Even the British public are finding it hard to care too much about David Beckham's decision to give up football for LA-based soccer where he'll earn more money in a week than entire streets do in a decade, so guess what the reaction is in LA.

That's right; there isn't really one of those either. Because at least in England people know who David Beckham is – he's the guy who used to play on England's right wing until Aaron Lennon came along and was better – but in America David Beckham is the dude with the skinny Spice Girl wife and not a lot else. What made David Beckham give up a life of being taken seriously as a competitive sportsman for a life in LA? Well, money obviously. And the love and support of Tom Cruise, who David Beckham has revealed was key in helping him decide to go and live in a warm country where everyone speaks English and wants to pay him hundreds of millions of dollars for basically holding some shaving equipment.

We all know that David Beckham is going to move to LA to play for a ludicrously-named soccer team and get paid an even more ludicrous amount of money for doing it. We all know that by doing so, David Beckham has effectively put the skids on a football career that saw him win the Premiership and the Champion's League, sign for Real Madrid and captain his own country in order to play against fat old men in front of Port Vale-sized crowds and get paid $1 million a week for the pleasure.

And we all know that the reason David Beckham is doing this is to try and sell more bottles of his pikey perfume to Americans, to make his wife slightly more famous than she is in the UK and to continue teaching little Maddox Jolie-Pitt how to kick a ball in a straight line. But was there more to David Beckham's decision to move to America and play for the Los Angeles Galaxy than that?

Of course there was. One of David Beckham's best friends in the whole wide world is Tom Cruise. Tom Cruise showed Suri Cruise to David Beckham before almost anyone else, invited David and Victoria to his preposterous wedding last year and Katie Holmes is such good friends with Victoria Beckham that she might be playing her in a rubbish-sounding Beckham biopic before too long. And, just to make things explicit, David Beckham has revealed that Tom Cruise was the man who finally convinced him to go to America:

"I was on the phone to him for about an hour last night and then an hour the night before. I asked him for his advice… because he's a very wise man, he's a very good friend of mine. He couldn't speak any higher than what he was saying about LA and that's gonna be a big help for us, to have friends actually when we arrive in LA."

And friends just don't come bigger than Tom Cruise, who will no doubt show David Beckham the sights of LA up to and including the spot where Tom's stuntman burnt his willy off, the spot where Sumner Redstone fired Tom from Paramount and the spot where David and Victoria Beckham will – probably at some point in the next six months – take their first E-Meter audit together, realise that they're in dire need of saving from all their bad thetans and then decide to spend all their Los Angeles Galaxy money learning about how cool Scientology is onboard Freewinds.

Incidentally, what's the deal with that name? We get Plymouth Argyle, a football team named after a kind of knitted sweater, and America gets the Los Angeles Galaxy, named after a massive gravitationally bound system that consists of between ten million and a trillion stars, an interstellar medium of gas and dust, and an unknown dark matter. Hardly seems fair.

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Becks' Phone Calls To Tom – Sky