David Beckham: For the Love of The Game, BBC1 - TV review: All for a good cause

It verged on grief tourism, but Beckham's homage to the game was beautiful

On the ball: David Beckham visited a refugee camp in Djibouti in ‘For the Love of the Game' (BBC)

For every professional sportsman the greatest challenge comes once you retire from the game. Days, once filled with action, stretch long in front of you and the world no longer rings with celebration and applause. There were hints of the strangeness of this post-sporting life in David Beckham's likeable if gimmicky travelogue, For the Love of the Game, which saw the former footballer accompanied by key Brand Beckham members Dave Gardner and Simon Oliveira cross seven continents in 10 days playing seven football matches, the last of which took place at Old Trafford, home of his former club, Manchester United.

It was all for a good cause, naturally. In this case Unicef, the children's charity for which Beckham is an ambassador. Thus we were treated to scenes of Becks playing football with school children in post-earthquake Nepal and at a Djibouti refugee camp as well as with a university girls' soccer team on a rooftop in Miami and a team of scientists and explorers on a makeshift snow pitch in Antarctica.

It could have seemed like the worst sort of grief tourism, a famous footballer dropping into people's lives for a day and bestowing upon them the gift of his glamour. That it didn't was down to Beckham's obvious connection with the different places he visited and his touching attempts to explain what football means both to him and the rest of the world. “I've taken it for granted being able to play for my country,” he admitted in Djibouti, genuinely humbled by the Somali coach Issa Ali who had gone from professional player to refugee and now spends his time passing his skills to the teens in the camp he must call home.

The film's real power came from the small, personal revelations. The conversation with Zinedine Zidane after he decided to drop out of the Old Trafford game following the Paris attacks. The late-night chat with one of his sons. The fact that Beckham still refers to Sir Alex Ferguson as “the boss” and “the manager” even after a shining post-United career in Spain and the US and, most of all, his touching, oddly sad admission that the years at Manchester United were “the best years of my life”. “I was lucky enough to play professional football for 20 years and today, though tinged with sadness, I still feel the buzz and joy that football brings,” he concluded. There haven't been many better, or more honest, assessments of the pull of the beautiful game.