BROOKLYN Beckham’s former football coach has revealed he felt sorry for the youngster after experiencing his “crackers” life firsthand.
Anthony McCool, who coached Brooklyn when he was an aspiring 14-year-old footballer at London club Queens Park Rangers, said the eldest Beckham child was different from the other lads.
While he described Brooklyn, now 26, as “polite” and a technically sound player, he said the teen struggled to make eye contact and never showed any emotion.
Speaking in the ITV documentary Beckham v Beckham: The Price of Fame, Anthony said: “Brooklyn was just very quiet, didn’t really look you in the eye at first. That took quite some time, but very polite.”
He then recalled a session when Brooklyn forgot to bring a drink to training.
When a nearby security guard caught wind of it, he leaped into action and rushed to sort the teen with an entire crate of drink.
He said: “This guy had someone shoot off and before we know it, he’s back and burst into the dressing room like Jason Bourne with an earpiece in, with a crate of Lucozade and said, ‘you said that Brooklyn needed a drink’. And everyone laughed.
“But I kind of caught Brooklyn and looked at him and thought, ‘wow, this life is crackers’. He probably thought everyone was laughing at him and that’s what made me quite sad.
“He would worry me because we never saw any kind of either massively high emotion or massively low. He was almost like he was in this daze and I think he was embarrassed at times.”
In his explosive six-page statement last week, Brooklyn accused his parents of controlling his life growing up and said it had left him with overwhelming anxiety.
But Anthony felt the Beckham name carried so much weight and expectation that it was difficult to know what to do.
He said: “There’s nothing anyone could have done, and I think maybe his parents were trying to do the right thing, perhaps by stepping back a little bit to try and give him the space.”
His view differs from Tom Bower, who wrote 2024 book The House of Beckham: Money, Sex and Power.
He recently told GMB’s Ed Balls and Susanna Reid of his personal views on Brooklyn and claimed: “He’s been used an manipulated I feel very sorry for him.
“That’s why I feel for Brooklyn, finally he’s exploded.”
Elsewhere in the documentary, Brooklyn’s college girlfriend Afton McKeith recalled her time with the star.
Afton, the daughter of nutritionist Gillian McKeith, claimed David and Victoria should have done more to shield him from their celebrity status.
She told Nina Nannar: “I could see that he would get visibly distressed and anxious. I do know that there were paparazzi every single, like, pretty much every day.
“And somebody would have been organising that who knew his schedule inside out. Because it’s not, like, random, you know.”
She continued: “I won’t say who I think it was, but I have an idea in my mind. I don’t think it was anyone at school.
“I think it was someone who knew his schedule from start to finish of his day inside out, everywhere he went, what break he would have had. So you can think about who that might be that would know that.”
