GIBRALTAR — David Beckham is the latest international superstar heading to America with the mandate of lifting Major League Soccer’s profile in the American sporting public’s mind. MLS is America’s best version of high caliber soccer, but when compared to Europe or South America, the league’s level of play is the equivalent of Double A baseball. America’s best players can get their start in MLS, but in time, if they are any good, they will look to play in an overseas league. If Beckham were playing baseball, he would be transferring to the Binghamton Mets of the Eastern League.

Formerly a star in the English Premier League and captain of the English national team, Beckham’s play had fallen off in recent years, before he experienced a dramatic resurgence with Real Madrid in Spain over the last few months, helping that team capture the Spanish league title this year. But whether Beckham ever reaches the elite level of play of his younger years is not important. Los Angeles Galaxy owner Phil Anschutz signed a deal with the English star for his name and his international renown. Anschutz wants to put MLS on the map internationally and make America a soccer hotbed.

In a sense, Anschutz is doing the same thing that Sonny Werblin did in 1965 when he signed Joe Namath to quarterback the Jets in the upstart American Football League. Namath was a big name college player who received a contract for the largest sum of money to that point in football history, and his mandate was to bring the league more attention. But Namath was playing in a sport that was ascending in popularity. The MLS a niche sport, not in the same class as the NFL, Major League Baseball, the NBA, college sports, or NASCAR. Like the NHL, soccer only has pockets of popularity nationally.

On Tuesday, Beckham expressed some regret that he was leaving Spain, claiming he wanted to spend another three years in Madrid. That is not exactly what Anschutz and a host of Beckham’s corporate partners wanted to hear. Beckham is supposed to raise the level of salaries and play in MLS, and get the league some international recognition.

At least that’s the plan.

Here in Europe, soccer fans are asking this question: How can Beckham sell the game in America when Pelé could not? After all, Pelé was the greatest player in the world in the 1960s and into the 1970s. In the mid-1970s, the New York-based Warner Communications, the owners of the New York Cosmos, strived to make their North American Soccer League one of the greatest soccer teams on earth with Pelé leading the charge.

Pelé and the Cosmos were a traveling road show with loads of personalities who were as well known in gossip columns for their off-the-field antics as they were on the sports pages for their soccer abilities, and for a little while in the late 1970s, Pelé and his mates captured not only the attention of the New York-area fans but some national headlines as well. It didn’t last. Eventually the Cosmos and the North American Soccer League imploded because other teams could not spend the kind of money that Warner Communications was giving to players, and people generally ignored the NASL, except in a few markets.

In 1994, when the World Cup was held for the first time in America, the nation’s soccer officials thought bringing the world’s best squads stateside would capture American fans attention along with the TV networks and press. It didn’t happen.

In 1999, soccer officials in America thought that the sport had turned the corner and that Americans would take the sport seriously after the U.S. Women’s National Team won the World Cup tournament. Again, it didn’t happen.

Soccer is a religion in Europeand South America. Liverpool backers hate Manchester United and vice versa. Glasgow Celtics backers have a deep-rooted dislike for fans of the Glasgow Rangers. Countries have gone to war over soccer matches, and wars have been interrupted by soccer matches. In MLS, there is no deeply rooted hate, commitment, or passion for any of the teams. The MLS teams seem generic, and faceless. Will Columbus Crew fans develop an extreme dislike for the Los Angeles Galaxy because Beckham plays with the team?

Probably not.

But there is a ray of optimism for MLS that has nothing to do with Beckham. In America, soccer is growing rapidly on the grassroots level in youth leagues. If you take the TV ratings of international games that are shown in America on Spanish networks, there are as many eyeballs watching those games as there are watching MLB on Fox.

That is the audience that Anschutz and American soccer officials should be courting. The youth players, the soccer parents, and the growing Hispanic community need to be married with the American corporate community. Anschutz and MLS are headed in that direction. All the new stadiums that are being built in America are small venues, with capacities of 20,000 or so, that are loaded with the requisite luxury boxes, club seats, upscale restaurants, and fast food joints.

Until the past few years, Anschutz owned most of the MLS teams, but now new owners have come in, and some have convinced local municipalities — in Harrison, N.J., and Sandy, Utah, for example — to pay for new soccer stadiums. Still the league needs more cable TV dollars and corporate support to really become viable.

Beckham may be able to draw enough eyes to games, which could in turn help with TV and corporate dollars. But what the league really needs is to develop homegrown stars and keep them here in order to upgrade the status of MLS. Players make far more money in Europe and other global locales than they do in MLS.

Anschutz, who is also a movie producer, is hoping his $250 million investment in David Beckham becomes “The Becks of Beverley Hills,” a best-selling story about an English soccer player and his wife who came to America and created major interest in a minor sport … soccer. The sport’s track record suggests that it won’t happen until MLS is accepted by more than just soccer families and the Hispanic population, but by the American sporting public.

evanjweiner@yahoo.com