Rows, haircuts and spag bol: the Beckham Netflix doc left me longing for football’s less sanitised past | Lauren O’Neill

Before they were ‘role models’, footballers reflected what we might be like if we were young, gifted – and richer than God

Forget the emotion, the fashion, the Rebecca Loos response – what stuck with me most after watching Netflix’s David Beckham documentary was the haircuts. As the film-makers trace the footballer’s life and cultural impact through new interviews, archival photographs and footage, one thing that they really impress upon you is the man’s ever-changing barnet.

Throughout his years at the top of English football in the 1990s and 2000s, Beckham variously wore his hair long, blond and angelic; shaved and rugged; with Jamie-from-EastEnders curtains; in a spiky bleached almost-mullet; in a mohican. At one point, there were even some ill-advised cornrows. And whenever the style changed, boys all over the country – including some, as I vividly recall, in my class at school in Birmingham – would follow suit. No matter the style, whatever Beckham was doing with his hair became the male equivalent of “the Rachel”, the much coveted and much-emulated long layers that Jennifer Aniston wore onscreen in her Friends role.

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