Becks - turning Japanese

With his Buddhist-monk-style shaven hairstyle, Manchester United's David Beckham is British football's secret weapon in popularising the game in the Far East, writes BBC News Online's Chris Horrie.

Japanese goalposts?

"We all know Beckham - he has the same haircut as me and the other monks," Sung Gong, abbot of Korea's largest Buddhist monastery, told a newspaper last week.

A generation ago it would have been remarkable that a Buddhist monk on the other side of the planet should know anything at all about the star of a football team based on an industrial estate next to a disused ship canal in Manchester.

England team on way back from barber's

Trend

But not anymore. The English national game, relaunched as a worldwide TV and merchandising operation, is taking the Far East by storm ahead of next year's World Cup in Japan and South Korea.

For years those in charge of the financial side of football have longed for the game to take off in the rich Japanese market.

The problem is that the Japanese tend to follow American, rather than European trends. The Japanese caught the baseball and golf bugs from the USA, enormously boosting the value of those sports to the TV and marketing business.

Some sort of Zen ritual?

Despite the vast efforts of FIFA and companies such as Nike - including the staging of the 1994 World Cup in the USA and an attempt to hype Brazil as a sort of adopted national team for African Americans - Americans have not really taken to "soccer".

Business

So from the mid-90s onwards the football business has been attacking Far Eastern markets directly. Manchester United and their main star David Beckham have been leading the way - with great success.

Real thing: Arsenal's Inamoto

"Manchester United is the single best-marketed franchise in the world," says John Krimsky of the club's US marketing partners, the New York Yankees. "They have about as many fans in Thailand as they have in England."

At stake is the sports fashion brand Nike's £1 billion marketing spend on football, designed to make it the number one clothing brand in the world. Nike has invested £303 million in the Manchester United brand alone - and hopes to see a return in the form of increased shirt sales.

Blonde Ambition

Beckham - who has his own personal deal with a rival sportswear company - established himself as a bankable star in Japan during the 1999 roll-out of the Manchester United brand in the Far East.

Seen as the "cutting edge" of the latest western fad, consumers queued up not only to buy replica shirts, but entire kits.

Some Japanese consumers would even turn up at stadiums wearing shin-pads and football boots as well as "Beckham" shirts. The ultimate fashion statement involved young men growing their hair and dyeing it blonde in imitation of the style worn by Beckham at the time.

Brand

But possible efforts to make English football more attractive to Far Eastern fashion fans and TV audiences do not stop at hairstyles.

This summer another English-based Nike brand - Arsenal - signed the Japanese player Junichi Inamoto for a record fee. The player is not a regular in the Arsenal team, but his association with the brand has already increased the value of pay-per-view Arsenal programming to Japanese cable TV.

Nike and Arsenal are reported to have made 100,000 shirt sales in Japan in the wake of the Imamoto signing, meaning that the brand now rivals Manchester United for market share in Japan.

Women

The other untapped global market, meanwhile, is women who, taken as a whole, have far more spending power than even the Japanese.

Female future: Angela Banks scores for England

Women may be the key to the elusive American market. The USA national team won the Women's World Cup, prompting FIFA to solemnly announce that the "future of football is female".

The implications are worth thinking about.

After turning Japanese, maybe David Beckham's next shirt-sales move will be somehow to turn female as well.