With the 2026 World Cup underway and the world's highest-paid footballers back in the global spotlight, there is renewed public interest in how elite athletes actually hold their wealth. When a 23-year-old winger signs a five-year contract worth £250,000 a week, plus image rights, boot deals and appearance fees, the money almost never lands in a personal current account. It lands in a carefully engineered structure — and the same is true, on a much larger scale, for the multinational corporations that sponsor them.
As founder of Castle Family Legal, I've spent over a decade advising families in England and Wales on how to protect what they've built. Most of my clients are not Premier League footballers. But the legal principles the top 1% use to protect their assets are the same ones that protect a family home in Leicester, a small business in Loughborough or a pension pot built up over 30 years. This article explains what those principles are, how the world's best-paid players use them, and how they scale down for the rest of us.
1. Image-rights companies: Elite footballers earn two distinct streams of income — playing wages from the club, and commercial income from sponsorships, endorsements and personal appearances. In England and Wales, the commercial half is typically routed through an image-rights company: a limited company owned by the player (and often family members) that licenses the use of the player's name, likeness and personality to sponsors. HMRC has tightened the rules around image-rights companies significantly since 2017, but they remain a legitimate structure when the commercial activity is real. The effect is that a large slice of a footballer's income is corporate income, not personal income — and corporate assets are legally separate from the individual.
2. Family trusts and family investment companies: Once income has been earned and taxed, the next question is where it sits. High net worth footballers and their advisers typically use one of two structures: a discretionary family trust, or a family investment company (FIC). A discretionary trust holds assets for a class of beneficiaries (spouse, children, future grandchildren) with trustees deciding who benefits and when. An FIC is a UK limited company holding investments, with family members as shareholders. Both structures achieve the same core aim — the underlying assets are owned by the structure, not the individual, so they are shielded from divorce claims, creditor claims and, over time, inheritance tax.
3. Pre-nuptial and post-nuptial agreements: Since the Supreme Court's decision in Radmacher v Granatino in 2010, pre-nuptial agreements in England and Wales are given significant weight by the family courts, provided they are entered into freely, with full financial disclosure and independent legal advice on both sides. For a player earning £15m a year at 24, a pre-nup is not a romantic statement — it's basic risk management, in exactly the same way that a shareholder agreement is basic risk management for co-founders of a business. Increasingly, established players also enter post-nuptial agreements after marriage to update the position as wealth grows.
4. Lasting Powers of Attorney (LPAs): This is the one area where elite players and ordinary families most often make the same mistake — assuming LPAs are only for the elderly. A footballer is one head injury or serious illness away from losing capacity, and without a registered Lasting Power of Attorney for Property & Financial Affairs, their family cannot access image-rights company accounts, sign player contracts, or manage investment portfolios without applying to the Court of Protection. Any responsible wealth adviser puts LPAs in place alongside the corporate structures — because the most sophisticated asset protection in the world is useless if nobody can operate it.
5. Wills and succession planning: A footballer earning tens of millions typically has a Will that dovetails with the trust and FIC structures — a 'pour-over' Will directing any personally-held assets into the family trust on death, plus specific gifts and guardianship provisions for young children. The same logic applies to a family with a home, a pension and a couple of ISAs: without a Will, the intestacy rules decide who inherits and in what proportion, which very rarely matches what a modern family actually wants.
How corporations do it: The corporate world uses many of the same principles, but at scale. A typical multinational is structured as a group — a top-level holding company that owns operating subsidiaries, each of which owns specific assets, contracts or brands. Intellectual property (trademarks, patents, brand rights) is often held in a dedicated IP holding company that licenses the brand to the trading subsidiaries. Real estate is frequently held in separate special purpose vehicles (SPVs). The point of all this is legal separation: if a customer sues the trading subsidiary in Germany, they cannot reach the IP holding company in Ireland, the property SPV in the UK, or the parent company's cash reserves. Risk is ring-fenced.
The same principle scales down. A family that owns a home worth £450,000, a small business and a pension is running, in effect, a very small corporate group. Holding the business through a limited company, holding the pension in a properly-structured SIPP, and ring-fencing each spouse's share of the family home in a Property Trust Will on first death, creates the same kind of legal separation the multinationals rely on — just at a family-appropriate scale.
The lesson for UK families: You don't need image-rights income or a corporate treasury to benefit from the underlying principles. What high net worth footballers and global corporations both understand is that ownership matters. Assets held in your own personal name are exposed to divorce, creditor claims, care-home fee assessments and third-party challenges after your death. Assets held inside the right legal structure — a trust, a company, a Property Trust Will — can be protected for the people you actually want to benefit.
For most of my clients at Castle Family Legal, the practical starting point is not exotic. It is a professionally drafted Will (typically a Property Trust Will for homeowners), a pair of Lasting Powers of Attorney, and — where appropriate — a bespoke trust or pre-nuptial agreement. That combination gives an ordinary family in England and Wales much of the same protection that a Premier League footballer's structure provides, at a fraction of the cost and complexity.
If the World Cup has prompted you to think about how your own assets are held, that is the right instinct. The question is not how much you have — it is whether what you have is structured to survive divorce, incapacity, care costs and third-party claims. Book a free 30-minute review with Greg Stevens at Castle Family Legal and we will tell you honestly which of these structures, if any, is worth putting in place for your family.