Clearly, something needs to be done with the England captain, removed 20 minutes before the end of the Northern Ireland game and glumly cosseted by his wife on the England team coach on their way to see Anastacia in concert.
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We sense the end of Real life as he's known it. The end of real life happened years ago when he married a Spice Girl and became The Mint in human form. Since then, while remaining an icon and shirt-seller of spectacular proportions, the footballer has become the football … er?
He doesn't seem sure of himself. One minute he espouses Real Madrid forever, wants to stay for the rest of his career, loves the paella, the pampering, the plastering of his sweet face over every billboard. "My wife, my family, are happy. We want to stay here." (March 4)
The next, he is railing against the prensa rosa, the Spanish version of the paparazzi, accusing them of hunting down his sons with lenses when no children on earth can have been better prepared for life in the glare of flashbulbs. "I love the country. I love the fans. But there are things that upset me in Spain. These incidents have made me sit back and think." (March 24) This did not ring entirely true. Something wrought that startling change and it may have been the discovery that he is surplus to requirements in a team of international galacticos who are now drifting aimlessly through space.
We all know Victoria wants to come home. She wants to hang her hat in Hertfordshire again and, presumably, that has helped fuel the Arsenal rumour. This potential move, however, has more than one down-side. The champions have just spent a season in the company of one sulky, under-performing captain without inheriting another one. If a straight swap is to be completed of Beckham for Patrick Vieira, manager Arsène Wenger had better be sure he is getting a better class of umbrage in midfield.
Furthermore, the priority for Wenger now is rebuilding given the Champions League failure of his own French-led assault on Europe which continually ends in Napoleonic defeat. Do they need a 30-year-old with a smattering of Spanish and a past that belongs to arch-rivals Manchester United? If it is a captain Wenger is looking for, he has already alighted in his mind on Ashley Cole, a quality full-back absolutely worthy of his place in the England team, which is more than you can say about Beckham.
Cole's 'tapping up' escapade with Chelsea will recede in importance once the fines have been handed over and insincere homage paid to a rule that everybody breaks all the time in the game, Arsenal almost certainly included.
So where does that leave Beckham? Last week it left him in a Manchester shop - which promptly shut, all the better for his browsing - shouting at photographers to leave him alone. He didn't mean it. The Beckhams live and breathe the vapour trail of the jetset. It is not enough that He gives Her a £1 million pear-shaped knuckle-dusting diamond ring, it has to be wafted before every lens in Manchester to be worth its weight in romance.
Now think Wigan. Lancashire, it's a second home to Beckham. All those years at Manchester, that loan period at Preston North End. He even christened Wigan's JJB Stadium, a small work of art, when United played a friendly in August 1999 that opened the 25,000-seat arena for business. They've never forgotten it up there. Beckham played full throttle for 82 minutes. Imagine him doing that for the Latics every week.
"I don't think we'd be able to afford him," Dave Whelan, Wigan's chairman and owner, said from his estate in Barbados yesterday, which suggests he could afford him all right. "But anything that puts Wigan in the public eye is a good idea. There's no such thing as bad publicity." They sound made for one another. The small pond in need of a profile and the most photographed man on earth. Wigan might be slightly impoverished compared with Real's billions. But Beckham doesn't need the money. Perhaps he would work for nothing, repaid for his graft by free shopping on a Wednesday evening (to be negotiated) and his own table at one of the bars at Wigan Pier (winner of a British Tourist Award in 1997).
"We're not all cloth caps and whippets, you know," said Maurice Lindsay, chairman of the rugby league's Wigan Warriors, who share the JJB Stadium with the football club. "And we're big admirers of David up here. Although he's got iconic status and all the bling, we appreciate that he's a great, great athlete with a tremendous engine."
They do this in America with the NFL/NBA draft system. The best young player is traditionally brought into one of the weakest teams to level the playing field in terms of talent. This is a variation on the theme. Obviously, Wigan will have to turn promise into reality and make the leap into the Premiership. They are three points clear of third-placed Ipswich at the moment but look the form team of the Championship with seven games to go. We cannot have the England captain - and Sven-Goran Eriksson seems determined that Beckham should remain so - playing beyond the borders of the Premiership. But if Wigan are promoted, here is the best English-born dead-ball player at their disposal. Worth an estimated 10 goals in a season, that might be enough for Wigan to avoid the yo-yo effect and stay up.
Then there is the style. Beckham said last week how much he relished the speed, the tackles, the physicality of British football. At Wigan he could enjoy all three alongside Scotland midfielder Lee McCulloch, Graham Kavanagh, of the Republic of Ireland, and Jimmy Bullard, once a West Ham kid, who usefully plays a mean game of golf.
What Beckham needs is security and inspiration. At Real Madrid he has played in a state of Castilian flux under four different managers, Carlos Queiroz, Jose Antonio Camacho, Mariano Garcia Remon and now Vanderlei Luxemburgo. You can't have that in World Cup year. Paul Jewell represents stability. He surely won't be lured elsewhere if he wins promotion for the Latics, not least because the man who pays his wages can afford a des res in Barbados.
He is good with children, Beckham. If he feels he can nurture a set of new boys to a greater achievement than they have ever known, he will thrive. He will be driven. He will be reborn as an English footballer. He won't be dwarfed by fellow icons. He won't stutter in an alien language. There are no prensa rosa in Wigan. This is his very own Lancashire hot spot.
Wigan could give Beckham the greatest gift of all: a sense of humility. For he could drive round town in his £73,000 personalised Humvee Hummer with Victoria dripping in diamonds like a Louis XIV chandelier, little Beckhams all waving from their baby seats in the back, and still the locals would mutter: "He's nowhere near as good as Ellery Hanley, you know."