James Lawton: Fame the spur for Ferguson's discontent in changing world

Goal on league debut for Real Madrid crowns fresh start for former Old Trafford idol who still looks back in bitterness

David Beckham's "blockbusting" memoirs, which had their first airing in the Murdoch newspapers over the weekend, were never likely to ignore the bitter ending of his relationship with his erstwhile Svengali, Sir Alex Ferguson. But if the plot line is as familiar as all else in Beckham's relentlessly documented 28 years of life, the details are no doubt the stuff of tabloid dreams.

Beckham, as the denouement came at the end of last season, says that he was in his own "private Arctic". When he was consigned to the bench, his wife Victoria, Ferguson's bête noire, advised him to take some Preparation H to ward off the piles which were threatened by all the sitting around he faced.

Beckham told the ogre Fergie not to speak disrespectfully of his wife. He tells of the manager's growing paranoia in all matters concerning his once-pampered favourite. Beckham reports ferocious spats over his decision to meet the Queen when Ferguson believed he should be resting up after an exhausting season, and the manager's rage when he missed training because of his son Brooklyn's gastroenteritis, an anger intensified by newspaper pictures of the boy's mother's shopping expedition and appearance at a celebrity event on the day in question.

There was an irrational phone call from Ferguson chastising him for being in Barcelona, taken by Beckham while he was leaving the Trafford shopping centre a few miles from the United ground.

Maybe some will be shocked by Beckham's revelations. Others, though, will see all of this as nothing more than the minute documentation of a self-evident fact, that Ferguson would not be the manager he is if he hadn't been appalled to his core by the drift of Beckham's career and priorities into deeply programmed celebrity.

Ferguson, as we saw the other day at Newcastle when he lost control of himself over a poor refereeing decision, marches only to the sound of his own clattering drums. In his perfect world, Beckham would have married a girl from next door, not one obsessed with maintaining a level of fame which tends to come swiftly and go abruptly in the lives of modestly talented pop stars. Ferguson says in his autobiography that Beckham changed from the moment he met "that woman".

What cannot be disputed, or rewritten, is the root cause of the break-up. Beckham's considerable, though latterly inconsistently applied talent was never discounted, but in the end the old Glaswegian football man's instincts could not be stilled. He concluded that the development of an entire Beckham industry, and cult, was simply incompatible with the smooth running of a championship-winning team. Beckham's priorities had been reordered. For Ferguson, Beckham had a simple choice. He could reimmerse himself in the culture of Old Trafford, or he could continue to develop his own, beyond the club.

However, unquestionably to Beckham's credit is that, despite the tide of bitter recall, he returns to a day at Chester races when his appreciation of Ferguson's ability to inspire the highest levels of camaraderie returned to an old peak as recently as last spring. "Even though by then I thought I was being pushed to the fringe of things, the togetherness for those few hours was as good as it had ever been," Beckham says.

"I don't think any of us could really imagine life at United without Alex Ferguson in charge. Players would have arguments with him: I definitely wasn't the only one. And when you're in the middle of a row with your boss, you wish he wasn't your boss. Most of the time, though, if you ask any United player they'll tell you that working for the gaffer means you're working for the best in the world."

That is a warm sentiment gracefully expressed. It also goes to the heart of the inherent poignancy of Beckham's departure from Old Trafford. It was one dictated not so much by an eroding relationship but a changing world. Beckham, with the enthusiastic support of his wife, was continuing to build a new one of his own. For Ferguson, it was an existence alien to anything he had ever known. So in the end it was a matter of the utmost simplicity. Somebody had to go and Ferguson, some time earlier, had resolved it wouldn't be him.