Sir David Beckham has taken a £38.5m payout from his sports, fashion and media empire after the 2026 men’s football World Cup turned his brand into what its owners describe as one of the most powerful names in global sport.
Accounts filed for DRJB Holdings, the vehicle that holds the Beckham brand, show an almost £50m profit in 2025, a 46% jump on the previous year, with sales rising from £72.2m to £84m, as the BBC reports. The company paid shareholders £38.9m in dividends during the year, followed by a special £46.6m payment after year end. Sir David’s stake, close to half the company, put roughly £38.5m of that in his pocket.
The growth was driven by a run of advertising partnerships struck in the build-up to the tournament, including deals with Bank of America, McDonald’s, Verizon and PepsiCo’s Lay’s. In the US, viewers found it hard to watch a match without seeing Beckham in adverts for Stella Artois, Home Depot or Lay’s crisps, known as Walkers in the UK. He also launched menswear collections for Hugo Boss, a pair of Adidas Predator boots and an eyewear range with Italian glasses maker Safilo.
The remainder of DRJB is owned by New York-based Authentic Brands Group, which also owns Reebok and the rights to other celebrity brands. Authentic’s entertainment chief executive Corey Salter said the results showed the Beckham name’s reach across “sport, lifestyle, entertainment and much more”.
Two things are worth noting for anyone watching the celebrity-business model. First, the timing: the World Cup pulled forward a decade’s worth of brand exposure into a single summer, and the accounts show exactly what that is worth when a personality has already spent thirty years building equity. Second, the structure. Beckham owns a minority stake in a company that Authentic largely controls, which is the template the brand-licensing industry is pushing celebrities towards: the star supplies the name, a corporate partner supplies the machine.
Revenue was also boosted by growth in Beckham’s health supplements business, a category that has been growing quietly while most of the headlines go to kit deals and fragrance lines.
Sir David is Britain’s first billionaire sportsman, and on these numbers the gap between him and the rest of the UK’s sporting wealth just widened.