than my dad was, but I would like to say that I brought my children up with the same values as what my dad and mum taught me.

“They are very polite, well-mannered, humble, and they all have the same values as what I have and my wife has. That’s the proudest thing that we have as parents.

“But all of those moments where my dad was hard on me as a kid, there was a reason for it.

“Those tough moments that I had in my career, all I knew was to put my head down and work hard.

“It wasn’t about showing people — well, sometimes it was — but it was more about, ‘When I get told that I can’t do something, I’m just going to do it anyway and I’m going to do it until I get it right’.”

Which explains why, as owner of US football club Inter Miami, Becks approached the family of superstar Lionel Messi five years before signing the ex-Barcelona player to his team.

Beckham revealed: “We’d been talking to Leo’s father for a long time, five years. Me and my partner in Miami sneaked into a hotel to meet Leo’s dad five years prior to him signing for us.

“And I said to him, ‘I know Leo’s not ready right now but I want your son to play for my club in the future’.

Victoria is a great mum and she looks after me most of the time

David Beckham

“Fast forward five years and its four or five in the morning, I’m in bed in Japan, and my phone keeps buzzing.

“Victoria elbows me and says, ‘Turn your phone off, we need to sleep. We’re jet-lagged’.

“I reach over, put my glasses on, and then see, ‘Leo Messi has decided to come to Miami’. I sit up in my bed and I start crying.

In David’s Netflix biopic series, called Beckham, he opened up about his “tiring” struggles with OCD, which saw him meticulously folding clothes in his wardrobe, organising the kitchen and cleaning candles before bed.

He revealed: “When everyone’s in bed I then go around, clean the candles, turn the lights on to the right setting, make sure everywhere is tidy. I know it’s weird.

“I clean it so well. I’m not sure it’s actually appreciated so much by my wife, in all honesty. It’s tiring.”

In the series he also ribs his wife about the “very working class” background she claims, despite being driven to school in her dad’s Rolls-Royce.

‘Amazing life’

But in the podcast, David gushed: “Victoria is a great mum and she looks after me most of the time — and we’ve created this amazing life together, we’ve got our four kids.

“She kind of runs the family. I think that is the most important thing to me because family’s always been important and the greatest thing she’s ever given me is my four children.”

When the couple first got together, there were fears David’s new showbiz lifestyle would affect his career on the pitch.

But having won six Premier League titles, two FA Cups and the Champions League with Man Utd, he proved the doubters wrong.

He said: “I knew deep down that if [the relationship] ever affected my career — not that we would have broken up or gone our separate ways — then we would have adjusted things.

“Other people around me probably were worried about it because at the end of the day I was a young kid from the East End playing for Manchester United, going out with a Spice Girl, the biggest girl band.

“But I knew that it would never get in the way of my career, and it was quite hurtful that people thought my head wasn’t in the game, or I wasn’t in the right place, because they don’t know me.

“I knew the moment I stepped out on that pitch, that is what mattered. It never once affected it.”

David even touched on the couple’s love for matching outfits back in the day, including when they both turned up to a Gucci fashion show in 1999 dressed in full leather.

I knew deep down that if [the relationship] ever affected my career — not that we would have broken up or gone our separate ways — then we would have adjusted things

David Beckham

He said: “We kind of knew that it would get attention, but we weren’t doing it for the attention.

“Obviously, she grew up as a pop star, so it was kind of different for her, but I just did it because I like wearing clothes and trying different things and doing different hairstyles.

“I’m an East End boy, I grew up liking my hair to look a certain way and nice trainers and nice clothes and nice cars and a watch, and I couldn’t afford it as a youth player, I was earning £27.50.

“With Victoria, we lived for a certain amount of time in her mum and dad’s house.

“That day, she went into her room to get ready, and I went into my room to go get ready and we both came out, and she had all leather on and I had all leather on.

“On other occasions we might have said to each other, you know what, you wear that and I’ll wear that and it kind of goes well together.

“But on this occasion we both came out in full leather.

“I turned round to her and said, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we could turn up on a motorbike?’.

“The worst idea in the world — I couldn’t ride a motorbike at the time, and I wasn’t allowed to.

“That night could have been a lot worse.”

But by the sounds of it, their marriage could not be much better.

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