David Beckham and Gary Neville buy-out their former Man United Class of ’92 pals to take over Salford City in bid to ‘do a Wrexham’

David Beckham and Gary Neville have completed the takeover of Salford City.

The former Manchester United stars were already part-owners of the League Two side along with a number of their ex-team-mates and stars of the ‘Class of 92’. 

However, it was confirmed on Thursday, that Neville and Beckham – as part of a fresh consortium – have bought out other shareholders after raising $15-20million to invest.

Taking to Instagram to share the news, Beckham wrote: ‘Salford played such an important role in my life growing up… it’s where I trained with United alongside my best mates every day, it’s where I bought my first house and where me and Victoria lived.

‘I’m so proud to be part of a new ownership group alongside my mate @gneville2 as we begin the next chapter of Salford’s journey. Football is at the heart of this community and I can’t wait to see what the future holds for the Ammies’

Former United stars Nicky Butt, Ryan Giggs, Phil Neville and Paul Scholes are no longer shareholders at the club but will take on various different roles at the club.

Speaking to The Athletic, Beckham said: ‘I will be over every big decision that’s made and every little decision that’s made.

‘That’s what my commitment is to Gary. It’s what my commitment is to the club.’

‘We’re definitely not doing it for a laugh and it’s also not for the romantic side of things,’ Beckham continued. ‘Yes, we care about the club — but we’re doing it to win. We want Salford to be successful and we have had success, but then we want it to go on to the next level. 

‘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. But there’s a lot of hard work and a lot of investment to be done up until that point.

‘The Championship is a league that we want to get in but it’s step by step. We want success very quickly but these things take time.

‘There’s a reason why we’re not going to be going up this year. So what is that reason? How do we solve it? And what do we need to put around the team, the manager and the club to ensure we have that success?

‘But if we can do that, fast forward it and be up in the Championship, that’s what the dream would be.’

Beckham and Neville have teamed up with Declan Kelly, founder of U.S.-based advisory firm Consello, and Lord Mervyn Davies, chairman of the Lawn Tennis Association, to move forward with the takeover.   

The Class of ’92 entered this world with great confidence when they bought Salford City in 2014 and took the club from the Northern Premier League North to League Two – a climb of four divisions – in five years. 

When they reached League Two, Paul Scholes baldly stated the ambition. ‘I know it’s a long way off, but the target has to be getting to the Premier League at some point.’

The club have been in the same division ever since and, to put it mildly, are struggling in a way Gary Neville and Ryan Giggs would not have imagined when first hatching this plan on a train in 2012, at a time when Giggs was contemplating retirement.

It looked rosy for a while, with six millionaires – the Neville brothers, Scholes, David Beckham and Nicky Butt – and a billionaire, Singaporean tycoon Peter Lim, the project’s bankroller-in-chief who kept propelling things along.

But, piece by piece, the landscape has changed, as Mail Sport revealed in October. The club had been seeking new investment and seemed to need it badly.

After Lim’s departure in 2024, Beckham and Neville had been seeking investment opportunities.

The Wrexham model, introduced when Ryan Reynolds, Rob McElhenney and razzmatazz replaced old-fashioned, football know-how as a route to winning games, uses those owners’ star power and film-making imagination to bring in the cash.

Beckham is no filmmaker and hardly oozes personality, though he is the one with that kind of draw if only someone had thought of turning his Salford co-ownership into a similar kind of creative property. 

Beckham’s 88.4million Instagram followers even puts Reynolds’ 54million in the shade, which is probably why Reynolds wanted him, as football royalty, in series one of his hit Welcome to Wrexham docu-series.

Beckham told The Athletic: ‘We’ve all been inspired by what Ryan Reynolds has been doing at Wrexham and I’m not saying this is why we’re doing it because it’s not.

‘But I’ve spoken to Ryan about it so many times now and he said the feeling around the city, the feeling around the club, is so exceptional. That’s the kind of thing that we want to create.

‘Tom Wagner and Tom Brady have done an incredible job with Birmingham. I went to a game a few months back and the atmosphere in the stadium was one of the best I’ve seen for a long time. That’s what we want to create. We want to create that community, add to the community and fan base we’ve already got — and then lift it.

‘When you see what the Toms are doing, there is investment, there is a plan and it would be the dream to talk about the growth of Salford City’.