David Beckham: world star, LA deadbeat

To mark the handover of Olympic responsibility to London at the grand finale of the Beijing Games this Sunday, David Beckham, along with Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page and pop star Leona Lewis, will enter the Bird's Nest stadium on top of a double-decker London bus, kick a football around with hand-picked children, and generally bask in the warm glow of adoration to which he is accustomed.

His top Olympic billing shows that he remains one of the most recognisable sports figures in the world. But in Los Angeles, where he's midway through his second season with the LA Galaxy football team, 'Goldenballs' Beckham is in serious danger of falling into sporting oblivion.

His first season with the Galaxy was close to disastrous, as a persistent injury stopped him from playing in more than a handful of games. This season, he has at least managed to get fit – but the Galaxy is in even worse trouble. The most expensive team in the American Major League Soccer has not won a game in over two months and has easily the worst defensive record in the league, conceding 40 goals in 19 games. The team runs the risk of not reaching the important end-of-season play-offs for the third year in a row. This ignominious run led to the exit last week of the Galaxy's controversial coach Ruud Gullit, the former Dutch international, after just nine months, and to the firing of general manager Alexi Lalas. It was, says Nick Green, who writes about football for the LA Daily News, "an unmitigated disaster of epic proportions".

Gullit's tenure was marked by vicious in-fighting, with furious dressing-room showdowns between the abrasive Dutchman and his players. "The players play but don't agree with what Gullit does," said Abel Xavier, a defender whom Gullit traded. "Most of the players don't believe in the coach." Gullit is the second coach to lose his job since Beckham's arrival: Frank Yallop left at the end of last season. According to Green of the News, "The behind-the-scenes atmosphere at the Galaxy is positively poisonous. This is an organisation that has run a once-admired club into the ground."

Tim Leiweke, chief executive of AEG, the huge entertainment company which owns the Galaxy, tried to blame the players for the problems, publicly describing the team as "dysfunctional" and lamenting that "unfortunately you can't fire 22 players". But the real problem for the Galaxy is that there is just one player they cannot fire: David Beckham. What makes the situation even more humiliating for the former Manchester United and Real Madrid star is that since his arrival, he and 'Team Beckham' - which includes his personal football adviser Terry Bryne and his personal manager, Simon Fuller - have effectively been running the club, having taken over many of the key personnel decisions.

"The captain of England calls the shots," says Grahame Jones of the Los Angeles Times. In particular, Team Beckham was responsible for the disastrous hiring of Gullit. "Ruud was their guy," admits AEG's Leiweke.

While Beckham's arrival in the MLS has boosted overall attendance and merchandising sales, even those are now slowing as Beckham and the Galaxy's performance on the pitch fail to live up to the hype that greeted him 18 months ago.

Equally galling for Beckham, as his career splutters to what could be an ignominious end, is the fact that a genuine new foreign sports star is currently firing up Los Angelenos.

In the few weeks since the Dominican-born baseball slugger Manny Ramirez, with his idiosyncratic ways and flowing dreadlocks, arrived at the LA Dodgers, he has become the most thrilling thing to happen to Los Angeles sports in years. With his game-winning hits, he has quickly taken the team into title contention. Attendance at Dodger games now tops 55,000, often several times a week, tens of thousands more than turn out to see David Beckham not win week after week.

"He's the big guy we’ve been waiting for years," said one fan. "There's a real buzz." ·