Coming out of a pub recently, David Beckham saw a note on his car windscreen. “I thought I’d got a parking ticket,” he says. Opening it up, he found a handwritten message from an England fan who had watched the Netflix Beckham series and been drawn back to the tumult of 1998: Beckham’s sending off in the World Cup and all the poison that followed. “It said, ‘We are really sorry how we treated you.’ No name or address, just from an England fan who had been involved in that stuff at the time. Kind of amazing — quite an emotional read, if I’m honest.”
The vilification for one petulant kick was off the scale, even by football’s standards of viciousness; an effigy hung from
