Beckham nets a $36 million salary from own company
AFP
November 14, 2006
LONDON (AFP) - Former England captain David Beckham may be miserable at his faltering career but he can console himself with his whopping salary.
Beckham has been ditched from the national squad and has struggled to hold down a first team place at Spanish giants Real Madrid this season.
But the midfielder's company Footwork Productions Ltd paid him a salary of around 19 million pounds (36 million dollars, 28 million euros), the end-of-year accounts revealed.
The huge sum is the 31-year-old's cash earned from sponsorship deals, personal appearances and business ventures.
However, it does not include his Real Madrid salary, nor money earned from partnership deals with his former Spice Girls singer wife Victoria.
The accounts showed that Beckham shared a salary of 19.7 million pounds with two members of staff, with the global football icon certain to have received by far the lion's share.
A Beckham spokesman said the figure was so high because he paid himself just 100,000 pounds the previous year.
He also has another firm, Brand Beckham, which holds the copyright to his latest book, while his wife, 32, has her own company named Moody Productions.
Beckham has revealed there is no chance of him going back to English Premiership leaders Manchester United.
"I had wonderful years at Manchester United -- many, many great years there. But that's finished, it's over," The Sun newspaper quoted him as saying.
"Of course I miss my friends in Manchester and there are certain things I miss at Manchester -- but I have moved on from there," Beckham said Tuesday.
Beckham is stalling on a new two-year contract at Real Madrid after failing to secure a regular first-team spot under coach Fabio Capello this season. A series of clubs have already expressed an interest in moving for him should he be made available in January.
US outfit Los Angeles Galaxy hope the high-profile player may be tempted to move to the city where one of his football academies operates. Such a move would be a major boost for the Major League Soccer competition.
It could attract other world stars to follow suit, reviving US club football's 1970s glory days when legends like Pele, Franz Beckenbauer, Johan Cruyff, George Best and Bobby Moore played out the twilight of their careers there.
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BECKHAM is a classic rags-to-riches saga: a boy, David, is born to a poor East End London family. He develops prodigious soccer skills, and his parents nurture him until he becomes one of the most gifted athletes of his generation. He grows up to marry Victoria -- a Spice Girl, "Posh" -- and enters a celebrity whirlwind of Princess Diana-esque proportions.
Chapter One
Murdering the Flowerbeds
'Mrs Beckham? Can David come and have a game in the park?'
I'm sure Mum could dig it out of the pile: that first video of me in action. There I am, David Robert Joseph Beckham, aged three, wearing the new Manchester United uniform Dad had bought me for Christmas, playing soccer in the front room of our house in Chingford. Twenty-five years on, and Victoria could have filmed me having a kickabout this morning with Brooklyn before I left for training. For all that so much has happened during my life -- and the shirt I'm wearing now is a different color -- some things haven't really changed at all.
As a father watching my own sons growing up, I get an idea of what I must have been like as a boy; and reminders, as well, of what Dad was like with me. As soon as I could walk, he made sure I had a ball to kick. Maybe I didn't even wait for a ball. I remember when Brooklyn had only just got the hang of standing up. We were messing around together one afternoon after training. For some reason there was a tin of baked beans on the floor of the kitchen and, before I realized it, he'd taken a couple of unsteady steps towards it and kicked the thing as hard as you like. Frightening really: you could fracture a metatarsal doing that. Even as I was hugging him, I couldn't help laughing. That must have been me.
It's just there, wired into the genes. Look at Brooklyn: he always wants to be playing soccer, running, kicking, diving about. And he's already listening, like he's ready to learn. By the time he was three and a half, if I rolled the ball to him and told him to stop it, he'd trap it by putting his foot on it. Then he'd take a step back and line himself up before kicking it back to me. He's also got a great sense of balance. We were in New York when Brooklyn was about two and a half, and I remember us coming out of a restaurant and walking down some steps. He was standing, facing up towards Victoria and I, his toes on one step and his heels rocking back over the next. This guy must have been watching from inside the restaurant, because suddenly he came running out and asked us how old our son was. When I told him, he explained he was a child psychologist and that for Brooklyn to be able to balance himself over the step like that was amazing for a boy of his age.
It's a little too early to tell with my younger boy, Romeo, but Brooklyn has got a real confidence that comes from his energy, his strength, and his sense of coordination. He's been whizzing around on two-wheeled scooters -- I mean flying -- for years already. He's got a belief in himself, physically, that I know I had as well. When I was a boy, I only ever felt really sure of myself when I was playing soccer. In fact I'd still say that about me now, although Victoria has given me confidence in myself in all sorts of other ways. I know she'll do the same for Brooklyn and Romeo too.
For all that father and son have in common, Brooklyn and I are very different. By the time I was his age, I was already telling anyone who would listen: 'I'm going to play soccer for Manchester United. 'He says he wants to be a soccer player like Daddy, but United? We haven't heard that out of him yet. Brooklyn's a really strong, well-built boy. Me, though, I was always skinny. However much I ate it never made any difference while I was growing up. When I was playing soccer, I must have seemed even smaller because, if I wasn't with my dad and his mates, I was over at Chase Lane Park, just round the corner from the house, playing with boys twice my age. I don't know if it was because I was good or because they could kick me up in the air and I'd come back for more, but they always turned up on the doorstep after school:
'Mrs Beckham? Can David come and have a game in the park?'
I spent a lot of time in Chase Lane Park. If I wasn't there with the bigger boys like Alan Smith, who lived two doors away on our road, I'd be there with my dad. We'd started by kicking a ball about in the back garden but I was murdering the flowerbeds so, after he got in from his job as a heating engineer, we'd go to the park together and just practice and practice for hours on end. All the strengths in my game are the ones Dad taught me in the park twenty years ago: we'd work on touch and striking the ball properly until it was too dark to see. He'd kick the ball up in the air as high as he could and get me to control it. Then it would be kicking it with each foot, making sure I was doing it right. It was great, even if he did drive me mad sometimes. 'Why can't you just go in goal and let me take shots at you?' I'd be thinking. I suppose you could say he was pushing me along. You'd also have to say, though, that it was all I wanted to do and I was lucky Dad was so willing to do it with me.
My dad, Ted, played himself for a local team called King fisher in the Forest and District League ...
From BECKHAM. Copyright © 2003 by Footwork Productions Ltd. HarperCollins Publishers. All rights reserved.
http://www.whatsyourantidrug.com/beckham.asp 
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David Beckham ფან-კლუბი, ინგლისის საუკეთესო ფეხბურთელი
