Save Our Squad with David Beckham review: sorry Becks, the real stars here are the newcomers

There have been a lot of football stories on TV over the past few years. This is in stark contrast to previous decades when football as drama was dead ground (see the Dream Team or the Goal franchise. Or better yet, don’t.) The fact was that football itself had all the drama you could want – you could t, and should not, invent.

But recently, in both fiction and non-fiction, television has found a way to speak to the world’s most popular game. Sunderland until I die, Ted Lasso and finally Disney’s as well Welcome to Wrexham have shown that all good football stories are not in the glitz and success, but in the background. The hopeless dared to hope, the communities stunned by their small-town teams, the individuals who make up those communities, and those teams that provide the stories we crave. It’s not about winning, it’s about taking hearts.

Enter, somewhat late in the game, David Beckham. Save our team (Disney+) sees Becks, born and raised in Chingford, fly in to mentor an East London U14 team who, needless to say, are struggling. As always with these types of troubleshooting sessions Friday Night Lights an experiment of sorts, the question that remains is why? And to be fair to Beckham, he answers this directly in the first episode: “I wanted to work with a team in this league because this is where it all started for me. That’s why I came back.”

Alas, the under-14 Westward Boys don’t seem to be as convinced by his ostensible motivation as I am. They’re a very likeable, watchable bunch and you’ll inevitably find yourself rooting for them (just as it’s impossible to watch Welcome to Wrexham and not check the results to see how your new favorite Welsh team fared a few weeks later), you hardly have to. to emphasize, it is a really good game, so it is impossible to resist the sequences on the field, where triumph follows defeat, a beautiful goal follows an easy missed goal.

But Beckham doesn’t add much. He’s always been known more for his right foot than his charisma, and no amount of editing magic can transform him from a perfectly likable international uber-star to a wardrobe inspiration. In the first episode, there is a painful scene where Becks tells a shy, new member of the team about how he too once had to deal with a difficult new environment. It was when he moved from Man United to Real Madrid, he adds.

The real stars of Save Our Squad are the two Westward coaches who struggle to get a group of boys with Disney cameras in their faces to focus on playing football. Of course I’ll be watching the rest to see if Westward can avoid relegation, but that’s it the appeal of footballnot the TV.