Ken Jones: Spinning it like Beckham is a story from our manipulated times

A week after Michelle Froman arrived in London with the task of preparing a documentary about David Beckham for the the American sports network ESPN she was still trying to overcome obstacles in communication unheard of in her own country. "I didn't imagine how difficult the assignment would be," she said when we spoke earlier this week.

If treated courteously by the Manchester United PR department, all Froman had to show for her persistence were short interviews with Sir Alex Ferguson and Ryan Giggs, and the views of some football writers. Since the documentary is scheduled to be shown shortly before Manchester United arrive in the United States for a close season tour designed to further expand their international status, Froman found this strange. "I guess things work differently here," she added.

She wasn't critical, merely puzzled. Puzzled to learn of the obedience shown by British football writers to managed news, perplexed that they accept working conditions that would cause uproar in the United States, where no sports news outlet would countenance payment for interviews or seek ghosted articles.

With long practice, it is possible to forget that informal contact was once an important aspect of football coverage, helping to create an atmosphere of mutual trust and understanding. In its place there is a closed system that inevitably leads to collusion and inexact judgements that are all too frequently subject to whim, pressure from advertisers and demands for ratings or circulation. Often, minor stories are wildly overplayed. Sometimes great stories even go unreported because football reporters are held in check by the system, or perhaps are so conditioned by that system they don't recognise the scoop that has just bitten them on the backside.

As stories linking Beckham to Real Madrid have proved, this is an era of wild assumption based on tenuous links to the truth. Even the European Cup holders' emphatic denial of interest in Beckham is not taken seriously.

No wonder that Michelle Froman finds us strange. Dressing-room access is standard practice in American sport and, in the main, sports performers consider interviews as an obligation. "I think this has a great deal to do with the way they develop through high school and college," she said. "As a result they are comfortable with the media."

Significantly, you may think, no sports figure was easier to reach than Muhammad Ali. Four days after a defeat by Ken Norton in 1973, I sat in Ali's home listening to him mumble through a wired-up jaw. It is by the standards of co-operation he set that some of us judge all others. When attempting to gain an interview with the remarkable Bo Jackson, who had made it big in the contrasting worlds of baseball and American football, I was simply told to show up in time for batting practice. Once he'd completed his stint in the cage Jackson spoke freely. A friend recalls how easy it was to gain an interview with Larry Bird when there was no bigger figure in the NBA.

The upper strata of English football tells anyone who watches intelligently about the times in which we live: about manipulated news and corporate politics, the hustling of transparent con men, adults playing childhood games for vast salaries, often out of all proportion to ability. And exaggeration.

This week, Manchester United's chief executive Peter Kenyon described Beckham as the most recognised footballer in the world, perhaps the most recognised person. There is substance in the former, the latter is arrant nonsense. Equally, it is ludicrous to suggest, as one leading sports columnist did, that the loss of Beckham's "sublime skills" would be a massive blow to the Premiership.

ESPN's interest in Beckham is entirely based on his celebrity status. "I wouldn't begin to know how good he is," Froman said, "but from what we've seen he has an acute sense of the dramatic" – and of self-promotion. "He's invariably first to congratulate the goalscorer, centre stage, on top of the pile," a former international said this week.

If the football writing fraternity are growing bored with the "Posh and Becks" syndrome they have only themselves to blame. It is the price of subservience.