Brooklyn Beckham’s former QPR youth team coach Anthony McCool says there was a moment he released things just weren’t right for the young would-be footballer
David Beckham always backed son Brooklyn attempts to make it in football (Image: Getty)
The former football coach of Brooklyn Beckham pinpointed the moment he felt such sympathy for him after a mic’d up assistant came in to deliver a crate of drinks as his young teammates laughed.
Queen’s Park Rangers youth team mentor Anthony McCool has shared his thoughts on the family feud in a new ITV documentary, Beckham v Beckham: The Price Of Fame? He says there was one moment that stuck with him as he trained the teenager, who was trying to make his way in the game.
Anthony worked with Brooklyn when he was 14 years old, and remembers one particular moment in which the lad forgot to bring a drink to training. He says what happened next was “crackers” – and highlighted the problems he faced connecting with the other children on the team.
His former coach said he felt sorry for the young star(Image: ITVX)
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“Brooklyn was just very quiet, didn’t really look you in the eye at first,” he recalled. “That took quite some time, but very polite. He once turned up without a drink. They’re supposed to bring their own drink. And I asked him where his drink was and he said, ‘I don’t know, they didn’t give me one.’
“This guy had someone shoot off and before we know it, he’s back and burst in 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.”
The coach went on: “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 had big footballing dreams from a young age(Image: Daily Mirror)
“He was almost like he was in this daze… and I think he was embarrassed at times.” He added his thoughts on the fallout and added: “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.”
In a savage attack, Brooklyn claimed his famous parents, Sir David and Lady Victoria, would always put the family’s image before anything else, and he’d had enough of staged social media posts. In Brooklyn’s scathing Instagram post, he also claimed his mother danced “very inappropriately” on him during his wedding reception after tying the knot with Nicola Peltz in 2002.
He fumed: “My mum hijacked my first dance with my wife, which had been planned weeks in advance to a romantic love song. In front of our 500 wedding guests, Marc Anthony called me to the stage, where in the schedule was planned to be my romantic dance with my wife but instead my mum was waiting to dance with me instead. She danced very inappropriately on me in front of everyone. I’ve never felt more uncomfortable or humiliated in my entire life.”
Anthony previously said he “felt sorry” for Brooklyn. In the wake of Brooklyn’s bombshell statement last week, he admitted he did witness “a strange dynamic” with Brooklyn, flanked by permanent security, at all times.
Posting on LinkedIn, he wrote: “Brooklyn Beckham getting piled on. But I felt sorry for the lad. I did see some bizarre carry on as his football coach at QPR, and certainly saw the anxiety. I’m not on either side because I don’t know them, and his parents were always polite to me.
“But I did witness myself a strange dynamic which is impossible for us to judge and predict how we would navigate it, both as parents and as a young person. I realised how tough it must have been for the lad. Yet I had coached many lads of famous parents, mostly well-known footballers. But this spell was on another serious level.”
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