Why Los Angeles has fallen out of love with David and Victoria Beckham.

WHEN David Beckham signed a $32.5m (€25.9m) deal with the Los Angeles Galaxy club to play for the club for five years, there was a veritable frenzy of speculation in the media as to what this would mean for the popularity of soccer in the US and, also, how he and the missus were going to conquer Hollywood.

Without a hint of irony, Victoria Beckham turned the family's move to LA into a publicity event, calling it their "world domination" tour . There were television specials, magazine cover stories and gala "Welcome to America" parties to toast the pair's arrival in the city. For a few months it did indeed look as though they might succeed in manipulating the American media as they have the British.

Their friendship with Tom Cruise, Katie Holmes and Will and Jada Pinkett Smith saw them at all the A-list parties and ever the clotheshorse, Victoria was regularly photographed shopping and socialising.

But for all the money which the Galaxy club owners spent to attract the Beckhams to LA, in the hopes of generating a new, wider audience for soccer among Americans, they have been sorely disappointed.

Lacklustre

In the less-than-two years since he arrived, Beckham has been injured most of the time and has scored just five goals in the 30 games he has been fit enough to play. Although his presence in LA and at games in which he was unfit to play, did cause a minor surge in interest in the game and ticket sales, it was on nothing like the scale that Galaxy's owners had hoped for.

The only real area to see a surge was in the sales of Beckham merchandise. Since he joined Galaxy, over 600,000 Beckham shirts have been bought at $80 (€64) a piece. The first year that he played for the club, television ratings went up by 67pc, but last year they had dropped back by 22pc.

Then he started flirting with AC Milan and it soon became obvious he was trying to get back to Europe, to keep his place in the England squad.

Since the start of the year, there have been stories leaking from all camps as to what Beckham might do, given his very lucrative contract with Galaxy, a largely uninspiring team, and his apparent intense seduction by AC Milan.

He has been on a two-month loan to the Italian club since the start of the year.

The owner of Galaxy, Tim Leiweke has been publicly fuming at how the whole Beckham deal has shaken down.

"We have every team in the league sitting there waiting for some clarification on whether David is going to be playing with Galaxy or not," he said. Even ESPN put its Major League Soccer ad campaign on hold until it knew whether Beckham will return.

On Wednesday, it emerged that a deal had been done between the two clubs, whereby Beckham would get to play for both and would buy himself out of his contract with Galaxy to play for AC Milan, while reversing the current arrangement by "loaning" himself to Galaxy.

Rubbish

The deal appears to have allowed all involved to save face, but what the reaction of Galaxy fans will be remains to be seen.

"Beckham was always going to have a problem solidifying his immense immediate impact, for two reasons," said Toby Miller, professor of media and cultural studies at UC Riverside. "First, football continues to be a marginal spectator sport in the eyes of American sporting journalists and TV producers, who don't give it the attention its fan base deserves.

"So his initial celebrity had to counter that longstanding prejudice, and there wasn't time to do it. Second, the product wasn't very good: his team is rubbish; Major League Soccer is rubbish -- and all good US players (of whom there are many) go straight to Europe. Really, Beckham is simply doing what any talented MLS player does -- go to Europe at the first opportunity," he said

Although Beckham has opened a football academy in LA and he and his wife have regularly been featured in the social columns in the city, with Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, his real contribution to developing soccer's popularity in the US has been, at most, negligible particularly when compared to his increased personal profile and the additional advertising and sponsorship deals he has bagged while here.

America seems to have ended up getting Beckham-lite and not the full deal the PR machine promised, and soccer lovers here expected.

For Victoria Beckham, the LA odyssey appears to have been a bigger disappointment than she was expecting. In spite of the spate of stage-managed publicity and the avowed "world domination" plans she had for the couple in Hollywood, interest in her waned quickly and she was soon topping worst dressed lists.

She never appeared to find something to do other than socialise. For her birthday, David bought her a vineyard in Napa Valley, which she handed on to staff to develop.

NBC, which hosted a one-hour documentary Victoria Beckham: Coming to America, almost never touched her again and she didn't land the movie and TV roles she seemed to expect.

"As for Victoria Beckham, her career as a figure of significance in her own right was fleeting -- she really acquired fame due to The Spice Girls, and then as a wife, mother, and shopper," said Miller. "Her recording career has been on the skids for a long time. So she lacked a product."

Of course, the successful launch of her fashion label has to be acknowledged, and will most likely give her reputation a head start in Europe.

Void

However, at the end of the day, the paparazzi might be the only ones to shed any tears when the Beckhams leave Los Angeles. X-17, one of the biggest paparazzi agencies here, set up a specific "Beckham team" to cover the pair, but they never had to try too hard.

The Beckhams obviously enjoyed having their pictures taken and unlike most LA celebs, they drove their own cars.

"As a family, they really don't hide," said Brandy Navarre, the co-owner of the agency. "They have been friends with some of the most famous people here. If they leave, there will definitely be a void."

- Patricia Danaher