Footballer David Beckham will be given a Lifetime Achievement award at the 2010 BBC Sports Personality of the Year. This series of images are a selection of the many taken of one of the world's most famous men
Brought up in Leytonstone, London, Beckham was nonetheless a boyhood United fan. After training with Tottenham, he moves north as a 16-year-old and makes his first-team debut against Leeds in April 1995
Beckham had won the Double the previous season but lodges himself in the consciousness of the wider public with an extraordinary goal against Wimbledon on the opening day of the 1996/97 season
He becomes a fixture of the celebrity pages after his engagement in January 1998 to Victoria Adams, or Posh Spice of Spice Girls fame
After making his international debut in September 1996, Beckham's early England career was blighted by his sending off against Argentina in the 1998 World Cup. The midfielder returns home to a barrage of criticism
Relations between Beckham and England's fans are fully mended with a dramatic injury-time free-kick at Old Trafford that secured qualification for the 2002 World Cup
He wins the BBC's Sports Personality of the Year award later that year ahead of Liverpool's Michael Owen (far right) and sailor Ellen MacArthur (left). Manchester United boss Sir Alex Ferguson picked up Coach of the Year
Beckham scores in a 2-1 win away to Everton on the final day of the season as he clinches a sixth Premier league title with the Red Devils
Beckham's relationship with Ferguson cooled however and in the summer of 2003 Real Madrid chairman Florentino Perez pounced to make him the latest in a string of so-called galacticos at the Bernabeu
By now a staple on tabloid front pages as well as back, Beckham's decision to quit the English game receives plenty of coverage
Beckham helps his native London win the 2012 Olympic Games as part of a star-studded delegation, including heptathlete Denise Lewis, that outflanked favourite Paris in Singapore in July 2005
After a four-year stay in the Spanish capital, Beckham arrives in the showbiz capital of the world, amid a flurry of tickertape and hype, to sign for Major League Soccer's LA Galaxy
In the very different setting of Cape Town's Khayelitsha Township, Beckham pays a visit to a clinic treating mothers and young children living with HIV
His hopes of returning to South Africa for the 2010 World Cup are destroyed by an Achilles injury suffered on his second loan spell at AC Milan
Beckham suffers further World Cup disappointment as he, along with Prince William and Prime Minister David Cameron, persuades only two of Fifa's executive committee to vote for England as host of the 2018 tournament
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