On the first Sunday night in April, drums are beating and horns are blaring in a boisterous Chase Stadium in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., as Lionel Messi and his Inter Miami teammates make a humdrum regular-season American soccer game a happening. Inter Miami and Toronto FC are tied 1-1 in the waning seconds of the contest when Messi drives a ball into the goal box, giving his team a golden chance to pull out the win. His pass lands on the foot of Inter Miami’s Fafà Picault, who pops what should be a surefire game winner over the net. A few seconds later, the referee blows the final whistle. David Beckham, co-owner of Inter Miami, sits still in his box, his face frozen in disbelief. He looks too ticked to move. Finally, he rises to shake a few hands and slap some shoulders. “That was a frustrating game,” he says.
“I feel more exhausted watching the team as an owner,” says Beckham, whose wife Victoria noted how sweaty he was when he got home and asked what in the world he had been doing. “I’m so invested in the game that I feel that I’ve played the game.”
It has been a dozen years since Beckham retired from professional soccer following a career in which he won six Premier League titles with Manchester United, a La Liga championship with Real Madrid, two Major League Soccer (MLS) Cups with the L.A. Galaxy, and a Ligue 1 championship with Paris Saint-Germain. And having just reached a major milestone—his 50th birthday, on May 2—Beckham admits that he’d love to get back out there. “There’s a lot of players that say, ‘Oh, well, I miss the locker room. I miss the banter,’” he says. “I don’t miss any of that, because I have that with my family and with my friends. I miss training every day. I miss playing every weekend. Every day, I wake up, and I feel like something’s missing. Even at 50 years old, in my head, I can still play.”
It’s not as if he’s let himself go. Beckham, who keeps to a strict fitness regimen, lost his shirt for photos in April’s Men’s Health, and when he and Victoria are in the same place, they work out together almost every morning. “I let Victoria believe that she’s working harder,” says Beckham. “But I think I’m the one that’s working harder. Don’t tell her that.” (“David does an hour in the gym, and I do an hour and 45 minutes,” Victoria says. “So, Sean, I will let you make that decision.”) Still, he concedes that although he feels like a 25-year-old in his head, his body cannot do what it did when he was the World Cup captain for England in the aughts.
But don’t expect any midlife crises. For one thing, the man does not have time. Beyond co-owning Inter Miami, Beckham has a range of business interests to keep him busy—supplement and eyewear lines, a production company that oversaw the 2023 Emmy-winning Netflix documentary, Beckham, and partnerships with brands like Stella Artois and Hugo Boss. And he remains committed to his longtime philanthropic work, particularly with UNICEF, where he is one of the organization’s longest-serving goodwill ambassadors.
“The competitive part of it is, I want to see wins,” says Beckham. “I want to see these kids walking around with clothing and not be subject to violence in their homes or in their schools or in their communities. Keeping these young kids in education. Keeping them out of early child marriage. When you go into these projects and you see that happening, that’s a win.”
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He’s talking about his charitable efforts, but it’s really the connective tissue of this all. He may have left the pitch as a player, but his drive to prove himself, to take big swings and see them pay off, persists across his endeavors. As he moves into the next half-century of his life, Beckham is happy to reflect upon his journey but eager to look forward as well. He is well aware that he is one of the 21st century’s most famous faces and has a global platform enjoyed by only a select few, many of whom—Messi, Tom Brady, and Tom Cruise, among them—were guests at his lavish birthday parties in London and Miami. And so even as he is content, he refuses to be satisfied. “I truly think,” Victoria says, “that he’s just scratching the surface of his full potential.”
In conjunction with his birthday, Beckham launched a fundraising appeal with UNICEF. “If you, like me, believe that every child should have the chance to achieve their full potential, please click the link in my bio to donate,” he wrote in an April post on Instagram, where he has 88 million followers, more than any active English Premier League player. He turned over his social media accounts to a trio of teenage girls from Brazil, Madagascar, and Sudan, who each shared stories of perseverance through roadblocks like war, disease, and lack of educational resources for girls.
While it may not get the same attention as, for instance, his Netflix doc, the making of which, he says, was “like therapy,” his relationship with the organization is almost as long as his marriage to Victoria. It began on a trip to Thailand with Manchester United in 2001 when he visited a UNICEF-supported protection center, for women and girls as young as 5 who’d experienced violence and abuse. He knew instantly this was something he wanted to be a part of. He started partnering with UNICEF, and in 2005 received a call from then U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, asking if he’d become an ambassador. “There’s certain phone calls that you get that make you quite emotional,” says Beckham. “That made me very emotional.”
He has since gone on humanitarian trips to places like Sierra Leone, India, and Indonesia to shed light on challenges facing children and families in those countries. He recalls one in particular, in 2014, a few months after Typhoon Haiyan ravaged the Philippines, killing more than 6,000 people. Beckham met with a family impacted by the storm. “The mum was completely glassy-eyed,” he says. “It felt like there was no life within her. The father explained what happened: he was on the roof of their home holding both his young daughters when a wave hit and knocked him unconscious. He woke up hours later holding on to just one of his daughters.”
In 2015, to mark his 10-year anniversary with UNICEF, Beckham launched his “7” fund—named for his number on his England and Manchester United jerseys—which has since raised more than $20 million. Among the beneficiaries have been 160,000 adolescents in Nepal who receive education and mental-health support, some 400,000 children in Djibouti who got the polio vaccine, and 40,000 boys and girls in El Salvador who take part in sports and recreational activity.
“The reason why sport is so powerful is typically that is how men communicate,” says Victoria. “But quite often in my experience, and I know in David’s experience on the ground, you have women and young girls holding entire communities together. They’re somewhat unheard. He sees the power in women and girls.”
While his efforts have taken him around the world, he remains involved with organizations in his native Britain. He is on the leadership council for the nonprofit Malaria No More UK, and a self-described royalist, he joined Prince William last year in helping to raise north of $20 million for the London Air Ambulance Service, which used the funds to purchase two lifesaving emergency helicopters.
He’s also formed a bond with the monarch himself. During the pandemic, Beckham took up beekeeping at his Oxfordshire country home. This is not news to anyone who saw Beckham, which opens with a scene of him in his beekeeping outfit. (“All of a sudden, people laugh,” Beckham says, recalling his experience at the premiere in London. “I’m like, ‘This is not funny.’ I even turned around. I was like, ‘Why are you all laughing?’”) But when he attended a British Fashion Council event in 2023, his hobby was less well-known and he held a jar of honey behind his back to present to the King. “I was worried about his secret security wondering, ‘What is that?’” he says. The gesture sparked a pleasant conversation, as King Charles III is also a beekeeper, and the King later invited him to his home at Highgrove Gardens, where Beckham observed “most amazing beehive I have ever seen.” In 2024, Beckham became an ambassador for the King’s Foundation, which offers U.K. students training in areas such as textiles, STEM, and horticulture.
In January, the World Economic Forum gave Beckham a Crystal Award at its annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, for his “long-term humanitarian work and unwavering commitment to improving the lives of children” around the globe. “He doesn’t have to do anything,” says UNICEF executive director Catherine Russell. “He’s a very famous, wealthy person who could just dillydally around. And he doesn’t do that. Does really serious work to help people in the world who most need it. To me, it doesn’t get much better than that.”
To be fair, it’s hard to imagine Beckham dillydallying around anything. Throughout his career, he’s been clear on his course and confident that everyone would see the wisdom of his moves eventually. When he was considering joining the Galaxy from soccer superpower Real Madrid before the 2007 season, he heard ad nauseam that he was making a huge mistake. After all, MLS was an afterthought in the soccer world, not at all established as a topflight league. “When you do get questioned, I like to come out fighting,” says Beckham. “I always knew that I could help raise this sport in this country, and hopefully I’ve done that.”
In 2014, he exercised his option to purchase an MLS expansion team for $25 million, a stipulation in his Galaxy contract. He set his sights on Miami, a city he had never visited before it became his preferred destination for a franchise, only to have politicians reject multiple stadium proposals. He was told by several advisers that he should sell the team back to MLS and earn a small profit for his trouble. But Beckham stuck with his vision, partnering with Jorge and Jose Mas, who run a Miami-based construction and engineering firm and used their political connections to help push through the $1 billion Miami Freedom Park plan. Jorge is now managing owner of the team, Jose is co-owner, and the mixed-use stadium, which includes Inter Miami’s new 25,000-seat home, hotels, offices, a public park, and retail spaces, is expected to open next season. Inter Miami is worth more than $1 billion.
In the early seasons of Inter Miami’s existence, Beckham would stay up well past midnight in London to watch his team, more often than not, lose. “It got to the point where Victoria went, ‘Maybe you’re the problem. Why don’t you try to not sit up and watch one night and just see if you win?’” says Beckham. “I tried it once, and it didn’t work. So I was like, ‘You’re wrong.’” He set out to change their fortunes, using his own experience moving to the U.S. as a sales pitch to Messi. It was another reminder that it never hurts to aim high. “I could never have dreamed to have Lionel here,” says Beckham. “As an owner, you always say that you want the best players. Does it really happen? No. And he is the best player to have ever played the game.” Messi, even at 37, has exceeded expectations. After his arrival, Inter Miami won the 2023 Leagues Cup—the annual competition between teams from MLS and Liga MX, the top league in Mexico—and the 2024 Supporters’ Shield, awarded annually to the team with MLS’ best regular-season record. Pictures of the team celebrating these accomplishments hang in Beckham’s Inter Miami office.
Though Messi’s contract expires after this season, Beckham is confident that he’ll be back in Miami in 2026, and that he will play in next year’s World Cup. “I think his heart is in Miami now,” says Beckham. “Players these days, they look after themselves more. They’re playing longer. His No. 1 passion is obviously his family. His other passion is football. As long as he’s happy, he will continue to play as long as he wants. It would be nice if he played another 10 years. I can’t see it. But you never know.”
Beckham, whose career has had him crisscrossing the world, understands that it’s impossible to know what lies ahead. But that doesn’t stop him from making both plans and predictions. He intends, over the next six months, to have low-key catch-up dinners with longtime friends in both the U.S. and U.K. He hopes to take a UNICEF trip to Brazil or India sometime this year. “Those are the moments that I love more than anything, going on the ground and meeting these young children,” Beckham says. And laugh if you will about the bees, but sometime in the next few months Beckham has plans to launch Bee Up, a brand of honey-based snacks like gummies, sticks, and bars marketed to the U.S. travel-soccer-kid set.
He’s also looking forward to the 2026 World Cup, though to be clear, despite putting down roots in the U.S., he’s still cheering for his home team. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m going to have to go with England.” And his tracking of what’s happening across the pond is not entirely confined to fandom. While he is highly invested, financially and emotionally, in Inter Miami, he allows that he’s not uninterested in expanding his portfolio. In March, thousands of Manchester United fans marched in protests against the Glazer family, who’ve owned the team over the past two decades. “I’d love to say that I own Manchester United one day,” says Beckham. “It’s always been my team, it will always be my team, and I care deeply about Manchester United.” But the team is valued at around $6.55 billion, according to Forbes, making it the second most valuable soccer franchise on the planet, trailing just Real Madrid. “Slightly out of my price range,” Beckham says.
In the meantime, he does see potential for the Americans at the global level. “The U.S. will win a World Cup at some point,” says Beckham of a country whose best result on the men’s side since 1934 was a quarter-final appearance in 2002. “This country is too powerful, is too big, has the best facilities, has the best coaches. The foundations have now been set.” Left unsaid is that he can claim some credit for this.
Of course, there are some things that are completely out of Beckham’s hands. Despite his affinity for and connection to the royals, knighthood—to the surprise of many—has thus far eluded him even as his fellow sportsmen Lewis Hamilton and Mo Farah have received the honor. “I’ve heard people in the media talk about it’s something that I really, really want, and of course, it would be an unbelievable honor,” says Beckham, who waited in line for 12 hours to pay his respects to the Queen at her 2022 funeral. “If it happens at some point, amazing. If it doesn’t, there’s nothing I can do about it.”
Beckham got his first gig when he was 12: he was a potboy, clearing drinks off the tables at a dog track. On Saturdays, he’d accompany his dad to his job fixing stoves in London hotels and restaurants, acting as his little helper. He’s always dug working and has no plans to slow down now. “The last 50 years have been pretty enjoyable and pretty hectic and packed with things that I never thought and dreamt that I’d ever be part of,” he says. “I want that to continue. If that stops, that’s when I won’t want to go to work. And that’s never going to happen.”