Beckham tops rich list with £87m in the bank

David Beckham's value on the field of play may be on the wane, but the former England skipper remains peerless when it comes to football's high earners.

According to a survey of British footballers and foreign imports plying their trade in the Premiership, Beckham remains by far the games' richest exponent.

Top ten

Despite slipping down the pecking order at Real Madrid this season, Beckham tops the rich list poll with a figure of £87million, more than twice that of second-placed Michael Owen who is said to be worth £32m.

Beckham's personal fortune is down to his £4.4m a year contract with Real, which expires in the summer, along with income from advertising contracts with the likes of Gillette, Adidas and Pepsi. And despite losing lucrative deals with Vodafone and Police sunglasses, Beckham still found enough cash to pay himself a £19m salary out of the coffers of his company, Footwork Productions Ltd, last year.

Robbie Fowler, like Beckham, may be entering the twilight of his footballing career, but shrewd investments in the property market along with his Liverpool pay packet see the former England striker complete the top three with a £28m nest egg.

Chelsea's Andriy Shevchenko is the top foreign earner playing in England in seventh place, his £121,000-a-week deal at Stamford Bridge helping to swell his wealth to £22m, £1m ahead of Arsenal's Thierry Henry.

Another Chelsea summer import, Michael Ballack, completes the top 10 with with a relatively modest figure of £18m despite his £130,000-a-week deal.

The survey, in the current issue of

FourFourTwo magazine (also highlights the amount of foreign money pouring into the Premiership, with overseas investors worth a staggering total of £13 billion.

That figure is set to touch the £20 billion mark should Dubai's billionaire ruler Sheik Mohammed complete his £450m takeover of Liverpool in the New Year.

But the wealthy Arab would have to settle for second place behind Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich, whose own dealings in the world of oil see him top the list of wealthiest investors with a £10.8 billion fortune.

American investors Malcom Glazer and Randy Lerner come in fourth and seventh respectively in the poll of investors. Manchester United owner Glazer, 78, is said to be worth a wallet-bulging £1.05 billion while Villa's new Stateside sugar-daddy has a healthy £789m in the bank.