DAVID BECKHAM AT 50: The real story of football's 007, our tense encounter that I'm now forever grateful for and how he rewrote the rulebook, writes OLIVER HOLT

In a small sports hall attached to the Hotel du Golf International, the retreat on the outskirts of the Brittany seaside resort of La Baule that was England’s base during the 1998 World Cup, we sat in five or six semi-circular rows in front of a table, waiting for David Beckham.

Beckham was only 23 then but he already had superstar quality. He had already announced his talent with his outrageous goal from the halfway line for Manchester United against Wimbledon at Selhurst Park a couple of years earlier. He had already started dating Spice Girl Victoria Adams. He had just been pictured wearing a sarong.

He was pushing boundaries, on and off the pitch, and challenging perceptions of how a footballer should behave. He was certainly challenging the authority of his United manager, Sir Alex Ferguson, who demanded unconditional obedience from his players.

And Beckham had already become the story of England’s tournament in France. The England manager, Glenn Hoddle, had left him out of the opening two games, alleging Beckham was ‘not focused’, an oblique reference to his romance with Adams, more commonly known at the time as Posh Spice.

So when Beckham arrived for his press conference, things were tense. Midway through it, a couple of journalists started questioning him about his personal life and Beckham bit back. ‘You don’t know me,’ Beckham said, ‘so don’t judge me.’

There was never much chance of that request being met. Beckham was on the brink of superstardom at France 98 and all the analysis and judgment and dissection and adoration and admiration and resentment that comes with it.

If the tears of Paul Gascoigne at the 1990 World Cup ignited football’s post-Taylor Report boom and brought the crowds flocking back to English stadiums after the hooligan era of the 70s and 80s, Beckham’s popularity was the tailor’s dummy on which the Premier League draped its brand.

Sponsors and broadcasters alike fluttered around Beckham’s light and paid Premier League chief executive Richard Scudamore and his clubs whatever they wanted to get a piece of the action. Beckham became football’s most significant cultural figure for a generation, a crossover star who embodied the game’s embrace of fabulous wealth, fashion, conspicuous consumption and rock star fame.

Perhaps it helped that some loathed him, too. He attracted notoriety as well as celebrity. When Ferguson kicked a stray boot across the dressing room after an FA Cup defeat by Arsenal in 2003, it grazed Beckham’s eyebrow and the resulting pictures of Beckham with a plaster above his eye polarised public opinion.

Many saw Beckham as a threat to the established football order, a man whose celebrity was challenging the traditional patrician authority of Ferguson. Just as many viewed Ferguson’s loss of control as a symbol of a man who was out of his time, a man who could no longer hold back the tide of change and the rise of player power.

Things had got worse for Beckham at France 98. He was sent off in the second half of England’s second round elimination by Argentina in Saint-Etienne and made a scapegoat. He was, notoriously, hung in effigy outside the Pleasant Pheasant pub in South Norwood, south London.

The level of fascination with Beckham has barely waned since then, neither during the rest of his 21-year professional career nor in the 12 years of his ‘retirement’ when he has helped to lead bids for the London Olympics and the 2018 World Cup and become president and co-owner of Inter Miami, the team for whom Lionel Messi now plays.

And we have not stopped judging him, either. None of us. Many still seek to suggest that his was a career built on the shifting sands of celebrity and fashion. They maintain that stance, somehow, even though Beckham played for United, Real Madrid, AC Milan, Paris Saint-Germain and LA Galaxy during a stellar career.

Cynicism followed him doggedly through much of that gilded career that brought him every major honour it is possible to win in the English club game, as well as 115 England caps, a record for an outfielder at the time.

That cynicism was rooted in the notion that Beckham’s fame – and therefore his earning power – was disproportionate to his talent. It nested in the idea that his triumph was a triumph of style over substance. That idea was – and still is – fatally flawed.

Sure, Beckham earned staggering sums during his football career and continues to earn staggering sums in what might loosely be called retirement, but only if you think of retirement as a land where you work even harder than you used to.

Only last week, the sports industry website Sportico produced a list of the 50 highest-paid athletes of all time that featured Beckham at No 8, sandwiched between Jack Nicklaus and Roger Federer.

It estimated his career and post-career earnings to be $1.2billion. Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi were the only two footballers above him in a list topped by Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods. Neymar was the only other footballer in the top 50.

So, yes, Beckham has earned spectacular sums of money through football and, yes, the fact that he is only one of four footballers on that list does not mean that he was one of the best four footballers to have played the game. He was not. He was probably not the best player in any of the elite club sides he played for.

But as Beckham turns 50 and we scroll back through all the yesterdays of the man his wife once called Golden Balls, it feels as if it is important to correct a misconception, which appears to have taken hold, that Beckham’s talent was some kind of mirage and that all he has to offer is vapid celebrity.

Beckham may not have been Zinedine Zidane or Roy Keane or the Brazilian Ronaldo but he was still one of the best players of his generation, a wide midfielder who won the Champions League with United, the Premier League title six times and the Spanish and French leagues once each, with Real Madrid and PSG respectively.

He was technically gifted, too. He was the best crosser of the ball from the right that I have ever seen. Trent Alexander-Arnold and Kevin De Bruyne are the closest to him, and they can do things that Beckham could not do, but neither of them quite matches him for the accuracy and consistency he achieved.

Beckham was not some celebrity dilettante. He practised as hard as anyone. Harder, most of the time. He was relentless in his work ethic and his determination. And it made him an integral part of one of the best Manchester United sides there has ever been, a key component of the team that won the Treble in 1998-99.

Beckham’s influence was germane to every strand of that Treble. He scored the goal that dragged United back into their final league game of the season against Spurs, he was the best player in their FA Cup final victory over Newcastle United and he delivered the corners from which United scored their two late goals in the Champions League final against Bayern Munich.

He was, in many ways, the most creative influence in those wonderful United teams built by Sir Alex Ferguson in the mid-to-late 90s, a beautiful passer and a player whose expertise with the dead ball made him feared across the top flight.

The other misconception is that he was a selfish player, that it was all about Beckham. Again, not true. United’s strength on the right-hand side was built on the ferocious work rate of Beckham and Gary Neville. Like Wayne Rooney after him, Beckham was a team player who ran himself into the ground.

When Ferguson grew tired of the futile attempt to try to control Beckham and forced him out of United in 2003, Beckham was signed by Real Madrid as part of the Galacticos era, which was marked by the recruitment of superstars without regard to the balance of the team, that has come to be regarded as a failed experiment.

In his first three seasons at the Bernabeu, the title was claimed by Valencia once and Barcelona twice but like so many triumphs in Beckham’s life, his stay there was a victory for perseverance and he won the title at his fourth attempt. He would go on to be the only English player to win league titles in four different countries. Beckham breathed rare air as a player.

For those of us who reported on the sweep of his career, it felt like covering the rise of a new phenomenon. I was critical of him for a while when I thought he was losing focus around the time of his move to Real Madrid and his elevation to the England captaincy.

I wrote some harsh things about him. But I was friends with Beckham’s agent, Terry Byrne, and Terry asked me to meet him and Beckham at their offices in the Salamanca district of the Spanish capital.

We sat at opposite ends of a long table and I knew Beckham wanted to settle some scores. He did not take issue with anything I had written about his performances on the pitch but he was angry about a comment piece I had written on his personal life and I accepted that criticism. That particular piece had been a misjudgment.

I saw Beckham differently after that encounter. The truth is, I feel grateful to him now. Thank for the memories, because there are so many, particularly during that golden era at United when he and Gary Neville and Nicky Butt and the rest of the Class of 92 embodied so much of the local romance embedded in everything that team achieved.

Thanks for those corners at the Nou Camp in 1999. Everybody who was in that stadium will remember those moments at the conclusion of the Champions League final for the rest of their lives.

Thanks for that penalty you scored for England in the Sapporo Dome during the 2002 World Cup, an impossibly dramatic moment that brought a small measure of revenge over Simeone for what had happened four years earlier.

Thanks for those goals against Real Madrid in that Champions League quarter-final second leg at Old Trafford in April 2003, particularly the free kick that dipped and fizzed over the wall. The game was so good it is rumoured to have inspired Roman Abramovich to buy Chelsea. Beckham, only on as a second-half substitute, was so good Zidane asked if he could have his shirt.

I reported on him throughout his career. I sat down for interviews with him in Madrid, Milan and Los Angeles, I even spent part of an evening with Victoria in the bar of the hotel in Baden-Baden some journalists shared with the players’ wives and girlfriends at the 2006 World Cup, talking about football and the media.

I spent much of my working life chronicling his professional achievements. The best of all of them, the one that continues to resonate the most, was the way he was at the heart of one of English football’s greatest ever stories, the way that a core of players from United’s 1992 FA Youth Cup-winning team went on to win the Treble.

He was also the only player who made me abandon the press box decorum I have always tried to observe. When Beckham scored that stunning free-kick for England against Greece deep in stoppage time in a World Cup qualifier at Old Trafford in October 2001, I wrapped a colleague in a bear hug.

People will say that that is typical of the small-time mentality around the England football team: being moved like that in a game that was not even taking place in a major tournament. And maybe that’s right.

But Beckham was superb in that game. In a drab England performance, he was a beacon of energy and light. He took that tie by the scruff of the neck and he would not let it go. He would not give up.

That tie, don’t forget, took place before FIFA removed the jeopardy from qualifying for the World Cup. It was a real possibility that England would not qualify for the tournament in Japan and South Korea but Beckham changed that.

So, sure, Beckham has walked the line between celebrity and dedication to the game his whole life. He became English football’s front man, its ambassador, its crown prince. When Lord Coe wanted someone to impress the IOC members who would decide the destination of the 2012 Olympic Games, he enlisted the help of Beckham.

It was Beckham who was one of the central figures in Danny Boyle’s magical opening ceremony for London 2012, riding down the Thames on a speedboat, dressed in a tuxedo, football’s No 7 and football’s 007 all rolled into one.

It was Beckham who joined Prince William to head up England’s ill-fated bid to win the right to host the 2018 World Cup. It was Beckham who was the pathfinder in moving to the MLS in the USA after his stint with Real Madrid and helping to resuscitate the men’s game in the States. It was Beckham who lured Messi, the world’s greatest player, to Inter Miami.

As he marks his 50th birthday with a series of glamorous parties, there will be those who insist that his career was built on sand. They are wrong. He may have been aided by charm and appearance but his career was built on talent, relentless application and relentless achievement.

If his life has been a race against perception, Beckham has outrun it.