How David Beckham earned more than £400MILLION from two incredible LA Galaxy contract clauses after shock MLS transfer
DAVID BECKHAM’S shock LA Galaxy contract has earned him more than £400MILLION – thanks to two genius clauses.
The former England captain shocked world football in 2007 when he left the glitz and glamour of Real Madrid to move with his wife Victoria and their three sons to Los Angeles.
Not only was Beckham turning his back on elite-level Champions League football for the MLS which had only started 11 years earlier – but he was also taking a major pay cut.
Beckham, just 31 at the time, was earning £16.6m per year at the Bernabeu and accepted a deal worth £5.4m per year in LA – a whopping 70 per cent drop.
However, in a brilliant Twitter thread by sports business and investing expert , the two incredible sections of the Galaxy contract reveal how Beckham earned more than £42m per year during his five years with the club.
But it also explains how and why Inter Miami are now one of the newest of the 29 MLS clubs.
Although Beckham’s basic salary may have been £5.4m when he joined LA Galaxy in 2007, the reality was he earned on average as much as seven times more than that.
That is because Beckham negotiated a deal to ensure he took a percentage of all the team’s revenue.
Therefore he earned a cut of everything – from ticket sales and sponsorships to every beer and hot dog.
That saw his earnings sky-rocket to around £212m across the five years – an extra £185m on top of his original wages.
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So £42m per year made Beckham the highest-paid footballer on the planet as he made 118 appearances and won two MLS Cups.
Incredibly, though, it was another deal that has helped Beckham’s bank balance even more.
When he signed for LA Galaxy, he was able to insert a clause guaranteeing him the right to buy an MLS expansion team for £20m after he retired.
At the time, that looked a great deal for the MLS as Toronto FC had just joined the league for £8m.
However, Beckham’s arrival sparked a major growth in the MLS with attendances up 40 per cent and the current £207m annual TV deal now worth 3,025 per cent of the £6.7m contract agreed in 2006.
It also means the franchises are also worth more, averaging at a whopping £484m in 2022 compared to £31m in 2008.
As a result, expansion fees are up significantly.
New York City FC paid £83m to join, Austin and Nashville £125m and Charlotte FC a staggering £270m to enter the MLS.
But Beckham had his own deal already in place and Inter Miami could join in 2020 for a fraction of the price of Nashville in the same year.
By the time the Herons played their first match in March 2020, the club was the tenth most-valuable franchise in the MLS worth £487m – more than 24 times the original £20m expansion fee.
It means overall Beckham’s risky move to America 16 years ago on a budget £5.4m per year that guaranteed him just £27m has returned more than £400m across his time at LA Galaxy and launching Inter Miami.
