When David Beckham touched down in Major League Soccer in 2007, he was the league’s highest-paid player, making 500 times the then-$12,900 minimum salary in a league where some players still worked part-time jobs to get by. He was glitz and glamor in a country where soccer had yet to go mainstream, a marketing machine who promised to propel a backwater league toward relevance.
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He was also a target.
Baldomero Toledo, who called 300 matches as an MLS referee, remembers that well. He was on the field in 2008 for maybe the most dangerous of horror tackles Beckham endured during his MLS tenure: a crunching, high-speed effort from behind by FC Dallas defender Adrian Serioux.
“That’s a good example of how we had to protect those players when they got those nasty tackles,” remembers Toledo, who did not hesitate to show Serioux a straight red. “(Beckham’s) teammates, they wanted to make sure we protected him, as a player. If something happened, we needed to be ready to react within the game.”
Beckham was making a reported $5.5 million a year at the time playing for the LA Galaxy, though his actual income was far higher due to the myriad of sponsorship deals he’d arranged as part of his pact with MLS. Serioux was making closer to $100,000.
Beckham collected the ball at the near sideline and the journeyman defender took him out. At best, it was a comically mistimed challenge. More realistically, it was Serioux sending Beckham a message.
Any confusion was cleared up when Serioux leaned over Beckham and said, according to Becks himself, “Welcome, baby. Welcome.”
‘We’ve dedicated our lives to the game and will have nothing to retire on,” Serioux told the British press the next day. “He’s great for MLS, but me
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