How do you make a small fortune in business? You start with a large one! Or so the wisdom of Dragons’ Den seems to go these days, as the well-heeled former footballer Gary Neville returns to the series to offer business mentorship to aspiring CEOs. But his presence is sending the wrong message about what it takes to be successful in 2026.
You can see why the show’s producers like Neville. He is a chipper presence in the studio, full of praise for the young entrepreneurs who appear before him (“you’re driven, smart, likeable and authentic,” he tells one pitcher, leading to much blushing). Like any good footballer, he seems keen to collaborate with his fellow investors, often deferring to their areas of expertise. “You definitely can’t win a game on your own,” he says.
It is natural that young entrepreneurs with businesses doing sales via social media would be interested in Neville. After all, he has two million Instagram followers, whereas fellow Dragon Touker Suleyman has just 68,000. In essence, they are offering equity in exchange for a few social media endorsements: not a bad trade given the price that successful brands like Hawes & Curtis, Norqain and Pepsi have presumably paid to partner with Neville in the past. But it is hard to see why anyone would select Neville on the strength of his business acumen.
In 2024, a Leeds-based restaurant he co-owned, The Man Behind the Curtain, went into liquidation, owing half a million pounds to HMRC and £370,000 to Neville himself. This week he announced his surprise departure from Buzz 16, a digital content business. On Companies House, he has 46 active appointments in companies ranging from property to education to a football club, Salford City. The approach feels scattershot; it is hard to pin down who Neville is, as a businessman. These directorships do not include either of his investments from his previous appearance on Dragons’ Den where he made two deals: Cozy Cinema, which has now ceased trading, and Full Power Cacao, where his stake was watered down to just 5 per cent.
Neville’s involvement with Dragons’ Den is typical of the way that the show has evolved over time. The core of this change has been rampant deal inflation. Across the board, the Dragons have been making more deals and taking more equity. Founders rarely push back against the Dragons doubling or tripling their prospective stake in the business. It offers Neville, whose primary dealmaking currency is his own celebrity, huge opportunities.
Neville’s involvement with Dragons’ Den is typical of the way that the show has evolved over time (Photo: BBC)This is, in part, because entrepreneurs used to arrive in the studio with a product, a business plan, and a genuine desire for investment. Now, the ambition is clearly to use the show as a promotional platform. Take the mortgage rewards app Sprive – which appears in Neville’s first episode of this series – whose website homepage now features an embedded link to BBC iPlayer and urges visitors to “Watch us on Dragons’ Den!”. Sprive had already raised more than £4m in investment, yet gave away 5 per cent of the business for £50,000, an effective valuation of just £1m. Hmm. Neville missed out on that opportunity (he speculated on whether he’d been “naive” about the app’s potential) but it demonstrates how the value of a Dragon’s investment has changed over the years.
The presence of social media savvy Steven Bartlett – who, with an average of 11.5 investments per series, is the show’s most prolific investor ever – has made this dynamic even clearer. When Chester, the ambitious creator of a nutritional seed bar (why is every other product a health snack?), is faced with potential investment from a range of Dragons with manufacturing and retail experience, his preference is clear. “In my mind before I came in today, there were two Dragons I was really keen on landing,” he told the expectant investors. “Gary and Steven.”
Despite their differences in age and background, the two men are unified by their fame and savviness with digital media. Since hanging up his boots, Neville’s primary success has been his new media channel, The Overlap. It is reminiscent of how Bartlett – a founder of middling success – leveraged his limited business experience into a far more profitable media empire. With the right spin, success begets success.
Neville is an affable presence on television and has clearly leveraged his sporting fame for a degree of business success. But alongside other “Guest Dragons” like Tinie Tempah and Joe Wicks, he demonstrates the way the show has descended into a social media bunfight. With Britain’s economic growth slow, and productivity in a perpetual crisis, it is worth reminding primetime viewers that not every business conundrum can be solved with a million followers on TikTok. Sometimes great businesses start with little ideas, just as large fortunes emerge from small ones.
‘Dragons’ Den’ continues next Thursday at 8pm on BBC One
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