There's a really nice article (sub req) in The Wall Street Journal for tomorrow (Jan 12) that summarizes the events of today. It gives a better idea of how the salary is structured: So it's not like there's some gigantic $250M salary being paid. I didn't know about the Simon connection. (There's like five different Beckham threads now and I wasn't sure which one this fit in, so Mods feel free to merge with whichever one talks about salary the most.)
That's a different Simon than the one you're probably thinking of (Simon Fuller rather than Simon Cowell). Fuller Cowell