Victoria and David Beckham Get Extraordinarily Candid About the Most Difficult Season of Their 24-Year Marriage

Today, 24 years and four children deep into their marriage, David and Victoria Beckham look as happy as they’ve ever been. (Case in point: David’s front row support—socks and sandals and all—at Victoria’s Paris Fashion Week show last Friday alongside three of their four kids.)

But it wasn’t always sunshine and rainbows for the couple (or any couple, for that matter). The four-part Netflix docuseries about David, called, appropriately, Beckham, dropped today, and in it they pull the curtain back on their marriage and take viewers inside a tough time. While the docuseries mostly focuses on David’s rise to fame as an athlete, in the final episode, the pair address a difficult time in their relationship, which (as it often does) coincided with the height of his success, per People. 

David was playing for Real Madrid in Spain in 2003, a time that Victoria candidly calls “the most unhappy I’ve ever been in my entire life.” The tabloid media involvement in their marriage during this time, she said, was the “hardest period for us.”

“It felt like the world was against us,” she said. “And here’s the thing—we were against each other, if I’m being completely honest.” She added “You know, up until Madrid, sometimes it felt like us against everybody else, but we were together, we were connected, we had each other. When we were in Spain, it didn’t really feel like we had each other, either. And that’s sad. I can’t even begin to tell you how hard it was and how it affected me. It was a nightmare. From the minute we opened the door in the morning, the press were there in cars, and everywhere we went, we would get followed. It was an absolute circus—it’s really entertaining when the circus comes to town, right? Unless you’re in it.”

Asked if she resented her husband during this season of their marriage, Victoria said “Did I resent David? If I’m being totally honest, yes, I did.”

David added of that time “There was some horrible stories that were difficult to deal with. It was the first time that me and Victoria had been put under that kind of pressure in our marriage. Every time that we woke up, we felt that there was something else. I think we both felt at the time that we were, not losing each other, but drowning.” An emotional David continued “I don’t know how we got through it, in all honesty. Victoria is everything to me. To see her hurt was incredibly difficult, but we’re fighters, and at that time we needed to fight for each other and we needed to fight for our family and what we had was worth fighting for.”

He continued “There were some days that I would wake up and think, ‘How am I going to go to work? How am I going to work onto that training pitch? How am I going to look like nothing’s wrong?’ I felt physically sick every day when I opened my eyes. ‘How am I going to do this?’”

The Beckhams married in 1999, two years after they met at a soccer match. The two are parents to Brooklyn, Romeo, Cruz, and Harper, and renewed their vows in 2017; at that time, speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, David said “We know each other better than anybody. People have talked about, ‘Do we stay together because it’s a brand?’ Of course not. We stay together because we love each other, because we have four amazing children. Do you go through tough times? Of course. That’s part of relationships. It’s part of marriages. It’s part of having children. It’s part of having responsibilities.”

Beckham is available to stream now on Netflix.