David Beckham to be made knight in King Charles’s birthday list

David Beckham will be awarded a knighthood next week as part of King Charles’s birthday celebrations, according to reports.

Beckham has been in line for a knighthood for more than a decade after playing more than 100 times for England and becoming well known for his charity work, much of which is focused on improving the lives of underprivileged children.

Beckham, 50, will be named in King Charles III’s birthday honours list and will take the title of sir. His wife, Victoria Beckham, the fashion designer and former Spice Girls member, will take the name Lady Beckham, according to the Sun.

The couple have appeared alongside the royals on public occasions, most recently at the Chelsea flower show last month where they were pictured alongside Charles and Queen Camilla. In February the Beckhams attended a dinner to promote Anglo-Italian relations at Highgrove, King Charles’s private home in Gloucestershire.

Beckham, who captained the England team for six years, is an official ambassador for the King’s Foundation, supporting its education programmes and “efforts to ensure young people have a greater understanding of nature”, according to his website.

The former footballer turned model has spoken about his love of nature in recent years, revealing his passion for beekeeping on the couple’s Cotswolds estate near Great Tew in Oxfordshire, in a Netflix documentary about his family.

Beckham received an OBE (Order of the British Empire) in 2003 and was said to have been first put forward for a knighthood in 2011, after helping London win its bid to host the 2012 Olympic Games. However, he was blocked from receiving a title after being implicated in a tax avoidance scheme, which he was cleared of four years ago.

View image in fullscreen David and Victoria Beckham at the Musée du Louvre in Paris. Photograph: Pierrick Rocher/BFA.com/Shutterstock

Beckham was one of 140 celebrities allegedly caught up in the 2013 Ingenious tax avoidance scheme, which resulted in the company being blacklisted. Sources close to Beckham at the time reportedly said the former footballer had no knowledge of the scheme; Ingenious was successful in appealing against HMRC in 2021.

Beckham has been a Unicef special ambassador for 20 years and this year collected the World Economic Forum crystal award – given to people who have used their art or other cultural work to improve the state of the world – for work on children’s rights.

In his acceptance speech he urged Davos attenders to fight for the rights of girls, saying he wanted his now 13-year-old daughter, Harper, to have the same opportunities as her three brothers.

He added that girls particularly were being held back by poverty, violence and discrimination. “They need opportunities. They need collective action and they need investment,” he said.

In May it emerged that Beckham was part of a nine-member consortium taking over the football club Salford City, alongside his former Manchester United teammate Gary Neville. Beckham said their ambition was to take the League Two team into the Premier League.

“I always dream big so I’m always going to want us to get to the pinnacle of football and be in the Premier League,” he told the Athletic. “But there’s a lot of hard work and a lot of investment to be done up until that point.”

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