Victoria Beckham's game of three halves Mrs Beckham shares with Sir Alex the belief that success is everything, and her managerial regime has been - if anything - even tougher than his. Never at Old Trafford did David have to suffer the boss plugging a skin-cream line by reaching across to stroke his cheeks while saying, "Ooooh, it's even softer than Brooklyn's." It was bound to be this way. With terrifying clarity, Posh had assessed the post-football landscape, and found it littered with creaking former players holding down commentary and coaching jobs, and she wasn't going to let this be David's fate. So, from the moment of their 1999 marriage in an Irish castle where they sat on thrones beneath heraldic 'Posh and Becks" banners, she took him over in a manner that could never be acceptable to Sir Alex. The clash of loyalties was understandably painful. Beckham had arrived at Old Trafford aged 14, a guileless Essex boy with a freakily useful right foot, and in Ferguson he found a second father. It has never been possible to say precisely what makes a player appeal to Ferguson, but one attribute the manager rates as key is stamina, and in young David he found - as Victoria would later - a boy prepared to work until it hurt. Despite the 'Posh" monicker, pinned on her by the Spice Girls" management, Victoria Adams owed nothing to life among the idle rich. Her father Tony was a failed Sixties pop singer, who had set up his own electronics business, and passed on his dreams of stardom to his daughter. At seven, Victoria watched Fame, and was sufficiently inspired by this tale of showbiz wannabes trying to realise their dreams that she joined a theatrical school. "I'm going to be as famous as Persil Automatic," she declared. And so it turned out, with global pop stardom, prodigious self-promotion and, lately, a lucrative venture into high fashion. For much of this time, however, Victoria has been portrayed as Lady Macbeth crossed with Joan Crawford, and the thin, unsmiling, hollow-eyed presence she affects has given great comfort to millions. To her detractors she has become a diva, a monster, a megalomaniac, unsatisfied while there are still publicity wheezes to be exploited and money to be made. Yet what would Becks now be without her? Sir Alex's "revelations" are nothing that he wasn't saying publicly a decade ago when he first got it into his head that Victoria was a morale-sapping menace who shouldn't be allowed near decent footballers. In an interview with the American magazine Sports Illustrated in 2003, Ferguson claimed that Beckham had become a "different person" after falling for Posh Spice. After training, he'd always be practising, practising, practising. But his life changed when he met his wife. She's in pop and David got another image. He's developed this fashion thing. I saw his transition to a different person. Posh, rightly, took no notice, realising that Beckham's career peak was passing and that in his touching pledge to remain at United forever, he was being taken for a mug. Beyond Old Trafford, the world was clamouring for a commodity just like Becks - handsome, glamorous, with a dab of mystery and a fabulously brilliant wife. So the Posh and Becks show rolled on to Spain then to the US, and the money continues to roll in. While Sir Alex will doubtless have been handsomely paid for his tome, the latest reports of the Beckhams" main companies show huge profits, with one director - almost certainly David - being paid £14 million last year. It is hard not to suspect that, deep down, Sir Alex knew it was time for Becks to move on.