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David Beckham reckons that Mark Wahlberg and his F45 Training didn’t pay him ‘appropriately for his promotional efforts’, and the soccer star has now dropped a $14 million (R267 million) lawsuit against Marky Mark.

Becks is alleging that F45 Training didn’t uphold its end of their contract – in which Beckham promoted the fitness brand ahead of its IPO in 2021 – and has already filed suit against the gym F45 Training, which is co-owned by Mark Wahlberg.

According to the suit, the company did not give Beckham the “substantial cash and equity compensation” that it had promised him in their agreement, despite the gym “substantially benefited from its relationship with Beckham, who enhanced F45’s public profile and credibility”.

According to The New York Times, the two had reached a promotional agreement that would have seen Beckham receive almost 1 million shares of stock, plus $5 million of extra shares. Beckham claims, though, that when F45’s business began to dip in 2022, it held on to the millions of dollars it owed him.

Additionally, Beckham’s lawyers noted that when the company went public, its valuation was about three times what it had been two years prior, before his involvement. Bechams now wants more than $14 million in damages, excluding interest.

According to the documents seen by the Times, Beckham also says that a delay in getting him the first 1 million shares cost him $9.3 million because the stock price eventually fell – a claim that F45’s lawyers refute.

However, Wahlberg – who bought a 36% stake in F45 back in 2019, and also sits on the company’s board – claims through his layers that Beckham didn’t carry out all of his duties and that he’s “attempting to benefit from his own wrongdoing and has unclean hands”.

This is not the first time F45 Training has butted heads with the sporting OG’s. In 2017, former NFL wide receiver Terrell Owens sued the company; while the football player was paid $15,000 for a promo video, he claimed that the brand was supposed to pay him $25,000 for each of the first 25 F45 gym openings, as well as $5,000 for any new gyms from then on.

It’s not quite clear how that case ended, but a F45 spokesperson said at the time that Owens’s claims were a “total fabrication.”

No comments about hand hygiene were made at that time, but F45 does look like a sweaty place, so perhaps nobody’s hands are clean.

 

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[source:robbreport]