Real Madrid Soccer Team

David Beckham's playing career at Real Madrid apparently came to a sudden and abrupt end Saturday when Coach Fabio Capello said the former England captain would never again play for the nine-time European champions. Capello's edict means that the Galaxy could move to buy out the remaining five-plus months on Beckham's contract and bring him to the U.S. in time for the start of the Major League Soccer season April 7 instead of in midsummer as originally planned.

Ramon Calderon, the president of Real Madrid, said Sunday that he would do everything he could to get David Beckham to remain with the team instead of joining Major League Soccer's Galaxy next month as planned. "That ship has sailed," responded Alexi Lalas, the Galaxy's president and general manager, who insisted that Beckham would arrive in Los Angeles in mid-July.

It was, not surprisingly, to the well-favored Meson Txistu restaurant on Plaza Angel Carbajo in the heart of Madrid, that David Beckham, his family and his friends weaved their celebratory way late on the night of June 17. Real Madrid had just won its first Spanish championship in four years, in Beckham's final game for the club, and the mood was festive.

Real Madrid is now off to Beijing, Tokyo and Bangkok, to conquer new teams in new lands by two-goal margins without really trying as they continue to prepare for the real soccer that matters, the Spanish League regular season.

Two weeks have passed since Real Madrid made its brief stopover in Los Angeles, where it dismantled the Galaxy at the Home Depot Center before heading for the Far East. In that time, the Galaxy has played two games, won neither, made no coaching changes, signed no new players, shown little sign of doing either and pretty much puttered along in a business-as-usual mode. Small wonder then that the Major League Soccer club remains largely out of the news, invisible even in its own city.