Soccer icon Beckham offers leadership inspiration on Long Island

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Bring grit and determination, but also foresight and grace. Surround yourself with people who have your best interests at heart. Celebrate the wins, and reassess the mishaps. And consider an exit strategy while keeping an eye out for new opportunities.

These are just some of the takeaways from soccer legend David Beckham, who spoke before a group of about 700 business leaders and also young athletes at the Long Island Association luncheon at Woodbury-based Crest Hollow Country Club last week.

To achieve great heights, Beckham said, it helps to love what you do.

“It takes sacrifice and dedication, and hard work, but also you have to enjoy it,” he said. “Unless you’re enjoying it, don’t do it, because at the end of the day you have to enjoy what you do.”

Once that highest level is achieved, focus and hard work keep you in the game, Beckham said.

It helps, too, to negotiate contracts with the most potential. For example, when joining the LA Galaxy, Beckham signed a deal that included a cut of the sales of tickets, jerseys, beer, hot dogs and more, according to published reports.  The contract also contained a clause that enabled Beckham to purchase a Major League Soccer team for “a set fee of $25 million” when he retired, according to The Athletic, a sports publication.

Now, Beckham is a co-owner of Inter Miami CF, and having recruited soccer icon Lionel Messi from Argentina, the “club’s value could skyrocket from approximately $585 million to over $1 billion,” according to Yahoo!Finance.

Even at this level, a leader’s grit and determination remains one of the most critical assets.

Take Messi. Beckham said he is “the first person in training, and he is the last person out of training. He is 36 years old. He’s won every major tournament and trophy that you can. But he’s still the hardest working. He’s still the most dedicated…that tells you how much work it takes. But he still also has a lot of fun doing it.”

Grace and charm help, too, when conducting business. At the luncheon, Beckham thanked LIA President and CEO Matt Cohen, and the audience for attending, adding a bit of humbleness.

“I do want to thank you all for giving up your morning to be here today, and also to listen to me talk up here,” Beckham said.

That humbleness permeated the luncheon interview even when highlighting some of the most powerful moments on the field. For example, Cohen referenced a winning goal Beckham had shot from 50 feet away for Manchester United.

“Some people consider that the greatest
goal of all time,” Cohen said. “Do you share that sentiment?”

“I’m not sure about that, but it was a pivotal moment, really, in my career,” Beckham said.

And while that goal opened many avenues, Beckham remains grateful for the people who kept his best interests at heart.

He said he was “lucky” that Manchester United had Alex Ferguson as a manger.

“He protected me on every level,” Beckham said, including keeping him from talking to the media during the early winning moments of his career.

Beckham continued to seek to surround himself with people he trusted and whose work he admired.  Consider, for example, his four-part documentary series currently airing on Netflix.

“I always said if I was going to do it, I would do it properly,” he said about filming the series.

“It was quite a difficult two-and-a-half years of filming,” Beckham said. “We did 55 hours of filming and Fisher Stevens was a director.” Beckham is a fan of Stevens, an actor and filmmaker, who won an Oscar for his 2010 documentary, “The Cove,” and, according to published reports, was recommended by Leonardo DiCaprio, who had worked with Stevens on two environmental documentaries.

The Beckham series looked at some of the roughest moments for the soccer superstar, including England’s World Cup match against Argentina in 1998. That was when Beckham was red-carded for deliberately kicking the back of Diego Simeone’s leg. England’s World Cup hopes were crushed, and Beckham instantly went from hero to villain.

Asked at the luncheon about that moment, Beckham said, “I always say there’s not one thing that I regret in my career. That moment was a difficult moment. And of course, I wish it never would have happened, but it happened for a reason, and it’s taken me a long time to find out why: It pushed me into a place where I had to grow up as a person, as a player, and become stronger.”

As for planning an exit strategy, Beckham said he’d planned in advance, keeping an eye out for new opportunities.

When he did exit in 2013, Beckham received a standing ovation from stadium fans. At last week’s luncheon, he grew teary viewing a clip of him bidding farewell to fans and teammates. He’d never expected to get emotional about hanging up his cleats.  But, he said, “even now, I still miss the game every single day.”

Moving forward, Beckham looked to existing business partnerships, and developed new ones.

“I always prepared myself for that moment to jump into something else. And the thing that I jumped into straight away” was his already-established business through which he served as an ambassador for various brands, he said. “I have a great team in London, with which I’ve surrounded myself.”

His post-soccer career includes partnerships with Adidas, Diageo, H&M, L’Oreal and Tudor, as well as Sands, the company that is seeking to build a casino at the Nassau Hub and was the luncheon’s presenting sponsor.

Beckham believes in giving back, both at
a charitable level in his ambassadorship
with UNICEF, and in cultivating a love of U.S. soccer.

His work includes increasing the sport at a grassroots level, starting with youth leagues.

Here, he said, “soccer has a real opportunity of growing, even bigger than it is.”

“I’m always looking for what’s next,” he said. “So I’ll continue to be passionate about building this game because it’s a game that I love. And the reason I wanted to own a team in America is because I believe in this country. I’ve always loved this country.”

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