Watch: David Beckham Gives Nod to Brooklyn Beckham in Father’s Day Message, Despite Rift
David Beckham and Victoria Beckham are not the people they were when they met in 1997.
And if they were, that might be a problem.
“So often in relationships, one will say to the other, ‘You’ve changed.’ Well, of course you’ve changed!” Victoria told ELLE in an interview published Sept. 18. “You’re a different person when you’re 20 than when you’re 50.”
The Spice Girls alum offered up her own journey for examination in the Netflix documentary Victoria Beckham, though we were hardly in suspense as to how her all-important Paris fashion show turned out. (Spoiler alert, it was a triumph.)
But other than son Brooklyn Beckham announcing that his relationship with his parents is strained for good reason (he still was included in his parents’ latest Father’s Day tributes), life has been pretty grand lately for Sir and Lady Beckham, David having received a knighthood in November for his services to sport and charity.
Yet their now rock solid foundation nearly crumbled 20-plus years ago when Rebecca Loos, a former member of David’s management team, alleged she had an affair with the athlete. He adamantly denied it, but Rebecca has maintained that she was telling it as it was.
And David still isn’t sure how he and Victoria managed to get past that fraught period.
“I don’t know how we got through it, in all honesty,” the Inter Miami CF owner said in the 2023 docuseries Beckham, about his road from footballer to man of many hats. “Victoria’s everything to me. To see her hurt was incredibly difficult. But, we’re fighters. And at that time, we needed to fight for each other, we needed to fight for our family. And what we had was worth fighting for.”‘
Brooklyn Beckham/Instagram
Victoria agreed that it was “the hardest period for us. Because it felt like the world was against us. And here’s the thing: We were against each other, if I’m being completely honest.”
And yet instead of relegating their union to divorce court, the scandal proved just how much the parents of Brooklyn, 27, Romeo Beckham, 23, Cruz Beckham, 21, and Harper Beckham, who turns 15 on July 10, wanted to stay on the same team.
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Four months after Brooklyn was born, David and Victoria tied the knot on July 4, 1999, at a castle in Ireland. Also that year, David completed the treble—winning the Premier League, FA Cup and Champions League—with Manchester United.
The following year saw the Spice Girls disband, and Victoria opted to go solo, starting with the hit single “Out of Your Mind.”
Still, she was one-and-done after her self-titled debut album sold a modest 50,000 copies upon its release in October 2001. Hopes for a Spice Girl reunion began the second the group split up, but otherwise the erstwhile Posh Spice turned her focus to fashion and her growing family, giving birth to son Romeo on Sept. 1, 2002.
At the same time, David’s star was rocketing ever higher. After having a whole movie, 2002’s Bend It Like Beckham, named after his prowess on the pitch, he signed with Real Madrid for almost $30 million in the summer of 2003.
And so began the most trying 12 months of the storied Beckham union.
In September 2003, David was reportedly spotted with a woman—later identified as Loos, an assistant at his management firm—at a nightclub in Madrid. The athlete denied the subsequent tabloid reports that his marriage was in trouble.
Meanwhile, he and Victoria remained united, his wife by his side when Queen Elizabeth II made him an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) at Buckingham Palace that November.
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But the now-defunct News of the World ran a story in April 2004 detailing, via a source identified as a so-called “close family friend,” several sexual encounters David and Loos allegedly had after that night at the club in 2003, after which they allegedly continued to exchange racy texts.
So, a few months shy of the Beckhams’ fifth wedding anniversary, the British tabloids were having their own field day covering the increasingly explosive cheating allegations, which blew up further after Rebecca’s brother alleged his sister had “confirmed” to him that she’d had an affair with the soccer star in Spain.
Aides speaking for the family said Victoria’s subsequent trip to Switzerland was a long-planned vacation with her parents and mother-in-law, not a hasty escape from the public eye.
With the scandal refusing to go away, David broke his silence, saying in a statement: “During the past few months I have become accustomed to reading more and more ludicrous stories about my private life…The simple truth is that I am very happily married. I have a wonderful wife and two very special kids. There is nothing any third party can do to change these facts.”
Sitting down with Sky One’s Kay Burley in April 2004, Loos said she didn’t “expect any sympathy” from Victoria.
“I think it’s bad enough for me to do what I have done without me expecting any words of sympathy,” she continued. “I really hope that they get through it. I think the problems were in their marriage long before I came into the picture. I in no way intended to break up their marriage especially when there are young children involved. I hope they stay together.”
Which they did, and Victoria was visibly pregnant again by August 2004.
The following month she and David geared up to sue News of the World over a story titled “Posh and Becks on the Rocks.”
“We are sick and tired of people trying to make money at the expense of our family,” the Beckhams said in a statement. “It’s even more distressing when we are expecting our third son. These allegations are completely untrue and it is in the hands of our lawyers.”
Cruz was born Feb. 20, 2005, in Madrid.
The couple then amended the complaint to include another NOTW story alleging, based on tales from a former nanny, that their marriage was a sham. They also sued the nanny, who had worked for them since 2003, for breach of confidence.
“When you invite someone into your home to look after your children—your most precious possessions—you have to trust them,” David said in April 2005. “I can’t say much more because there is a legal process…What I will say, though, is that the reason I keep my mind on football is that me and my wife are happy. We are normal people, although people might not think that. Of course, we have arguments like everybody, but, at the end of the day, I know that I love my wife.”
The Beckhams collected an undisclosed settlement from News of the World in March 2006 and dropped their suit. (The tabloid shut down in 2011 after it turned out multiple staffers had conspired to hack into private voicemail accounts, including those belonging to celebrities such as Hugh Grant, members of the royal family and a teenage murder victim.)
Loos told 60 Minutes Australia in March 2025, reflecting on the scandal, “I have stuck to the truth, I’ve never exaggerated. I never lied about a single thing. Why? Because I’m going up against the strongest, most powerful couple in the media. And all I had on my side was the truth.”
The Beckhams, meanwhile, took advantage of David’s well-timed offer from the Los Angeles Galaxy worth a reported $250 million and moved to America.
“Another challenge has come up and it is the right time for us to do it,” the renowned midfielder—who would go on to win the La Liga title with Real Madrid in his final season with the club—said in a January 2007 interview, calling his decision to uproot his family “extremely difficult.”
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NBC’s six-episode Victoria Beckham: Coming to America then chronicled the family’s move to Beverly Hills.
“We were surprised that anybody actually even knew who we were, or the fact that we were coming,” Victoria told E! News that August, though by then the red carpet had been fully rolled out on their behalf. “We think L.A. has got so many really famous people, so we just kind of see ourselves as ‘David and Victoria from London.'”
She said it would only be a matter of time before the paparazzi figured out “we’re actually quite boring, we don’t do that much. We just hang out at home with our kids and keep ourselves to ourselves.”
The family’s SoCal abode was a 13,000-square-foot villa purchased for a reported $22 million because, as Victoria told W, “we didn’t want anything too huge, too fancy, too ostentatious.”
“It’s a light, happy house, with a great corridor the kids are going to love when they are roller-skating,” she added, while David joked that they wouldn’t have any live-in staff because “we like to lock the doors at night and wander around naked.”
Victoria acknowledged that the scandal she and David had only recently turned the page on made for “a really tough time” for them, “hard for our entire families. But I realized a lot of people have their price.”
But she and David “got through it together,” Victoria continued. “No one said marriage was going to be easy. Yes, there have been bumps along the road. But the fact is we’ve come out of everything we’ve been through stronger and happier. It’s even better now than when we were first married. After all these years, we can just come home and have a laugh together.”
She got to work starting her eponymous fashion line and David thrived with the Galaxy, winning two titles and providing a key assist in putting Major League Soccer on the map.
While Victoria she quipped to E! in 2007 that having three boys was more about “crowd control” than parenting, daughter Harper Seven was born July 10, 2011.
And the family only got more famous, though David shrugged off the importance of name brand recognition.
Victoria Beckham/Instagram
“I’ve got my wife. I’ve got my four kids. I’ve got parents, grandparents still, and three really good friends. It’s all you need,” David explained to Men’s Health in 2012. “I’d rather have three really good friends than 20 good friends.”
He retired in 2013 at 38, playing his last game for Paris Saint-Germain, which hoisted their Ligue 1 trophy that night in a picture-perfect moment.
Since 2016 their home base has been a $45 million spread in London’s Holland Park, a convenient four-minute drive to Victoria’s Hammersmith headquarters. Their portfolio also includes an $8 million weekend cottage in the Cotswolds and a $24 million abode in Miami, where David is club president and co-owner of MLS’ Inter Miami CF, which made its own splash bringing Argentinian superstar Lionel Messi onboard in 2023.
Darren Gerrish/WireImage for Victoria Beckham
After Brooklyn wed Nicola Peltz Beckham, at her family’s Palm Beach estate in April 2022, the groom revealed the words of wisdom he got from his parents about married life.
He said on E!’s Daily Pop in August 2022 that they advised the newlyweds, “Just love each other, try and not worry about anything. Keep working and just try and have fun.”
David has attributed his and Victoria’s enduring partnership and “strong family unit” to a number of factors, including the inspiring examples that were set for them.
“We have got strong parents too, and they taught us the right values,” he told BBC Radio 4 in 2017. “Of course you make mistakes, and we all know that marriage is difficult at times. It is about working through it. We have come up against tough times. But we know each other better than anyone else knows us. And we talk.”
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To any skeptics who assume it’s just better business to stay married, he added, “Do we stay together because it is a brand? Of course not. We stay together because we love each other and because we have four amazing children.”
Which also means having four other hearts and minds—plus the heart and minds of the kids’ partners—to look out for as well.
“People have been making things up about our relationship for 20 years,” Victoria told British Vogue in 2018, “so David and I are pretty used to ignoring the nonsense and just carrying on as normal. But these things have a wider effect on the people around us, and that’s unfair.”
At the end of the day, she and David “both realize that we are stronger together than we are as individuals,” she said. “Would either of us be in the position that we are in now had we not met and been together all those years ago? It’s all about the family unit.”
Keep reading to relive David and Victoria’s epic romance in photos:
John Giles – PA Images/PA Images via Getty Images
Barry King/WireImage
Justin GoffUK Press via Getty Images
John Shearer/WireImage
LEON NEAL/AFP/Getty Images
Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images
Karwai Tang/WireImage
Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images
Anthony Harvey/Getty Images
Photo by Karwai Tang/WireImage
Bertrand Rindoff Petroff/Getty Images
Danny Lawson – WPA Pool/Getty Images
Matt Crossick/PA Wire
Darren Gerrish/WireImage for Victoria Beckham
Karwai Tang/WireImage
Ricky Vigil M / Justin E Palmer/GC Images
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(Originally published Feb. 14, 2026, at 4:30 am. PT)
