Castore: How rejection from professional football kick-started a global sports brand

Guest post by Graham Ruddick

Tom Beahon wanted to be a professional football player when he was growing up. This was not an unusual ambition for a teenager in Merseyside, north-west England. After all, this is the home of Liverpool and Everton, two of the biggest and most successful teams in the history of English football.

Beahon was talented enough to be on the books of his local team, Tranmere Rovers, who are the smaller local rivals to Liverpool and Everton and play in the fourth tier of professional football in England.

However, a conversation when he was just 20 years old would change Beahon’s life forever.

“I remember extremely vividly being called into the manager’s office at Prenton Park, which is the stadium of Tranmere Rovers,” Beahon says. “I’m being told that they’re not going to renew my contract. You’re 20 to 21 years old. You don’t have a lot of life experience. You have literally dedicated your life up until that point to becoming a professional footballer. You’ve made huge sacrifices.”

When your friends are going out, drinking, partying, and doing all the fun stuff that people should be doing – you didn’t do any of that, because you wanted to be a professional footballer. Then someone has sat across the table from you and told you that dream is no longer a reality. That’s a big moment.

“For me, it was a big thing that I’d let my dad down. My dad had come to watch all of my games. He sacrificed his own career. He wouldn’t be in the office for long hours because he would take me to football and my brother to cricket.”

Beahon’s life was now at a crossroads. Professional sport is littered with stories of young people who were spat out of the system at a young age and struggled. They usually leave with no educational qualifications because until this point they have dedicated their life to the sport. This was the case for Beahon,

“I think you can essentially go one of two ways,” he says. “That pain hurts you so much that you never want to be out of your comfort zone ever again. You want to do something where you’re in control of the environment. You don’t strive, because if you don’t strive, you can’t fail. I think a lot of people do that and I don’t blame them at all.

“Alternatively, you can go the other way. To my mind – my little uneducated brain at 20 years old – the worst has happened. But you realise that the sun still rises the next day. So what it instilled in me was whatever I do, I need to be in control of my own destiny. I’m not getting called into the manager’s office again. Failure doesn’t scare me. I’ve failed. The worst has happened. What scares me is not being in control.”

This story is the origins of Castore, the sportswear brand. Beahon would go on to found Castore with his brother Phil. They have built it into a company that is worth around £1 billion and is one of the fastest-growing sports brands in the world. Castore makes the kits for the Red Bull and McLaren Formula One team, Everton in the Premier League, and the English cricket team.

In 2024, Beahon was asked to join the Prime Minister’s Business Council in the UK, a collection of business leaders who advise the government on policy. He was surrounded by the chief executives of the biggest companies in the country.

“Often there’s this misconception of entrepreneurs that you have this lightbulb moment and all of a sudden the world changes,” says Beahon.” It’s very rarely like that. So to have this setback [with football] – that is probably the seminal moment in my life. I wouldn’t change it for the world.”

Beahon, now powered by a steely determination to succeed, got a job working in finance for a bank in London. After the financial crisis and a sharp rise in university tuition fees, companies started offering apprenticeship-style schemes to those who couldn’t afford to go to university. His brother Phil also got a job in London and they lived together. When they got home from work in the evening they started discussing business ideas. Their passion for sport was met with a belief that there was a gap in the sportswear market. Castore was born.

“The big three – Nike, Adidas, and Puma – have always dominated this market. Why? Why is there not space either above them or below them for a cheaper, low-cost alternative or a more premium alternative?” Beahon explains. “Look at any other sector. The one I would always look at was the automotive market. You’ve got your VW, your Renaults, whatever. And then, of course, you’ve got your premium cars at the top. Why is there not a premium option in the sportswear market? Why do these guys dominate it?”

The Beahon brothers started visiting factories in Portugal and Italy while they were on holiday to explore sites that could manufacture their products. “We didn’t have any experience about design, about fabrics, about sourcing, about manufacturing,” he explains. “We just worked out as we went along and it built through momentum.”

At the age of 26, Beahon quit his job in London and moved back in with his parents in Merseyside to work on launching Castore. His parents offered to provide money to launch the business by remortgaging their house.

“I find that quite difficult looking back,” he says.” I just went into a very insular, almost dark place. I don’t know what success looks like. I don’t know if this business is going to get to £100,000 in revenue or a million. But I’m not going to fail. I’m not stopping until I make enough to pay them back.”

This just added to Beahon’s steely determination.

“In a way that’s quite hard to articulate. It instils something in you that is a real competitive advantage. I’ve got nothing against people who go to Oxford or Harvard. I’m probably jealous that I didn’t, because I left school at 16. But I do think that it’s a competitive advantage to have that ferocity, that relentless deep drive and desire to be successful, versus someone that’s had a really good idea that they wrote in a business plan in their dorm in Harvard. I mean, Facebook and other quite good businesses have come out of that, so clearly that works. But looking back, it didn’t feel like it at the time, but it was and is a competitive advantage.”

From here, Tom and Phil started to build Castore. They sourced products from factories in Portugal then stood outside high-end gyms like Equinox and offered their new products to personal trainers alongside incentives to promote them to clients. They wrote to customers who placed online orders every week. Castore quickly gained traction. They secured a big breakthrough when Sir Andy Murray agreed to wear a Castore kit. They won the endorsement deal after sending products to the people around the Scottish tennis star. This led to a meeting with him and then an agreement.

Today, Castore has hundreds of employees and deals with big sports teams around the world. But there continue to be challenges. For example, Aston Villa, the Premier League team, ended a deal with Castore after being disappointed with the quality of the kits that were provided.

“When you are disruptive and innovative, there are always bumps in the road,” Beahon says. “You can’t let them affect you. You have to learn from them. You have to have humility and say: ‘Okay, could we have done something better there? Most times in life the answer isn’t black or white – it’s grey. But there will always be learnings. You take those learnings, you implement them and you’ll be better for the experience.”

Graham Ruddick is the author of Risk Roulette: The Surprising Reasons Why Some Businesses Work, and others fail, out now, published by Kogan Page.