Premier League 100: Remembering David Beckham’s brilliance through Manchester United’s 1998-99 season review on VHS

At No 21 in The Independent’s 100 greatest Premier League players is David Beckham, whose immaculate ball-striking became one of the top-flight’s most devastating weapons

From my hierarchy of childhood memorabilia, only a few top-ranking pieces are still visible in day-to-day adulting. The Nintendo 64 still sits forlornly under the TV despite not having worked since 2014, and a dishevelled 1993-94 Manchester United bootbag, acquired aged six, is still in occasional use. Most pointless is a VHS copy of United’s 1998-99 treble-winning season, which sits on the living room shelf despite me not owning a VHS player or knowing anyone who does. Yet when assessing David Beckham the Premier League footballer, that video seems a good place to start.

Both a blessing and a curse of such end-of-season reviews is the sheer intensity of them: 60 games distilled down to two hours, broken only by candid interviews with David May and Henning Berg. These ultra-highlights are a giddy stream of goals and cards and full-time whistles, as the sound of cheering crowds and Andy Gray slowly dulls your senses, but soon you start to notice patterns: the same goal scored, the same team-mates combine, the same defensive lines are stretched and broken.

The recurring image of United’s 98-99 season is David Beckham’s right foot literally bending the ball to his will. Re-watching it now, you notice Beckham features in almost every game (only Roy Keane played more minutes), and you realise just how relentlessly constructive he was in United’s attacking play. Beckham scored nine goals and created 23 more, and by my count played a significant part in nearly 40 per cent of United’s league goals that year.

There is a common perception that Beckham must have been overrated, a football career embellished by stardom. In retrospect the opposite might be true: that he transcended the game in a way that caused brand Beckham to mask the original talent. Elements of the story were lost, like how his fame was a tribute to hard work, the result of a childhood spent practising free-kicks in the park until dark.

This was the thing about Beckham the footballer. Where most great players developed an array of weapons to hurt or hinder opponents, Beckham meticulously honed one skill: kicking a ball. George Best once said: “He cannot kick with his left foot, he cannot head a ball, he cannot tackle and he doesn't score many goals. Apart from that he's all right.” In many ways Best was right, but what Beckham did have was a near-immaculate right foot, and from 1996-2001 he was the best in the league at supplying forwards from wide, making the PFA Team of the Year four seasons in a row.

At that time the league was lit up by the artistry of imports like Gianfranco Zola and Dennis Bergkamp, but Beckham brought a beauty of his own. His unique delivery drew a parabolic arc in the air, the ball a vortex-warped bullet made to dip precisely into the space between two defenders and on to Dwight Yorke’s sizeable forehead.

His free-kicks were even better. That season Beckham was prolific – most teams might score two or three direct free-kicks per season; Beckham scored five. They were all brilliant but the pick of the bunch comes near the end of the campaign against Aston Villa, perhaps 30 yards out, right of centre. He sends the ball high into orbit before curl and dip pulls it implausibly down in the top corner behind a perplexed Michael Oakes. By the time Beckham departed the Premier League in 2003 he’d scored 15 free-kicks, a record no-one has ever come close to.

It is easy to forget how close United came to losing the title that season: they needed to beat Tottenham at Old Trafford on the final day, but were 1-0 down approaching half-time and were squandering chances. Then Beckham collected the ball on the right of the area and swept a vital equaliser past Ian Walker; it was a bizarre finish, curled into the top corner with left arm pointed to the sky and body skewed to the side like a set-piece. In his team’s moment of need, Beckham’s gut instinct – 15 yards out – was to take a free-kick.

Beckham's right foot was one of the game's most dangerous weapons (Getty Images) (Getty)

As the season rolls on, you realise every time United send the ball right, you already know what’s going to happen. Beckham, Keane, Scholes and Giggs were the perfect blend, an almost fantasy selection of entirely different working parts which synced so successfully during those fertile years. The other three toed Alex Ferguson’s line and subsequently lasted much longer, and their sustained excellence rightly places them above Beckham in our list of the greatest 100 Premier League players. But at their zenith, nothing was more influential than the unerring accuracy of Beckham’s right foot.