David Beckham was left “clinically depressed” after his red card in the 1998 World Cup, his wife Victoria has said.
Her comments are part of a new Netflix documentary about the footballer, which delves into his career with interviews from friends and family – as well as Posh and Becks themselves.
Beckham was sent off during the match with Argentina in 1998, after kicking Diego Simeone – a game that England went on to lose in a penalty shoot-out.
In the second episode of the documentary, Victoria, 49, and David, 48, talk about the abuse they had levelled at them in the late 1990s as a result of the sending off.
After the game, an effigy of Beckham hung in a pub, and during the following season, Manchester United’s team bus was pelted with rocks and pint glasses at an away game at West Ham.
Victoria said: “He was absolutely broken. He was in pieces.
“He was really depressed, absolutely clinically depressed.
“It pained me so much, I still want to kill these people.”
Beckham added: “I wish there was a pill you could take which could erase certain memories.
“I made a stupid mistake. It changed my life. (The questions when he came back) ‘how do you feel about letting your country down?’ and ‘you are a disgrace’.
“We were in America, just about to have our first baby, and I thought ‘we will be fine, in a day or two people will have forgotten’.
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“I don’t think I have ever talked about it, just because I can’t. I find it hard to talk through what I went through because it was so extreme.
“Wherever I went, I got abused every single day.
“To walk down the street and to see people look at you in a certain way, spit at you, abuse you, come up to your face and say some of the things they said, that is difficult.
“I wasn’t eating, I wasn’t sleeping. I was a mess. I didn’t know what to do.
“The boss (Alex Ferguson) called me. He said ‘David, how are you doing?’ I think I got quite emotional. He said ‘how are you doing, son?’. I said ‘not great boss’. He said ‘OK, don’t worry about it, son’.
“That was the only thing I could control, once I was on the pitch, then I felt safe.”
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Beckham added: “It brought a lot of attention that I would never wish on anyone, let alone my parents, and I can’t forgive myself for that. That is the tough part of what happened, because I was the one that made the mistake.
“When I have gone through difficult moments, I was able to block it out, but inside it killed me.
“Any time I was kicked during that season, it was like the (opposition team) had got two goals.
“As horrible as it was to look up to Victoria in the stand (getting that abuse), it was the one thing which spurred me on.”
The series streams from Wednesday 4 October.
