David Beckham has taken a $51m (£39m) dividend from his business empire after a summer dominated by World Cup brand work, with the former England captain appearing in about a dozen advertising campaigns across this summer’s tournament in the United States.
The campaigns put him alongside brands including Lenovo, McDonald’s, Bank of America, Verizon and PepsiCo’s crisps brand Lay’s. The work helped to fuel a record year for DRJB Holdings, the commercial company for Beckham’s brands business, where revenues surged by a fifth to $110.5m, up from $92.3m in 2024. Pre-tax profits also climbed to a record $65.7m, a 46% increase on the previous year.
DRJB Holdings is made up of three divisions, the largest of which is DB Ventures, covering most of Beckham’s partnerships with brands such as Hugo Boss. The company paid out $51.1m to shareholders last year, compared with $53m the previous year. A Companies House filing due to be published next week shows that a further $61.6m was paid in special dividends this year, meaning the 51-year-old received about $51m. Beckham sold a 55% stake in his businesses to the US group Authentic Brands for £200m in 2022, and so took home 45% of last year’s total dividend.
Ahead of this year’s World Cup, the company secured partnerships including a multi-year deal with Bank of America, under which Beckham became an ambassador for its global sports programme. He also launched menswear collections for Hugo Boss, an eponymous range of spectacles for Safilo and a limited edition Predator football boot with Adidas, and struck a new deal for Beckham & Friends Live, a show on Paramount+ that ran around the Uefa Champions League. He featured in a Stella Artois campaign alongside Theo James to mark the beer’s partnership for the second season of the Netflix series The Gentlemen.
DRJB Holdings is jointly owned by Authentic Brands Group and Footwork Productions, which is controlled by David Beckham. As well as DB Ventures, it includes the Seven Global division, which holds licensing agreements with companies such as Adidas, and Studio 99, the production company behind the four-part Netflix documentary Beckham, released in 2023. Studio 99 also produced Victoria Beckham’s Netflix documentary, which came out last year.
Corey Salter, chief executive of entertainment at Authentic Brands, said David Beckham was “one of the most powerful global brands in sport, lifestyle, entertainment and much more”. She added: “What these results show is that behind the Beckham brand is a strong and highly effective team within Authentic, set up with the financial discipline and strong fundamentals to continue to grow profitably through 2026 and beyond.”
Beckham, who retired from professional football in 2013, is also an investor in businesses including the supplement specialist IM8, which he co-founded in 2024, and the honey-based fruit snack firm BeeUp.