Out-of-Beckham still the richest Footballer

D

avid Beckham, the husband to former Spice Girls celebrity Victoria Caroline Adams, is British richest football player with a personal fortune of £87m, a new poll has revealed.

Beckham, who turns out for Europe’s power house Real Madrid, wealth is almost three times that of the next richest player, his countryman and Newcastle striker Michael Owen, who is worth £32m.

Liverpool’s Robbie Fowler has amassed £28m, followed by former Gunners defender before moving to his current club Portsmouth Sol Campbell (£27m), Manchester United’s Rio Ferdinand and his clubmate Ryan Giggs and Chelsea’s and Ukraine’s best striker of his generation Andriy Shevchenko (all £22m).

Russian billionaire and Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich is comfortably the richest investor in British football, with a fortune of £10.8bn.

With his enormous wealth, Abramovich is now rated the second richest man in the Britain, behind steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal, worth an estimated £13.2bn. Abramovich is thought to have ploughed around £440m into Chelsea. He is followed by Spurs’ stakeholder Joe Lewis (£2.1bn) and Celtic shareholder Dermot Desmond (£1.25bn), according to the survey in FourFourTwo magazine.

Beckham, the former England Captain, earns £4.4m per season at Real Madrid and has a number of lucrative sponsorship deals that earned him £19m last year.

Sports observers say that temperamental Red Devils striker and England international Wayne Rooney and his fiancée Coleen McLoughlin could threaten the Beckhams in future years, with their fortune up to £20m from £6m last season.

Below is the list of top ten richest footballers and Investors:

FOOTBALL'S RICH LIST

David Beckham £87m

Michael Owen £32m

Robbie Fowler £28m

Sol Campbell £27m

Rio Ferdinand £22m

Ryan Giggs £22m

Andriy Shevchenko £22m

Thierry Henry £21m

Wayne Rooney £20m

Michael Ballack £18m

FOOTBALL'S TOP INVESTORS

R Abramovich (Chelsea) £10.8bn

J Lewis (Spurs) £2.1bn

D Desmond (Celtic) £1.25bn

M Glazer (Man Utd) £1.05bn

T Hemmings (Ch'ton, Preston) £900m

Sir A Sugar (Spurs) £790m

R Lerner (Villa) £789m

D Murray (Rangers) £650m

S Keswick, family (Cheltenham) £644m

D Sullivan (Birmingham) £595m

Ends…