Here in America, I'd find it hard to classify Beckham as anything other than upper-class (upper-income, if you prefer).  He's got enough truckloads of money (and his former-pop-star wife is also likely well-off) that he doesn't deal with middle-class or lower-class issues like affording his mortgage payments or saving for retirement or paying for college educations for his kids.<p>I suspect it's a cultural difference.  Here in America, people don't really care much where your parents came from or how you did in school, they measure success and class by what you have.  We haven't really discriminated on "old-money"/"new-money" lines in decades at least, and we've never had much in the way of titled lineages.  We don't have the centuries of cultural history of class immobility that Europeans have (I don't mean that judgmentally, I'm just saying we don't have that history in the back of our minds).