When Becks came to Sydney : multiple readings of a sport celebrity

The November 2007 visit of David Beckham to Sydney attracted unprecedented mainstream media coverage for the developing sport of association football (soccer) in Australia, starkly emphasizing the increasingly globalized nature of sports consumption. As an Englishman playing for a relatively obscure American club in a ‘friendly’ match in Australia, the combination of capital and symbol circulation evident in Beckham’s visit produced a new variation on the ‘New International Division of Cultural Labour’. Beckham’s talent and celebrity have been widely deployed to advance the global expansion of sporting brands into new soccer territories, and the manner in which he was ‘inserted’ into Australian sociocultural contexts by the local media exposes the polysemic, ‘glocal’ nature of the production and consumption of contemporary commodity athletes on multiple stages. This essay examines the streaming and localization of celebrity soccer branding through an analysis of Australian media discourses employed to frame Beckham’s brief visit to the country.