They do football differently in America and not just because they call it soccer. Take Inter Miami, the country’s best known new club, thanks to its co-owner and founder David Beckham. The team’s strip is acid pink and its new 25,000-seat stadium is rising not in the heart of Miami but at one end of the runway at the international airport. It is the centrepiece of the $1 billion Miami Freedom Park development, which is due to open next year and will include a 750-room hotel, shops and flats.
Beckham says the stadium deal, which has taken six years of wrangling, has been “the hardest challenge in my career. But it is also the most rewarding.” That’s because for the former England captain it is much more than a new home for his team. It marks the first step in the next phase of his business career, which he hopes will take the £500 million Beckham empire “to the next level”, making him the first British sporting billionaire.
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Being a US Major League Soccer (MLS) club founder and owner “gives me licence to be more entrepreneurial”, the 50-year-old told The Sunday Times. He is moving on from simply being the face of brands such as Adidas, Pepsi and Stella Artois, to becoming a business founder, owner and CEO in his own right with “an incredibly broad portfolio of projects”.
Self-produced media is proving to be as profitable as his right foot. His latest show, Beckham & Friends Live, made its debut on Paramount+ earlier this month during the semi-finals of the Champions League, with guests including the former Arsenal star Thierry Henry. It will return to our screens next year and builds on the success of his 2023 Emmy award-winning Netflix documentary, Beckham, which was made by his production company Studio 99. It was the most watched documentary on the streaming service that year.
He is entering the fast-growing health market, putting his name and investment behind the supplement business IM8, and has started co-designing collections with his longtime sponsor Hugo Boss, no longer simply showing off his tattoos in ads for tight white pants. Remember those bees in the Netflix documentary? A honey business is on the cards. Beckham does philanthropic work for the King’s Foundation and the two men have bonded over their love of apiaries.
He is building from a firm financial base. In 2023, a decade after he hung up his Adidas Predator boots, his UK company DRJB Holdings — David Robert Joseph Beckham — paid out about £100 million in dividends to its shareholders. He has a 45 per cent stake.
To add to the Beckham family’s pile, the net worth of his wife, Victoria, 51, has risen sharply thanks to the recent success of her eponymous fashion brand. Beckham bailed out the loss-making label by investing £23 million in the early days but it finally turned a profit in 2022. Performance improved last year, company executives say, with revenues up to £89 million (the accounts will not be published until December). Sources close to Neo Investment Partners, which co-owns the business, believe it is now worth about £375 million. The couple together own about 35 per cent — worth an estimated £130 million.
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Small wonder they are now spending it like Beckham. David’s 50th birthday celebrations earlier this month — in Bordeaux, Paris and at the couple’s £60 million home in Miami, £50 million home in London, £12 million Cotswolds retreat and on their £20 million yacht called Seven — cost more than £300,000. (And in London came to an abrupt halt when the neighbours complained about the noise.)
Most sports stars make their money during their playing careers; few more than Beckham, who raked in an estimated $800 million — an average of $40 million over each of the 20 years he spent playing in Europe and at California’s LA Galaxy. But almost all flame out a few years after their playing career ends, when their cultural currency wanes and their looks fade. John Barnes no longer flogs Lucozade. Michael Owen’s Asda days are long gone (to the relief of the nation). So what makes Beckham a power player who has “managed to keep his brand at a very steady level”, as the Harvard Business Review puts it?
David Beckham in numbers
Richard Conway, managing partner at Spectacle, a leading sports PR firm based in London, says: “Beckham and his team have expertly navigated — and leveraged — the two shifts that have defined sports culture and business over the past 25 years: the rise of the age of celebrity and the new era of social media and ‘owned media’ .” This is the industry term for carefully choreographed Instagram posts, soft-ball interviews and “tell all” documentaries that raise a star’s profile while revealing little that fans did not already know.
Beckham has Simon Fuller of 19 Entertainment, who managed the Spice Girls, to thank for success in the celebrity era. He negotiated commercial tie-ups worth more than £100 million with the likes of Adidas, Pepsi, Armani, Coty, which made Beckham’s Instinct aftershave, and the Las Vegas Sands hotel group (yes, there are Beckham-branded hotel rooms). Each move was carefully planned and timed. “To go global, to touch pop culture it’s not random or a mistake,” Fuller explains. “It requires precision, focus and planning ahead.” He was already thinking far into Beckham’s future.
His next step was to leverage Beckham’s status to negotiate one of the best contracts in sporting history: his transfer from Real Madrid, where he had moved from Manchester United, to the MLS club LA Galaxy in 2007. When Beckham announced the move, Ramón Calderón, president of Real Madrid at the time, claimed he was “going to Hollywood to be half a film star”. Analysts pointed out that he would have to take a 70 per cent pay cut: MLS teams had an annual salary cap of just $2.1 million. But the contract Fuller negotiated included three critical incentives that ended up netting him more than $300 million.
First he got the MLS to create the “designated player” rule, which allowed teams to sign one star player for whom only $400,000 of their salary would count towards their $2.1 million cap. Instantly Beckham scored a $6.5 million-a-year contract for five years. Fuller also persuaded LA Galaxy to guarantee him a percentage of all club revenue — he’d get a cut on every hot dog, beer and jersey it sold. Analysis by the sports business writer Joe Pompliano indicates Beckham’s commercial endorsements totalled $255 million over the five years he played in California — probably more than he would have earned if he had stayed in Europe. But there was something even more prescient, an option that Fuller insisted on but few noticed at the time.
He got the MLS to guarantee Beckham the right to buy an expansion team — a new team — in any market except New York City for a fixed price of $25 million after his retirement from LA Galaxy. Fuller and Beckham were banking on the fact that teams’ valuations would rise, in no small part because of the publicity the England star would bring to the league. It turned out to be the punt of a lifetime.
Beckham left LA Galaxy in 2012, aged 37, and retired the following year. By the time he exercised his expansion option to become the new owner of Inter Miami in February 2014, the going fee for a new club was about $150 million. He was getting a team in a global city with a large football-loving Hispanic population at an 84 per cent discount to the market price.
It has since got even better. Thanks to his success in wooing Lionel Messi to play for the team — even though Messi was being courted by far bigger clubs after captaining Argentina’s World Cup winning team in 2022 — Inter Miami is today worth about $1.2 billion, analysts estimate. That’s 50 times what Beckham paid. He holds a 26 per cent stake, worth $312 million.
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You don’t get those kinds of deals and those multiples unless you have some exceptional qualities, and those who have worked with Beckham say three key attributes make his businesses grow. The first is that he is one of the few sports stars who are truly global. Unlike even Cristiano Ronaldo, who inherited Beckham’s No 7 shirt at Manchester United, or America’s NBA or NFL stars, Beckham has played all over Europe, Asia and the US, for club and country. Nicola Howson, who runs Studio 99 and has worked on Beckham’s brand strategy, says he has “more than 65 per cent awareness in America among the general public, which is off the scale for a sports star who’s not American”.
The second attribute is enduring looks. Like or loathe the recent “oops, I forgot to take off my white T-shirt before I got in the shower” campaign for Hugo Boss, there is no denying that his strict health and fitness regime — he works out most days in the gyms he has in all his homes — means he has retained the world’s most marketable male face and physique. David Gandy, the most highly paid male model, notes that Beckham “can appeal to an 18-year-old as much as an 80-year-old, which makes him uniquely appealing for brands”.
The third attribute is his Englishness. Paddy Harverson, who was the director of communications for Manchester United when Beckham played for the club, says the Netflix documentary “showed how David sums up the best of Englishness or Britishness, which has broad global appeal. In particular he doesn’t take himself too seriously, as we’ve seen in adverts.” He recently appeared in a spoof ad in which Matt Damon plays his “twin brother Dave Beckham”.
Being one half of a power couple does not hurt. He and Victoria support each other’s interests. She was instrumental in raising his profile in the early days of his sporting career when she, not he, was the bigger star. It was Posh ’n’ Becks then, not the other way round. It was she who persuaded him to wear that sarong during the 1998 World Cup in France to snag a front-page picture in The Sun. He has backed her business, not simply with cash but also by appearing on the front row of her fashion shows in London, New York and Paris with all their children. Brooklyn, 26, Romeo, 22, Cruz, 20, and Harper, 13, are a key part of brand Beckham. The recent fallout with Brooklyn — he did not attend Beckham’s 50th celebrations amid reports of a rift between his wife, Nicola Peltz, and Victoria — is a rare discordant note.
These qualities have helped Beckham to navigate the second big shift in the sports celebrity market. By 2020 it was becoming clear that stars with a vast social media following could create and manage their own media, and produce their own TV series to supercharge their profile and diversify into new sectors. To exploit these business opportunities, especially in the US, Beckham needed some extra muscle. Step forward the distinctly unmuscular figure of Jamie Salter, founder of the New York-based Authentic Brands Group.
Authentic is the world’s largest sports and entertainment licensing outfit and the second largest licensing group behind Disney, generating $30 billion in global sales. It manages the brands of the basketball legend Shaquille O’Neal, as well as the late American icons Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe and Muhammad Ali. In 2022 Salter offered to acquire 55 per cent of Beckham’s commercial interests, excluding his stake in Inter Miami, in exchange for 45 per cent of future profits. For Beckham, giving up control of his business was tough, but Salter’s assurance that each man would have a veto on projects — as well as the promise of a $200 million cash payment and $50 million in Authentic stock — sealed the deal.
Speaking in Davos in January — his first visit to the global business elite’s annual Alpine shindig, the World Economic Forum — Beckham described Salter as “an incredible partner to be in business with. The scale that he has done at Authentic is what I want to do with my business.”
Salter and Beckham are not wasting time. They have already inked new deals with Boss, Stella Artois and Shark Ninja, a household appliances brand. Some hundred people now work at Authentic’s London office, which was set up following the deal. A Beckham-branded alcoholic spirit is in the works, Howson says.
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Howson is one of those old-school executives whose motto is “If you don’t want to work Sundays, don’t bother coming in on Saturdays”. She insists Beckham has the same drive. “You may see him photographed in restaurants, but he is in the car at 7.30am going to watch Inter Miami train or going to the office,” she says.
Beckham insists: “I love to work. I love to be in business.” He credits his parents — Ted, a gas engineer, and Sandra, a hairdresser from Leytonstone, east London — with his work ethic. “They worked their backsides off from seven in the morning until 11pm at night,” he says, in his father’s case until “he was 71, 72 years old”.
Beckham also cites his Manchester United manager, Sir Alex Ferguson, as a role model. Ferguson combined raw instinct with hard graft, and Beckham insists, like the fiery Scot, “I always go with my gut. If it does not feel authentic, does not feel right, I won’t do it.” That’s one reason why he has never followed his former Manchester United and England team-mates into football club management. As one executive who works with him puts it: “He’s smart enough to know what he is bad at, as well as good at. When it comes to management he knows he’d probably be as bad as Wayne Rooney.” Rooney has had disastrous spells in the dugout in the US and with Derby, Birmingham City and Plymouth here.
That’s not to say there have not been missteps along the road to riches. Beckham was bitterly criticised by LGBT football fans, whose rights he had previously championed, over his decision to sign an estimated £130 million deal to promote the Qatar 2022 World Cup and sports in the Gulf state, where homosexuality is illegal. Many argue his instinct was correct, though. When the final whistle blew on a final for the ages, Qatar 22 was widely acclaimed as one of the greatest World Cups in history. “The Qatari deal was a big risk but it paid off,” says one of the Doha-based executives who helped to negotiate it.
Beckham, an arch-monarchist who queued through the night to file past the coffin of Queen Elizabeth, has long coveted a knighthood. Leaked emails from 2017 revealed his growing frustration with members of the honours committee who decide who gets a gong. His comments — he called committee members “unappreciative c***s” — tarnished his “English gentleman” image.
His carefully crafted identity as a family man has been dinged by allegations that he has had affairs since his well-publicised dalliance with Rebecca Loos. Rumours persist of staff signing nondisclosure agreements to cover up supposed indiscretions, as memorably reported by Tom Bower in his 2024 book The House of Beckham. Bower also wrote that when the couple were in Madrid, a pregnant Victoria was so suspicious of her husband’s claim to have booked a midnight tanning session at a hotel that she jumped into his Lamborghini in her pyjamas and set off to confront him, her security detail following in a third car.
The claims have been dismissed by both David and Victoria as “ludicrous”, but in any event these issues have faded into obscurity. Whatever befalls “Golden Balls”, he seems to emerge unscathed. “Dear old David has become something of a national treasure,” Harverson says.
Beckham is keen to exploit that status. Soon he will be back on TV, appearing in a Studio 99 documentary on the historical rivalry between the German sportswear brands Adidas and Puma. He is helping Salter to gear up for a potential flotation of Authentic, which is likely to bump up the value of his stake in the firm. He will also have a supporting character role in another documentary. Victoria has her own Netflix show in production, a follow-up to Beckham that is also being made by Studio 99. She is currently filming her preparations for Paris Fashion Week.
Oddly, the film was a tough sell. “Victoria didn’t want to do it,” Beckham says. “I wanted to do it. I wanted to highlight how hard she works, everything that goes into her design, everything that goes into a brand. I’ve never met a harder-working woman. People will see a new side of her.”
I doubt there will be any revelations. But it will be a global hit for the missus and another bumper payday for the £500 million players.
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