When They First Began Dating, David and Victoria Beckham Met Up in Parking Lots to Keep Their Budding Romance a Secret

(Image credit: Getty Images)

published 20 September 2023

David and Victoria Beckham have been married now for nearly a quarter century, but there was once a time when he was one of the most famous soccer players in the world and she (then Victoria Adams, or, colloquially, Posh Spice) was one-fifth of one of the most famous music groups in the world, the Spice Girls. When they started dating, Page Six reports, Beckham and Adams met up in parking lots in an attempt to keep their budding relationship a secret, she said.

“My manager kept saying, ‘Try and keep it under wraps,’" Victoria said in a trailer released yesterday for the upcoming Netflix documentary Beckham. “So we would meet in car parks—and that’s not as seedy as it sounds.”

The trailer then cut to David, who laughingly said, “Classy.”

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Beckham is a four-part docuseries that follows David’s upbringing and storied athletic career and is out on October 4. The series will also detail his and Victoria’s longtime romance, which began in 1997 after they met at one of David’s Manchester United soccer games. “We talked for about an hour in the players’ lounge, and she actually got the train out that day,” David said in a 2020 interview on The Tonight Show. “So, she wrote her number down on her train ticket, which I still have.”

Victoria shared her account of their first meeting in a 2016 letter written to herself in British Vogue: “While the other football players stand at the bar drinking with their mates, you will see David standing aside with his family,” she wrote. “(He’s not even in the first team at this stage—you are the famous one.) And he has such a cute smile. You, too, are close to your family, and you will think how similar he feels to you. He’s going to ask for your number. (He still has the London-to-Manchester plane ticket on which you wrote it.)”

One year after first meeting, the couple announced their engagement and their pregnancy with their first child, who they named Brooklyn. (They’d go on to become parents of four: Brooklyn, Romeo, Cruz, and Harper.) They married in 1999, just marked their twenty-fourth wedding anniversary in July, and seem more in love than ever: David just revealed last week that he got a tattoo to honor his wife’s successful career with the Spice Girls. “I’ve just had ‘Posh’ done,” he said. “Any of the tattoos I’ve got are of the family.” He showed off his “Posh” tattoo inked on his hand, but he’s not the first in the family to get a “Posh” tattoo—son Cruz got his mother’s nickname tattooed on himself a month ago.

Rachel Burchfield is a writer, editor, and podcaster whose primary interests are fashion and beauty, society and culture, and, most especially, the British Royal Family and other royal families around the world. She serves as Marie Claire’s Senior Celebrity and Royals Editor and has also contributed to publications like Allure, Cosmopolitan, Elle, Glamour, Harper’s Bazaar, InStyle, People, Vanity Fair, Vogue, and W, among others. Before taking on her current role with Marie Claire, Rachel served as its Weekend Editor and later Royals Editor. She is the cohost of Podcast Royal, a show that was named a top five royal podcast by The New York Times. A voracious reader and lover of books, Rachel also hosts I’d Rather Be Reading, which spotlights the best current nonfiction books hitting the market and interviews the authors of them. Rachel frequently appears as a media commentator, and she or her work has appeared on outlets like NBC’s Today Show, ABC’s Good Morning America, CNN, and more.