If you were aghast at the fawning coverage last week of David and Victoria Beckham all those cheesecake newspaper photos, Victoria’s reality show on NBC, a horde of eager press at David’s first practice with the L.A. Galaxy, and of course, paparazzi and adoring fans at every step just think how really aghast NFL officials must be.

Somewhere deep inside NFL official-dom, they must be wondering if they’re losing Los Angeles.

Think about how soccer is taking hold. World Cup ratings last year were up 200 percent and more kids play soccer than American football. And as L.A. continues to be populated by soccer-loving Latinos, the sport’s popularity here is bound to grow. Now, L.A. has a soccer superstar to follow with a wife so goofy and adorable she has made the tabloids shove Paris Hilton inside. Soccer, long considered the sport of the future in the United States, may well be the sport of the present in Los Angeles.

Compare that to football. Los Angeles is going into its 13th season without a pro football team which means many of today’s teens have no connection to the NFL. If Angelenos were angry and frustrated in the past, they seem to have slipped into an oh-just-watch-the-Trojans kind of resignation and apathy.

You’d hope that some adult in the NFL ranks was struck by the breathless coverage of the Beckhams “Hollywood aristocracy clamors to rub shoulders with Beckhams,” read one headline last week and say, “Uh oh. No football player has that kind of star power in L.A.”

If NFL executives are half aware, they’d declare that it is time to do something, anything, to stop this embarrassment and get an NFL team back in America’s second-largest city.

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James O’Shea, the editor of the Los Angeles Times, was quoted as saying that putting ads on the front page, as the Times appears set to do, would “diminish the newspaper, cheapen the front page and reduce the space devoted to news.” O’Shea is right. It’s a sad day when a big metro daily newspaper must resort to putting “You’re killing me, Larry!” slogans on nearly reverent space.

But the reality is this: that sad day has arrived. With the Times’ revenues swooning 10 percent in the second quarter, and cash flow down 27 percent, this is no time to worry about such niceties. If you need to be rescued, you shouldn’t worry that it is Larry from Sit ‘n Sleep who’s throwing you a lifeline.

But if there’s any solace in it, most people long ago learned to shrug off ads and product placements in formerly ad-free zones. We see ads plastered on walls of baseball stadiums and ads tattooed on boxer’s backs. It’s been 25 years since E.T. followed the trail of Reese’s Pieces and at least that long since we started pushing grocery carts that are rolling billboards. This publication has had ads on the front page for years, and even the Wall Street Journal has adopted them.

The point is, we now live amid ad clutter and don’t think less of the ones who are selling the ad space. Many of us will learn to read a newspaper with a front-page ad without thinking that the Times’ editorial independence is compromised by it.

I don’t like to see it. But I’d rather see front-page ads than see the Times cut a few million more dollars worth of staff.

Charles Crumpley is editor of the Business Journal. He can be reached at

[email protected]

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