At the beginning of the season, Beckham's decision to leave Manchester United had stunned almost everyone.
It was not the fact that he was leaving.
By then, Manchester United had already placed him on the transfer list, so his departure had seemed inevitable.
What shocked people was where he chose to go.
New Manchester United.
Why?
Beckham never publicly explained the full story.
Neither did New Manchester United.
Manchester United's official position was simple: New Manchester United had offered a higher transfer fee than Real Madrid.
Barcelona president Joan Laporta added another layer to the story when he claimed Beckham had rejected Barcelona because the club could not meet his wage demands.
Taken together, the rumours created a very convenient narrative.
Beckham had moved for money.
Professional footballers were entitled to care about their earnings.
But for a player of Beckham's status to join a newly promoted Premier League club purely for financial reasons was viewed by many as a step backwards.
Some even suggested he had sacrificed sporting ambition for a bigger contract.
Over time, that criticism began to fade.
Beckham kept performing.
New Manchester United kept winning.
Eventually, people had to admit that whatever the reasons behind the transfer, Beckham was still very serious about football.
Even so, some doubts remained.
There were still people who believed he would have looked even better at Real Madrid, surrounded by players such as Zidane and Ronaldo.
Juninho was often used as evidence.
He had been respected in Europe before leaving New Manchester United, but hardly viewed as one of the biggest names in the game.
At Real Madrid, however, he quickly established himself as Del Bosque's preferred option in central midfield.
His performances made him one of the most important players in the side.
He was even nominated for that year's Ballon d'Or.
Beckham was nominated as well.
But because he now played for a club that was still considered an outsider among Europe's traditional elite, relatively little attention was paid to his chances.
Then the results were announced.
And a lot of people suddenly had to reconsider what they thought they knew.
Pavel Nedvěd won the Ballon d'Or after an outstanding year with Juventus.
He became only the second Czech player in history to receive the award.
His final total was 190 points.
Second place finished on 128.
And that player was David Beckham.
The result surprised almost everyone.
Beckham had been one of the Premier League's best players that season, but his performances were very different from the image that had once made him famous.
He defended.
He covered enormous distances.
He dictated possession.
He created chances.
And he led the Premier League in assists.
Across seventeen league appearances and four League Cup matches, Beckham had scored seven goals.
That total did not compare with Henry's.
His fifteen assists did.
At the halfway point of the season, Beckham was the Premier League's leading creator.
A huge proportion of New Manchester United's goals had either been directly assisted by him or begun with one of his passes.
And those numbers did not even capture his contribution to build-up play.
Different leagues and competitions sometimes recorded assists in slightly different ways.
That hardly changed the larger point.
Beckham had become indispensable.
New Manchester United had also climbed to the top of the Premier League.
Arsenal had been held by Fulham and Bolton, allowing Mourinho's side to move first with fourteen wins, three draws, and forty-five points.
It was the second time that season New Manchester United had led the table.
Wenger had previously dismissed the importance of being top midway through the campaign.
The decisive part of the Premier League, he insisted, would come later.
He also made it clear that Arsenal were confident of beating New Manchester United at Highbury.
After all, Arsenal had Henry.
That was partly Wenger protecting his team.
It was also an obvious attempt to keep attention on his star striker.
But Henry did not beat Beckham in the Ballon d'Or voting.
And Arsenal had not managed to stay ahead of New Manchester United in the league either.
Henry finished on sixty-eight points.
That left him sixty behind Beckham and fifty-five behind Maldini, who placed third.
For all his dominance in the Premier League, the Ballon d'Or was judged differently from domestic awards.
The voting tended to consider a player's overall quality, influence, and contribution across the year rather than reputation alone.
That helped explain why players such as Shevchenko, Zidane, Van Nistelrooy, and Raúl failed to finish above Nedvěd, Beckham, Juninho Paulista, and Maldini.
Ronaldo did not even make the top ten.
Celtic's Henrik Larsson and Porto's Deco finished twelfth and thirteenth respectively.
Beckham had not won.
But second place transformed the discussion around him almost overnight.
For years, some critics had treated him as a celebrity who happened to play football.
Now, after six months at New Manchester United, he was forcing people to reassess that image.
He was not simply a famous face.
He could become the central figure in a team.
He could control matches.
He could carry responsibility.
He could influence a side in the way the very best midfielders did.
Seven goals.
Fifteen assists.
And countless attacks orchestrated from deeper positions.
Beckham was involved in almost everything.
He started moves.
He supported them.
He recovered possession.
He dropped into defensive positions.
He controlled tempo.
At times, it seemed there was almost nothing Mourinho did not ask him to do.
Anyone still doubting Beckham's quality had a simple answer now.
Look at the Ballon d'Or voting.
That did not mean he was statistically at the absolute peak of his career.
During the 1999-2000 season, Beckham had recorded thirty-three assists in all competitions.
Across his Manchester United career, he had accumulated 152 assists.
Some newspapers went digging through the numbers.
Between 1992 and 2003, Manchester United scored 929 goals in all competitions.
Beckham assisted 152 of them.
Giggs assisted 154.
Together, the pair had contributed directly to roughly a third of Manchester United's goals during that period.
The remarkable part was that Giggs had established himself as a regular several years earlier.
Beckham only became a consistent starter around 1995-96.
Statistically, Beckham's current numbers at New Manchester United were slightly below his very best seasons at Old Trafford.
Tactically, however, his influence was greater.
He touched more phases of the game.
That was a major reason voters had recognised him.
The first reports of the Ballon d'Or top three appeared in the French press.
Soon afterwards, Juventus and AC Milan published congratulations on their official websites.
The news spread quickly.
At first, many New Manchester United supporters online assumed the reports were fake.
Then they checked the official sources.
They were not.
The reaction was immediate.
This year's shortlist certainly looked unusual compared with some previous seasons.
Nedvěd.
Beckham.
Maldini.
There was no Ronaldo.
No Zidane.
No Raúl.
No Shevchenko.
For supporters used to attacking superstars dominating individual awards, the names felt less glamorous.
Beckham was probably the most famous footballer among the three.
Yet even his inclusion attracted debate.
Football professionals, however, were much less surprised.
People who watched New Manchester United every week understood how good Beckham had been.
...
The following day, New Manchester United held a press conference.
Beckham faced the media and admitted that finishing second had surprised him.
More than anything, he said, the recognition gave him additional motivation.
He hoped the result might encourage people to pay closer attention to what he was doing on the pitch.
That was one of the main reasons he had joined New Manchester United.
He wanted to prove himself again.
Years from now, when people remembered David Beckham, he did not want the first thought to be fashion, celebrity, or publicity.
He wanted them to remember a footballer.
Mourinho strongly supported him.
In the Portuguese manager's view, Beckham had been good enough to win the Ballon d'Or.
Nedvěd had simply produced an even better year.
Mourinho also believed that if Beckham continued developing in his current role, there was no reason he could not eventually win both the Ballon d'Or and the FIFA World Player of the Year.
The club's supporters were delighted.
Some even brought banners to Old Trafford celebrating Beckham's second-place finish.
Predictably, a few hard-line Manchester United supporters saw that as a deliberate provocation.
Manchester United's highest-ranked player was Van Nistelrooy, who finished sixth.
New Manchester United had several players recognised.
Kaká received four votes and finished joint thirteenth.
Palacio collected three votes and finished joint eighteenth alongside Totti and Nihat.
New Manchester United's official website also published a congratulatory message for Juninho Paulista, who finished seventh.
That was partly a response to Juninho's own comments in a recent interview.
He had said that although Real Madrid were now his club, he remained deeply grateful to New Manchester United.
The years he spent there had transformed his career.
The coaches.
The staff.
The supporters.
The environment.
All of it had helped him improve.
He had left Manchester on good terms and had no intention of forgetting that he had once been part of the club.
Ethan called him personally.
Juninho thanked him repeatedly.
He also thanked New Manchester United as a whole.
Without the club, he said, he would never have reached his current level.
Ethan was genuinely pleased for him.
Juninho had become one of Real Madrid's most reliable midfielders that season.
His performances had been outstanding.
He had earned the recognition.
Other former players also contacted the club.
Olić.
Crouch.
Abidal.
Several others.
Their departures had generally been handled professionally.
Most transfers had benefited both the player and the club.
That was why relationships remained strong afterwards.
Some former players, including Olić and Abidal, still used financial advisers introduced through New Manchester United to help manage their earnings.
Ethan had no objection.
The advisers charged normal professional fees.
The club itself did not lose money.
More importantly, it had helped New Manchester United build an unusually strong reputation among players.
Financial planning had gradually become part of the club's support structure.
Players who wanted assistance could place part of their income under professional management.
Over several years, the portfolios had produced average annual returns in the region of eight to thirteen percent, depending on risk and market conditions.
For footballers, that mattered.
A professional career was short.
Even highly paid players had to think about what happened after retirement.
Helping them manage their money sensibly gave them greater security.
And players who felt secure away from football generally found it easier to focus on football itself.
...
The Ballon d'Or dominated headlines across Europe.
Inside Newton Heath, however, the celebration lasted little more than a day.
Then everyone went back to work.
Arsenal were coming.
Terry's suspension remained a serious concern.
Without him, New Manchester United's defensive weaknesses had become more obvious.
Vidić was talented but still occasionally too rash.
Curtis had matured quickly, yet he was still only eighteen.
That worried Mourinho.
Arsenal possessed one of the most experienced and dangerous attacking units in England.
Mourinho could not guarantee that his defenders would avoid the kind of collapse they had suffered for ten disastrous minutes at Anfield.
The fact that New Manchester United were top of the Premier League had surprised almost everyone.
That success brought advantages.
Confidence was high.
The players were improving rapidly.
The squad had embraced the Premier League far more comfortably than expected.
As a newly promoted side, they had also benefited from opponents initially underestimating them.
But there was another side to it.
The first half of the season had almost gone too well.
This was not the First Division.
Manchester United, Arsenal, and Chelsea were all close behind.
One bad run could change the table quickly.
Premier League history was full of teams that started brilliantly and faded badly after Christmas.
Mourinho was determined not to let that happen.
At least one piece of good news arrived before Arsenal.
Essien was back.
Mourinho had been managing his workload carefully during the demanding autumn schedule, but the midfielder had still picked up a minor injury.
Fortunately, it was not serious.
He recovered in roughly two weeks.
Just in time for Highbury.
Essien's return gave Mourinho something he badly needed.
Power.
Mobility.
Defensive cover.
Against Arsenal, New Manchester United were going to need all three.
(To be continued.)
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