I’m in the burger queue before the LA Galaxy-Chivas USA derby when the tequila-stoked Chivas Legion Kalifas burst into the stadium like a red and white tsunami.

“What the fuck! Who the hell are they!” asks the guy in front of me, taking a nervous step back as the crazy carnival of Spanish-chanting lunatics reminds Los Angeles that this is not a “sports” event – this is futbol!

“That’s the Chivas fans,” I tell him.

“Wow!” he says, obviously astonished. “Is it always like this?”

This is his first “soccer” game. You get the feeling it won’t be his last. He came because of David Beckham, as did 7000 new LA Galaxy season ticket holders. Even though Goldenballs isn’t here yet. In fact ticket sales have soared right across the country. When Beckham first signed to the MLS franchise, the US media had a collective fit. When he actually turns up to play, they’ll have an even bigger one. The hype is boiling nicely.

But, as the chanting, tattooed, pogoing, smoke-bomb tossing, goat-faced wrestling mask wearing Chivas fans prove, Bexmania isn’t the only mania in town. An increasing number of American soccer fans are seeking to recreate the passion, energy, spontaneity and noise they see and hear at European and Latin American games. Already these fans are helping save MLS games from the sterile, spoon-fed, Disneyfied McFandom that ruins the atmosphere at most other US sports.

Beckham might lure tens of thousands of Americans to soccer, but it’s the likes of the Chivas USA fans and the atmosphere they create that’ll most likely persuade people to stay. Not that you’d know that from reading the US press.

“Beckhams to save America and get us out of Iraq!” screams a headline in one
magazine. It’s a piss-take of countless mindlessly repetitive “Can Becks save soccer in America?” articles.

Save it from what exactly? Hard as it may be for outsiders to believe – and I speak as an English ex-pat – football is doing quite well over here, thank you. Beckham knows that. That’s why he’s here.

Meanwhile the pre-shocks of the imminent Bexquake are being felt all over LA, where Beckham billboards are starting to pop up. Most Galaxy fans say they’re “stoked” or “psyched” and, as British-born, LA-based soccer broadcaster Steven Cohen says, “The women of LA are all aflutter.”

Indeed, every female glazes over and grins at the very mention. A thirtysomething soccer mum and newly-minted Galaxy season ticket holder playing with her kids in an LA park – just yards from a game between two sets of Chivas fans – screams “Whoooooooo! Beck-ham! Yeah!” Then she punches the air and runs in a small circle. And then hides behind her husband and refuses to give her name.

“When I told her I’d got season tickets,” grins the soccer-mad hubbie, “I was worried she’d ask me how much. All she said was: ‘How close?’”

The City of Angels is in the deceptively calm eye of the Beckham storm. Tommy Mack, 37-year-old member of Galaxy’s Riot Squad – an unofficial supporters group “with the emphasis on songs, chants, and massive amounts of booze” – feels relaxed enough to joke about it.

“Everybody’s heard of Beckham,” he says. “They don’t know why, they don’t know how, but his ‘Q’ rating is rather high for a soccer player. Unfortunately, in Los Angeles, you can also achieve this amount of interest by killing someone in a creative manner. So you tell me, imported soccer royalty, or OJ Simpson?”
The gossip mags keep the pot boiling with a series of increasingly ridiculous
stories about Victoria. She’s apparently searching for a private school that will provide the boys with their own personal soccer pitch. And she’s also insisting on a mansion with separate master bedrooms.

Posh is also photographed shopping with new best mate Katie Holmes. And Tom Cruise is giving David advice on where to live. The late night talk show hosts are still making Spice Girls and “nobody-in-America-likes-soccer” jokes. They’re lame and out of date. But they’re still making them.

All-female LA soccer podcast The Treble even features a regular “Beckham gossip” spot where the soccer-mad trio gleefully pull apart the latest rumours. “Posh is really hot with the press right now,” says Jennifer Robertson. “OK, so our view is skewed, but everybody we know is asking us about Beckham. I mean everybody!”

“The MLS really needs more gossip,” says her mysteriously forename-only colleague “Nicolle”, who confesses that before Beckham’s arrival they used to
deliberately spread “pretty scandalous and seedy” rumours about squeaky clean and rather boring players like Cobi Jones just to make the league seem more interesting.

Away from LA and gossip-hungry females, fans of other MLS teams are understandably less agog – but they’re still awaiting BecksDay with some glee. “As DC United fans, my family can’t wait to see what the burden of being a travelling circus does to the hated Galaxy,” laughs Bryan James. “My wife was in LA recently and Galaxy fans Joe Six Packs and Jane Housecat were all talking about Posh and Becks. Will Posh take Paula Abdul’s spot on American Idol? Will Becks make soccer more relevant than hockey? Will Landon Donovan cry about not being the biggest fish in the pond?”

But there’s one group of Los Angeles soccer fans who care little for David Beckham. “What good is he going to be? It’s going to be a circus,” shrugs 40-year-old construction worker and Mexican citizen Obios “Obi” Mossaro,
unofficial leader of the Chivas Legion de Kalifas, an LA-based grass roots supporters organisation largely comprised of Mexican Americans. And they make every other supporters group in America look like the Anthony Callea fan club on Valium.

As far as the Legion is concerned, Beckham is a pampered, past-his-sell-by-date, show pony.

“He’s just an actor!” smiles Pillow, 21.

“Posh Spice? Who is she? No, seriously, who is she?” asks 41-year-old Wera.

“She’s his wife,” chips in Rocker, 21.

“Yeah, I know that,” says Wera, “but who is she?”

Despite this hostility-tinged indifference, when I first meet 26-year-old Legionnaire Aspa, he’s wearing a red England shirt and despite his explanation – “I just like the colour! Red, like Chivas!” – he changes before I can read the number on the back.

Are they all secret Beckham lovers after all? He certainly doesn’t feature in any of the Legion’s anti-Galaxy chants – and there are plenty of them.

“Why would we bother?” says Obi. “If I had to rate Beckham on scale of one to ten? Zero. Landon Donovan is a better player. Beckham is just a movie star.”

“Amazing! Chivas fans have finally learned how to speak!” retorts the Riot Squad’s Tommy Mack. “We were getting concerned for their evolutionary well-being. On the other hand, Chivas USA was founded on the concept of bringing over-the-hill Mexican soccer stars to Los Angeles, so I’ll call them on their hypocrisy and invite them to a nice refreshing cup of Shut The Hell Up.”
Me-ow. Inside the stadium the Legion and the Riot Squad roar at each other
across the pitch. Meanwhile Chivas fan Diana Rosa Germano from The Treble finds herself in among newish Galaxy supporters: “All you can hear is people talking ‘Beckham, Beckham, Beckham’. I’m like, ‘Shut up! There’s a game on and he’s not even playing!’”Some of the Beckham coverage has referenced the 1964 arrival in the US of The Beatles. Others, perhaps more accurately, have asked if Beckham can have the same impact Pelé had when he came to play for the New York Cosmos in the 1970s, when the Brazilian outshone every American sports star and, for a while, helped US soccer fill 70,000-seater stadiums.

If football in the US is ever going to scale these heights again – and stay there – it’s going to have to have to reach black kids, particularly in the inner cities. The challenge is not so great in LA, where only 12 percent of the population is black and nearly 50 percent are of Hispanic and Latino, soccer-mad origin. In DC, however, the black population is approaching 60 percent, while in another six “MLS cities” that figure is between 24 and 36 percent. The majority of them have been relatively untouched by the soccer revolution. “Competitive youth soccer in the United States is the middle-class equivalent of dressage or polo,” explains Paul Kooistra, Sociology Professor at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina and author of Bend it Like Bourdieu: Race, Class and Gender in American Youth Soccer. “It provides a way that middle class parents can separate themselves and their children from lower social classes and minorities,” he says.

But is Beckham the man to mobilise an African-American fan base? The fact that he chose Michael Jordan’s shirt number when he moved to Real Madrid suggests he might think so. And why has he taken to name-dropping iconic black music stars like P.Diddy, Usher and Snoop Dogg?

Either way, opinion is divided on whether Beckham can actually manage to sell soccer to the inner cities.

“At the moment black kids look at soccer the way they looked at golf before Tiger Woods,” says award-winning US journalist, Kia Gregory. “But there’s no reason Beckham couldn’t cross over if he’s got the skills – look at Eminem.”
Professor of Sociology Katharine Jones is less optimistic: “I think the race and class dynamics of soccer in the US are too complicated for Beckham to understand or bridge.”

Equally as important, can metrosexual, sarong-wearing gay icon David Beckham sell soccer to the ignorant rump of ass-scratching American males who think
soccer is a sissy sport played by “flopping-on-the-ground, writhing-in-pain homos”? “I don’t think so,” says Jennifer Robertson. “The beer-swilling, nacho-eating couch potato is already catered for with traditional US team sports.”
Beckham’s not walking into a vacuum. The US of 1975, when Pelé arrived, was barely a decade removed from almost total soccer ignorance, whereas football in the United States is now deeply rooted and undergoing real change – with or without its new English superstar.

Beyond the hype and excitement, there’s an ocean of cynicism surrounding Goldenballs’ move to the US. But the unvarnished truth is he’s still a potentially match-winning, international-class player. And a shrewd businessman who wouldn’t come within a thousand miles of US soccer if he thought it needed “saving”. But he does want the game to take off here.

At the end of the Los Angeles derby, Galaxy win 3-1, but you’d never know that from the crowd. The phalanx of Chivas Legionnaires – dressed in wigs, silly hats, and goat-faced wrestling masks and sunglasses – are pogoing like maniacs, making the stadium ring with a rapidly chanted “Chivas! Chivas! Chivas!”

And there’s something wonderful about seeing this red and white carnival flanked on both sides by yellow-clad, finger-jabbing Galaxy fans – including an alarming number of Galaxy headscarf-wearing teenage girls – all bellowing “Hey, Chivas? YOU SUCK!” These pony-tailed young characters are the
BenditlikeBeckhamistas (and their big and little sisters), and while they might be content to spend most of the game waving their free inflatable yellow wibbly-wobbly tubes and screaming every time slightly balding heart-throb Landon Donovan touches the ball, when push comes to shove, they ain’t afraid of no Goats.

After the NASL and subsequent youth soccer boom, the Chivas Legion Kalifas, the Galaxians and the Riot Squad – not to mention the Screaming Eagles, La Barra Brava, Empire Supporters Club, Raging Bull Nation, the Sons of Ben and Section 8 Chicago – are leading US soccer’s third revolution, supplemented by the national team, Uncle Sam’s Army.

Sure, the MLS soccer is way more fun to watch than the tediously chopped up, dumbed down, TV advert-wrecked disaster zones that constitute the rest of US sports – where the play is constantly interrupted by dancing girls, frisbee-catching dogs, mascot sumo-wrestling and PA exhortations to “make some noise”.
But the truth is that even if the MLS imported all the Galacticos plus Wayne Rooney and both Ronaldos, the live soccer on offer would probably still be inferior to that which can be watched every week on US television. But if Becks and co do get arses on seats, and if those arses are lucky enough to sit next to, say, the Chivas Legion, they’re going to experience something that is all but unique in American sports – the soccer carnival.

Earlier this year the MLS sent out a memo telling clubs to turn off the piped music, cut down on the PA chatter, stop the insulting “make some noise” bollocks and let the fans generate the atmosphere (Lord knows, the Premiership could take heed). At the Galaxy-Chivas game (despite intensely annoying quiz questions and KFC ads) the announcer pretty much shut the fuck up and let the fans make the noise. And – surprise, surprise – they did. All of them. It’s enough to put a smile on the face of even the most jaundiced, Yank-mocking Euro-snob.

So, you see, the bandwagon is already rolling. What the Galaxy and the MLS will be hoping, however, is that with Beckham’s five-star fuel in the tank, they just might get there faster.