Axed Beckham Nears Exit Door at Real Madrid

David Beckham will finally sit down and hold contract talks with Real Madrid today but his future at the club looks more uncertain than ever after the coach, Fabio Capello, dropped him from the squad for the first time since he moved to Spain.

While reports that Madrid's sporting director, Predrag Mijatovic, had admitted that Beckham would leave the club were revealed to have been a misunderstanding, Capello's decision to leave Beckham out of tonight's Copa del Rey fixture with Real Betis comes as a serious blow.

This is not a case of resting a player or fielding a weakened team for the cup competition. Instead, with the club growing increasingly irritated by his stalling tactics over a new contract, Beckham has become the first head to roll as Real announce a revolution which has also claimed Ronaldo and Antonio Cassano.

After Real fell to their third defeat in four games against Deportivo La Coruña at the weekend, they held an emergency meeting at the Bernabéu, attended by Capello, Mijatovic and the club president Ramón Calderón. The three men left insisting that they had identified Real's ills and were resolved to act quickly to rectify the club's poor results.

Strategic leaks reported in the Madrid press suggested that the first measure, as demanded by Capello, would be the sale of Ronaldo and Cassano, as well as the summer departure of Beckham. "We have analysed the situation and we will take important measures," Capello said yesterday. "You will see what measures we have decided upon against Betis."

The first of these is the ditching of Beckham and Ronaldo. Capello's squad was not simply a list of names to face Betis, it was a declaration of intent.

"When I came here I talked about recuperating the historic values of Real Madrid, of suffering for the shirt and commitment for the cause," Capello said. Although he did not name Beckham, it has become clear that the club question the former England captain's commitment as he continues to stall over a new deal.

Beckham has six months remaining on his contract and has been able to negotiate officially with other clubs since New Year's Day. On July 1 he will be able to move on a free transfer, when he will be 32. He has stressed his desire to continue at the Bernabéu but there has been little meaningful progress and Real now believe he is simply buying time. They are keen to force his hand but Beckham is determined to withstand any pressure to depart before the summer, when his likely destination remains the United States.

Capello's decision to axe Beckham was quickly followed by reports yesterday that Mijatovic had announced that Beckham would not be offered a new deal at the Bernabéu. He was quoted as having told Sky Italia: "Beckham will not renew his deal. He will leave us".

But as the afternoon progressed it emerged that Mijatovic, whose Italian is not fluent, had fallen victim to a linguistic misunderstanding. Asked if Beckham was going to renew his deal with Madrid, Mijatovic confused the tenses and replied: "No. He has not renewed [his deal]."

"There is an offer on the table from Real Madrid and we will be meeting to discuss this in the next two days," a Beckham spokesman said last night. "I've spoken to Real Madrid about this and they say it is a confusion in the interview with Mijatovic."

There was no such confusion over the contents of Capello's team sheet, however. Publicly singled out and dropped from the side, Beckham will be missing at the kick-off in Seville. His Real Madrid career nears its close.