David Beckham to receive special prize at GQ Men of The Year Awards

3 September 2019

David Beckham will receive the Editor's Special Award at the 2019 GQ Men of The Year Awards .

David Beckham

The 44-year-old retired soccer star will attend the GQ Awards in association with HUGO BOSS, in London on Tuesday (03.09.19), where he will be presented with the prestigious prize.

David - who appears on one of the GQ Men of The Year Awards special edition covers of the October issue of the magazine - opened up to the publication about the advice he has for his and his wife Victoria Beckham's four children, Brooklyn, 20, Romeo, 17, Cruz, 14, and Harper, eight.

He said: "To work hard, simple as that. I tell the kids they have to make choices, sometimes give things up. If your friends are going out on a Friday night, maybe you can't. Maybe you've got tennis practice the next day or you're in the studio singing, like Cruz, or you've got a shoot, like Brooklyn. That's where your focus needs to be."

David also revealed that football was his main passion when he was growing up.

He said: "To be honest, all I ever wanted was to be successful as a footballer. Obviously, I always did things outside of the game and outside of my footballing career that were slightly different at the time. I think it's more acceptable now to do some of the things that I did, some of the covers, some of the photo shoots, some of the sponsorships, but I think my focus back then was to just win trophies, be successful with Manchester United and never leave United. Anything outside of the game was just a bonus."

However, the star has since branched out with various endorsement deals including fashion, fragrances and alcohol and said he has become passionate about businesses other than football.

He explained: "I think the change happened when I started seeing things differently on the business side and largely because I was enjoying it a lot more. Consequently, I started to focus and then started looking towards the end of my career and what I was going to do, setting up a team and at some point owning my own team and owning my own office and being able to actually control everything that was going on in my world. I was probably in my late twenties, early thirties when I started to readjust. And it looked very different from when I was 21."

See the full feature in the October issue of GQ available via digital download and newsstands on Friday 6th September.