David Beckham made $23.6m (£18.6m) in dividends from his personal business empire last year as Stella Artois and SharkNinja joined the football star’s roster of brand deals.
Accounts for his company DRJB Holdings seen by the Guardian reveal a 44% rise in pre-tax profit to $44.9m in 2024, compared with $36m in 2023.
The holding company paid out $52.5m in dividends last year to its investors including Beckham, up from $28.4m in 2023. That was followed by a further $23.2m this year, with about $10.4m of this also going to the sports star.
It means that Beckham, who retired from professional football in 2013, has in the past two years alone taken more in dividends than the £25m that Real Madrid paid to buy him from Manchester United in 2003.
The former England captain sold a 55% stake in his businesses in 2022 to the US group Authentic Brands for £200m.
Beckham and his wife, Victoria, a former Spice Girl who owns an eponymous fashion brand, are worth an estimated £500m between them, according to the most recent Sunday Times Rich List.
DRJB Holdings is made up of three divisions, the largest of which is DB Ventures, which covers most of his commercial partnerships with brands such as Hugo Boss and the eyewear group Safilo. This part of the business alone made $63.6m in revenue in 2024, up from $62.2m in 2023.
The Seven Global division contains licensing agreements with companies such as Adidas.
The remainder of the business is Studio 99, the production studio that made the Netflix documentary series about the former footballer, titled Beckham, which became one of the streaming service’s top 10 shows in all 90 countries where it was released.
Studio 99 also produced Victoria Beckham’s Netflix documentary, which will be released later this month.
In August, it was revealed that the Beckhams and the private equity firm Neo had pumped a further £6.2m into the former pop star’s fashion empire this year as losses widened to almost £5m despite a surge in sales in 2024.
The company received £6.9m in cash and loans from shareholders last year. Investors in the fashion company include the former Spice Girls manager and Pop Idol creator Simon Fuller, as well as Neo and the Beckhams.
This year, David Beckham was awarded a knighthood as part of King Charles’s birthday celebrations.
The 50-year-old, who captained the England team for six years, received an OBE in 2003 and was reported to have been first put forward for a knighthood in 2011, after helping London win its bid to host the 2012 Olympic Games.
While Beckham retired from professional football more than a decade ago, he remains an icon of the sport among the younger generation. He has a following of more than 160 million people on social media, the majority of whom are aged between 18 and 25. He is a co-founder and co-owner of the football club Inter Miami.
This year, his business launched the supplement brand IM8 in partnership with the biotech company Prenetics, as well as securing an agreement with Hugo Boss for a co-designed menswear collection. He also secured a new contract with Verizon, the US telecommunications company.
The company said it expected to announce further commercial partnerships in the coming months as the buildup to the 2026 Fifa World Cup gets under way.
Authentic, the US sports and entertainment group that bought the majority stake in Beckham’s business two years ago, also owns rights to the images of Muhammad Ali, as well as stakes in popular fashion labels such as Reebok, Champion, Hunter and Forever 21.
