Beckham tops football's rich list

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

Beckham's wealth is almost three times that of the next richest player, Michael Owen, who is worth £32m.

Robbie Fowler has amassed £28m, followed by Sol Campbell (£27m), Rio Ferdinand, Ryan Giggs and Andriy Shevchenko (all £22m).

Roman Abramovich is comfortably the richest investor in British football, with a fortune of £10.8bn.

Despite his enormous wealth, Abramovich is only the second richest man in the country, behind steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal, worth an estimated £13.2bn.

It is thought that Abramovich has ploughed around £440m into Chelsea.

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

After Abramovich the next richest investors in British football are Spurs stakeholder Joe Lewis (£2.1bn) and Celtic shareholder Dermot Desmond (£1.25bn), according to the survey in FourFourTwo magazine.

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

Wayne Rooney and his fiancée Coleen McLoughlin could threaten the Beckhams in future years, with their fortune up to £20m from £6m last season.

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