Beckham offers personal legacy to game with £2m academy investment

David Beckham laid out his legacy to English football yesterday by announcing that he would be funding an academy for schoolchildren out of his own personal fortune. But as the most famous player of his generation looked to a life beyond football he also had to concede that Real Madrid had been replaced by Chelsea as Europe's pre-eminent force.

The high-profile launch of Beckham's £10m academy, of which £2m will be invested by the player himself, was conducted from the Millennium Dome in London's Docklands, and looked back upon the career of a player who first blossomed at a Bobby Charlton football school in the 1980s. With his parents Ted and Sandra watching from the front row, Beckham said that he would never become a manager and would dedicate himself to his academies in London and Los Angeles.

Before then, however, he will have to oversee a return to power of Real Madrid if the England captain is not to go an unprecedented three seasons without a domestic medal. Beckham said that Chelsea's performance this season had earned them the right to be known as Europe's new galacticos.

He said: "Manchester United have great young players and experienced players, Arsenal have the same but Chelsea have Mr Abramovich with the money to keep supporting the club and taking them on. They've also got a new young manager and no one has seen anything like him before.

"He's got the confidence and the arrogance and that keeps the pressure off his players. Got to respect him for that. He's got a good mixture of good young English players and talented foreign players who have come in and performed well right from the off."

The David Beckham Academy has been established by the player's management company and the American Anschutz Entertainment Group and will offer 15,000 places to children between the ages of eight and 15 - 10,000 of which will be free. Beckham himself will be ensuring that the first year's entire intake of 15,000 do not have to pay the £250 fee to join.

While Beckham did not rule out making the business profitable in the future, the joint venture with AEG will not aim to make money directly from the children. Instead, the American company hopes that the academy, which opens this summer on the Greenwich peninsula, will act as a flagship for its redevelopment of the Dome. One AEG official said that Beckham had invested a "significant amount" of his estimated £65m fortune in the academy.

"It is a lot of money but I have to prove to people how much I believe in this," Beckham said. "People know I've earned a lot out of football and I want to give something back. If I'm going to put my name and my money into the school I've got to truly believe in it.

"When you get to my age you do think more about your career after football. So many players say they wish they had gone on for a few more years. I want to have that same buzz because I'll miss that a lot and I think the soccer school is one of way of carrying it on."