Posh Spice: The Secret Ingredient to Commercial Success in Football.

Victoria Beckham may forever remain a largely uncredited artist on the soundtrack to her husband's commercial success (outside of his pitch work) on the global stage, but the evidence speaks for itself. Victoria Beckham's cultural and commercial impact should not be downplayed purely because pop culture insists on chronically underestimating her commercial value and her own understanding of it.

The late '90s and early '00s really put the currency in "social currency" and no one was making more bank than The Spice Girls. At their peak The Spice Girls were one of the most commercially powerful entities in popular culture and they remain the best-selling female group of all time having sold over 80 million records worldwide. They're often cited as the pioneers of the "girl power pop" movement of the era. Their brands and personas, both individually and collectively, sold pre-packaged relatability through music, merchandise and even film.

If we consider Victoria in isolation, she stepped into the Posh Spice persona which in theory alone was synonymous with luxury, fashion and status… foreshadowing, destiny or carefully considered architecture? The Posh Spice costume wasn't just an aesthetic — it was infrastructure. Her entire persona was a walking billboard that any and every luxury brand would love to have.

Comparatively, if we introduce the David Beckham who met Victoria Adams in 1997, we'd be describing a talented and prominent Manchester United midfielder whose football reputation had grown exponentially, but a commercial profile that was specifically domestic and limited to sport.

David Beckham secured a £4 million contract with Brylcreem in 1997, which ultimately demonstrated his commercial viability, but Brylcreem is a British hair product and the obvious commercial appeal of the attractive golden-haired athlete didn't really signal "global icon." Overall David Beckham's public persona in 1997 feels in complete opposition of the one we've come to know. So much so that Victoria had no idea who he was… he had been watching her music videos.

"David was never a problem until he got married… from that moment, his life was never going to be the same."

— Sir Alex Ferguson

This early conclusion from Sir Alex Ferguson almost grasps the point. It wasn't marriage itself that changed David, but rather the impact of whom he was married to.

Victoria's commercial world and David's sporting world had only previously crossed paths on the opposing covers of the newspaper, but the magnitude of this relationship created a cross pollination that shifted the expectations of the public roles that they were forced to play. What Victoria wore to a game became sporting news, in the same way that what David wore off the pitch became front-page worthy.

Enter "sarong-gate."

In 1998 David famously broke conventions and wore a sarong during the World Cup in France, a moment widely attributed to Victoria's influence on his willingness to experiment with fashion. A foray that had never been seen from his predecessors.

Shortly after his transfer to Real Madrid in 2003, Beckham signed with Victoria's manager Simon Fuller and their international careers took off. Suddenly the commercial commodity scale was balanced — the investment was now the relationship. Later that year David would sign one of the largest sports sponsorship deals ever, a lifetime deal with Adidas for just over $160 million.

The commercial acceleration maps directly onto the deepening of their partnership and the broadening of his identity — from footballer to style icon, from domestic athlete to global cultural figure. Victoria is the connective tissue.

By the time the FIFA World Cup 2006 swings around, the commercial commodity of footballers would be completely altered by the coining of a term synonymous with only one woman above all others — "The WAG." The term exploded into popular culture when England manager Sven-Göran Eriksson made the decision to permit partners to accompany the squad to their training base in Baden-Baden, Germany, which ultimately resulted in a media frenzy and heavy scrutiny from tabloid publications with regards to their conduct, fashion and lavish expenditure. The Wives and Girlfriends turned Baden-Baden into a playground and the press labelled them "hooligans with credit cards." Truly, what the WAGs were doing was far beyond their reductive label… they were dominating the media in a way that had never been seen before. This was a true demonstration of the commercial and cultural power that had been building since 1997. This was pop culture dominance.

David Beckham's natural gifts and commercial appeal would almost certainly have produced a successful partnership portfolio — the Gillettes, the Pepsis, the sports brands that identify commercial opportunity through the audience an ambassador can reach. That path was always available to him.

Without Victoria, however, David Beckham was commercially invisible to the audiences that ultimately made him a global icon. He was not culturally relevant to the non-football fan. He had no mechanism to reach women who didn't follow sport. He had no entry point into fashion, entertainment or pop culture. No matter how attractive or talented he was, those doors do not open for a footballer on the basis of football alone.

Victoria didn't just open those doors — she walked him through them. Her audience became available to him because of the relationship. Her cultural world absorbed him because she was already its inhabitant. His natural gifts made the transition easier — the looks, the charisma, the willingness to experiment with fashion — but they were not sufficient without her to create the context in which those gifts could be received by a new audience.

From the Adidas lifetime deal to the Armani campaigns, cultural icon status had never been the natural end game for a talented Manchester United midfielder. It was the result of a specific cultural collision that only happened because of who he married.

What does this mean for footballers commercially today? …To be continued…