Beckham explains why team made moves
Owner David Beckham insists Inter Miami’s decision to hire Phil Neville isn’t based on their long friendship. Instead, he views the coach as a culture builder.
It wasn’t the original plan, but David Beckham had to spend almost all of Inter Miami CF’s inaugural season watching from more than 4,000 miles away. The COVID-19 pandemic meant he spent most of 2020 at his home in the United Kingdom and couldn’t take the hands-on ownership approach he initially planned. Even an ocean away, Beckham knew quickly, though, that his team didn’t look the way he expected it to.
“I knew pretty soon that I needed, or we needed as an ownership group, to make changes,” the co-owner said, “and I think it was better doing it sooner rather than later.”
On Jan. 7, Beckham and Inter Miami’s ownership group made the change official after the team and former coach Diego Alonso “mutually agreed to part ways.” Quickly, Beckham and Co. targeted Phil Neville, and officially named him coach Monday, along with new sporting director Chris Henderson.
The moves were brash and exciting for one of Major League Soccer’s highestprofile disappointments in 2020. They
were also, at least in Neville’s case, eyebrow-raising and risky.
Henderson’s resume is unimpeachable. The former midfielder had been the technical director for Seattle Sounders FC since its 2009 expansion season and led the team to 11 consecutive playoff berths, four U.S. Open Cups, a Supporters’ Shield in 2014 and a pair of MLS championships.
Neville’s is more unorthodox. He won six Premier League titles and the UEFA Champions League as a player for Manchester United, then had stints as an assistant coach for the England under-21 national team, Manchester United and Valencia CF in La Liga before he finally got the head job as the coach of England’s women’s national team in 2018. Above all else, his relationship with Beckham drew scrutiny.
BECKHAM AND
NEVILLE RELATIONSHIP
The two have known each other since they were 15 or 16, Beckham said, as they rose to prominence through Manchester United’s youth academy to become the foundation of the club’s success through the 1990s and into the 2000s. Beckham adamantly denied he hired Neville just because the coach is one of his closest friends.
“Of course people are always going to turn around and say, ‘Oh, it’s because he’s your friend.’ It’s nothing to do with him being my friend,” Beckham said. “Our ownership group don’t just employ our friends. We employ the best people, whether it’s on the field, off the field, in our backroom staff, the staff that we have working at our training facility, at the stadium. We’re running a serious soccer club here and, at the end of the day, we hire the people that are best-suited to the job.”
Owner Jorge Mas was even more firm in defending Inter Miami’s hiring process.
“Phil Neville was not handed the Inter Miami job. Phil Neville earned the job. It was a very thorough interview process with many candidates,” Mas said. “The fact that he’s
David’s friend is a reality. No one runs from that — actually, we embrace it — but he wasn’t given or handed the job because he’s friends with David Beckham, or solely because of his relationship with David Beckham. Phil Neville earned his job and I’m very proud as a coowner of this club to have Phil on board.”
WHY NEVILLE
FOR INTER MIAMI?
As much as Beckham wants to separate his relationship with Neville from the hiring process, those days they spent together as teenagers played a part in the club’s interest in Neville.
Mas, Beckham, Neville and Henderson all spoke publicly Friday for the first time since Inter Miami’s makeover. The overarching theme of their conversations was the holistic approach to team building in Fort Lauderdale.
Beckham rarely mentioned just the MLS team. In almost every answer, he also brought up the importance of Fort Lauderdale CF, the USL League One affiliate, and the potential of Inter Miami’s fledgling youth academy in South Florida.
Beckham finally returned to Florida on Christmas and said he has been at the training complex every morning since. It backed up his hunch the club needed to make a change after a first-round exit from the MLS Cup Playoffs in its debut season.
While he didn’t dive into too many specifics, Beckham said Neville’s work ethic and his experience coming through one of the world’s best youth academies puts the two on the same page.
“A couple things have been eye-opening and that’s why we’ve really made the changes that we’ve made. I felt that it was important to install the coaches that we expect at this club, the hard work that we expect at this club and also we’ve spoke about the young players who are around our city, and the real opportunity and potential that we have,” Beckham said. “We need people within this club that are