Beckham cashes in on World Cup summer with £39m payout
David Beckham's business empire has paid out a $51m (£39m) dividend after a bumper World Cup summer.
The payout, a share of profits to owners, followed record sales and profits at DRJB Holdings. The company cashed in on about a dozen advertising campaigns built around the tournament in the US.
Revenues rose by a fifth last year to $110.5m, up from $92.3m in 2024. Pre-tax profits jumped 46% to a record $65.7m, according to accounts reported by The Guardian.
He did not kick a ball. Beckham retired from professional football in 2013. He spent the summer on billboards instead, fronting campaigns for Lenovo, McDonald's, Bank of America, Verizon and PepsiCo's Lay's.
Ahead of the tournament, DRJB Holdings signed a multi-year deal with Bank of America. Beckham became an ambassador for its global sports programme.
The deals kept coming off the pitch. He launched menswear collections for Hugo Boss, an eponymous glasses range for Safilo and a limited-edition Predator boot with Adidas. He also struck a new deal for Beckham & Friends Live, a show on Paramount+ that ran around the UEFA Champions League, Europe's top club competition, and appeared with actor Theo James in a Stella Artois campaign.
Much of that work runs through two arms of DRJB Holdings. Seven Global handles licensing deals with firms including Adidas. Studio 99 is the production company behind the four-part Netflix documentary Beckham, released in 2023, and the Victoria Beckham documentary released last year.
The ownership is split. DRJB Holdings is jointly owned by Authentic Brands Group and Footwork Productions, which is controlled by Beckham. He sold a 55% stake in his businesses to Authentic Brands in 2022 for £200m and took home 45% of last year's $51.1m total payout to shareholders, down slightly from $53m the year before.
More could follow. A filing at Companies House, the UK's company register, due to be published next week shows a further $61.6m was paid in special dividends this year.
What makes this stand out is the second act. Beckham co-founded supplement firm IM8 in 2024 and backed BeeUp, a honey-based fruit snack firm. Thirteen years after his last match, his most consistent season is happening in boardrooms and studios.
