David Beckham is playing for AC Milan, in Italy, and playing well. Two goals in four matches, that is. Including a classic Becks-ian “how’d he do that?” score off a dead ball in his last match.

And it now is clear Becks would like to go back to Europe — although he is under contract to the Los Angeles Galaxy of Major League Soccer, which has only loaned Beckham to Milan.

And the Galaxy apparently is opposed to letting Beckham stay past early March, when the MLS season gets going.

When it would make lots of sense to just bid Becks “arrivederci!”

It’s never been quite clear how much the Galaxy was paying Beckham of that “five-year, $250 million” deal that was announced and (fairly inexcusably) reported by otherwise responsible media outlets. But whatever the Galaxy was paying him clearly was a tiny fraction of that big number. Maybe $4-5 million per season? The rest of it was projected/conjectured money Becks might be able to make endorsing tattoo parlors or hair products, or somesuch.

Still, even if the Galaxy were paying him as little as $4 million a season, that’s a lot of money for a club that has …

–Missed the MLS playoffs the past two seasons, with Beckham on the roster;

–Needs far more than one famous face to turn a bad team into a competent one, and could use some of the money it presumably not only would not be paying Beckham, but could get in transfer fee from AC Milan, to rebuild the rest of a lousy franchise;

–Picked up Beckham on the back side of his career. He will be 34 in May, and that’s about 80 in midfielder years. His play in Los Angeles has been uneven. He has been nicked up a lot, but that is what happens to midfielders in their mid-30s.

It never was quite clear what Becks was doing in L.A. in the first place. Maybe his wife wanted to be there to see if she could do the movie thing before it was too late? Perhaps he was bored one day, and it seemed like ditching European soccer (Real Madrid was where he had decamped, before jumping the Pond) and starting over in the New World seemed appealing? And then there was the school of thought that had him planning to be a soccer ambassador to America, turning it into a soccer nation through the powers of his “Bend It Like Me” popularity.

And all of that was something of a cock-up, as the Brits would say. Victoria Beckham never is going to lead a movie and his quickly sunk into utter irrelevance in SoCal; maybe she has noticed. And Becks isn’t going to make soccer an American passion in the twilight of his career.

If Pele, the greatest player in the history of the game, couldn’t do it, a generation earlier, a pretty boy with one great skill (kicking a ball that is at rest) certainly wouldn’t.

So, Becks got to Milan this month, and he liked the attention, and he liked being around other serious players (Kaka, Ronaldinho, Pato) instead of the Galaxy drones (throw any three names in here that aren’t Landon Donovan), and back in a serious league (Italy’s Seria A) vs. a sort of Double-A league (MLS). And who wouldn’t? It had to remind Beckham of what it was like to be in a league that someone was paying attention to.

Now, he’s making careful but clear statements about how it might be nice to stay in Milan … and it doesn’t take great analytical powers to see what he would like to do. And Milan would like to have him. And the rest of the soccer world seems to want him to be somewhere where they can see him — and L.A. isn’t that place.

If he wants to go back to Europe, and it’s fairly clear he does, the Galaxy should let him.

Let me tell you how Becks-in-Italy is being received in Asia: With great enthusiasm.

Asia knows Italian soccer and cares about it (though not like the Premiership, of course), and Beckham’s arrival in Milan was like he had emerged from a coma and returned to the soccer pitch — or had, at least, come back from some weird self-exile to the States.

The cable station I watch in Hong Kong has run scads of promotions of AC Milan matches focusing on Beckham, when he is just one of numerous stars on that squad. But his name still means something — on just about every continent that isn’t North America.  So AC Milan suddenly has become David Beckham’s team — for purposes of advertising, anyway.

I believe the Galaxy got a nice jolt of enthusiasm from signing Beckham in 2007; I saw it furst-hand. And the league benefitted from having him around for all of the next season. Just the exposure to people who hadn’t watched the league. At all. That was worth something.

But the whole concept seems to have run its course. He isn’t going to make any more converts; everyone who is going to come out to look at him — already has. He clearly isn’t making the Galaxy a good club by himself, over there on the right flank, waiting for someone to get him the ball or looking for someone he can bend one of his services to.

Let him go, Galaxy. Cash out while the man still has some value, and get down to the business of making your franchise about a team, and not just one fading superstar. And let that fading superstar fit in with a bigtime club, and maybe milk a few more appearances with the English national team out of it.

It works out best for everyone. Really, it does.