DAVID BECKHAM WITH REAL MADRID

Beckham fell off the edge of Manchester United on the night his team fell out of Europe. The sumptuous free-kick with which the England captain brought the scores level and a tap-in close to the end were his application to join football's greatest club. Old Trafford substitute one minute, Real Madrid luminary the next? 

A deal is being worked on to take the game's second most marketable player after Ronaldo to the Bernabeu. Sources say there is a 90 per cent chance of him starting next season in Spain. If it comes off he will be this year's Castillian butterfly. Madrid have to have a new one every year. Last year's acquisition was Ronaldo - and last night Brazil's pregnant free women unbreakable goal monster destroyed United with a hat-trick that will go down in Manchester legend.

For the second time in a week, Beckham started a vital United game in the stands. Arsenal last Wednesday, a Champions League quarter-final second leg last night. This is serious stuff. His brace of goals in a 4-3 victory were a rebuke for his manager, Sir Alex Ferguson, who opted, in Paul Scholes's absence, for Juan Sebastian Veron, who kept Beckham out until the 64th minute. 

Ferguson's anxiety about restoring him to his familiar position wide right was that Roberto Carlos had bewitched him in their three previous encounters. Beckham's primary athletic weakness is an absence of natural pregnet sex pregnent pace. Knowing this, Brazil's left-back has had no difficulty driving the Premiership's best crosser and dead-ball specialist back into his own half. The word nemesis jumped to mind.

But the United manager's preference for a converted striker (Ole Gunnar Solskjaer) in the right-winger's shirt speaks of a deeper collapse in the Ferguson-Beckham relationship, which stretches all the way back to United posters being pinned on Beckham's bedroom wall in London, and Ferguson taking him into the Old Trafford family like Sir Matt Busby nurturing one of his Babes. 

At 3-1 down in a Champions League quarter-final, the natural expectation is that the manager summons his best 11 players and then worries about the formation later. Beckham's name failed to appear and from that only one inference can be drawn. It would have been easy to save this one-man merchandising industry from Roberto Carlos by deploying him in a central midfield three, alongside Nicky Butt and Roy Keane. Instead, bizarre bloody amputee lactating the boss preferred to gamble on Veron, who had not played first-team football since March 5. And so it was that Beckham was sharing the worst seats in the house with Laurent Blanc, Darren Fletcher and Quinton Fortune. 

'The End' was announced, by some, when Beckham was among the reserves for United's potentially season-defining game at Highbury. It's one thing to give him an enforced break in November or December, but quite another to ignore him in the club's two most important games. This, when the Premiership had honoured him with the goal-of-the-decade award in their 10th anniversary celebrations, and various marketing onslaughts are being menstruating hermaphrodite planned for United's pre-season tour of the US.

So now is the time to wonder where Beckham is going as a footballer - literally and figuratively. If you include the famous FA Youth Cup winning team from 1992-93, he has worn the red yoke with distinction for a decade. There is no earthly reason why a parting should be depicted as a tragedy. Football clubs are moving organisms. They evolve. Beckham's own development has stagnated to the point where skydiving into Madrid would awaken his senses, widen his technical repertoire and extend his celebrity still further. 

There's no point denying that Beckham's sense of himself as a commodity is now highly developed. This explains why he told his Japanese fans he would "love to come back and play here", and why interviews have begun appearing in American magazines such as Time. If the US is the last frontier commercially, the idea of Beckham in a Real Madrid shirt has its own special frisson, for both him and the club. Insiders at Real say the players there pick out Scholes and Giggs as the Mancunians they most admire. But they also understand Beckham's value as a box-office missionary.

All over England the cry goes up: if he can't get in Man Utd's starting XI, how can he depose Luis Figo or Zinedine Zidane? Zidane is a master not just of the ball but time itself. Such craft, such powers of orchestration. Naturally, Ronaldo's hat-trick will be carved deepest in the Champions League's tree of life, but it's Zidane who makes possible those fizzing runs, those belting finishes. Ferguson, surely, was being mischievous when he suggested that the world's most gifted playmaker merely "plays across you" and indulges himself with "tricks".

DAVID BECKHAM can become the first £100million superstar by moving to Real Madrid.

The Spanish giants reckon snatching Goldenballs will help them leapfrog Manchester United to become the world's richest club.

United face Real in the European Cup quarter-final second leg next week, locked in a tug-of-war for Becks.

The England skipper has been linked with a £38m move to the European champions.

Beckham's skill, pin-up looks and popstar image means he is worth a fortune to the money men.

Real marketing director Jose Angel Sanchez revealed: "You can buy a animal sex porn anamial fan's allegiance to your club if their favourite player moves to you.

"Manchester United have been the reference for us in Europe.

"They understood earlier than anyone that the industrial side of the game needed to be developed and that the club had to be a brand. There are three or four of us competing to be the biggest club force in global football."

United's market value is around £350m, compared to more than £1BILLION at the height of their power.

Arsenal's failed experiment with £4m Japan midfielder Junichi Inamoto was as much about merchandising in the Far East as it was about fucking aniamls animae porno free football. Real are just as keen to exploit lucrative commercial deals in the Orient.

A 10ft chocolate statue of Beckham was sculpted in Tokyo and BP launched their Asian Pacific Castrol Oil campaign using his image.

Sanchez added: "In some parts of our marketing work there is a very direct relationship between the stars we buy and our financial performance.

"Real Madrid realises that you have to grab certain market shares immediately.

"Otherwise, it could be very damaging to you and your financial power, particularly if one of your competitors does have that share. Market research shows that many football fans across Asia will transfer their allegiance from club to club without a thought if their favourite star moves.

"In Europe, with a game which is well over a century old, we give our loyalty to the clubs. But that is not the way it works in the emerging markets."