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Daily Mirror
Daily Mirror
Sport
Ben Husband

Teenage ball boy kicked by Eden Hazard has become millionaire with £40m business empire

It’s an incident that 10 years on still causes every viewer to do a swift double take.

Back in 2013, Eden Hazard was still a fresh-faced 22-year-old and the star of Rafael Benitez's Chelsea side attempting to make the final of the League Cup. The Blues were strong favourites going into the tie with Swansea City and would have still fancied their chances in the second leg, despite a 2-0 defeat at Stamford Bridge.

But as it became abundantly clear they wouldn’t overturn the deficit, Hazard’s frustrations boiled over when he appeared to kick out a ball boy at the Liberty Stadium.

The Belgian later apologised for the incident, which saw him handed a straight red: "The boy put his whole body on to the ball and I was just trying to kick the ball. I think I kicked the ball and not the boy. I apologise."

Charlie Morgan was subsequently named as the 17-year-old involved in the incident, who decided to not press charges against the former Lille star. The night ended with Charlie shaking hands with the Chelsea players in the dressing room and was the toast of the home crowd for his ingenious time-wasting tactics.

But Charlie, now 26, was determined to not be defined by that night more than a decade ago. And as the owner of a business empire worth £40million, with celebrity clients including Floyd Mayweather Jr, it’s fair to say he has achieved that feat.

Charlie, along with his business partner Jackson Quinn, founded Au Vodka back in 2016 and is now a multi-millionaire with his name included in the Times’ Rich List. His father, Martin Morgan is still a director at the Championship club, but he has made his fortune in his own right.

Brazilian legend Ronaldinho and UFC star Paddy Pimblett are more high-profile fans of the growing brand, which has 268k followers on Instagram. Speaking last year, the entrepreneur admitted that their most famous client, Money Mayweather, actually reached out to them.

Speaking to WalesOnline in 2021, he said: “We got a contact for Floyd - through a mutual friend of Frost the music producer - and we were told that Floyd absolutely loves the brand and loved the black grape flavour.

"We were asked whether he could have few bottles before he goes home. We said yeah, OK sure, and Floyd said he would post a photo on Instagram as long as we included him when we do something big in America.

"Back years ago we were asking ourselves, who would be the best ambassador we could have holding the bottle and I think our answer was Floyd, so it's amazing how it has manifested itself. Seeing the brand in the hands of someone you admire is crazy."

The pair sit at 24th in the Young Rich List compiled by the publication and revealed how a chat about friends’ birthday gifts set them on the road to their fortune: "Me and Jackson were best mates in school and we just felt there was a bit of a gap in the market,” he explained.

"We were 18, 19, 20 at the time and every one of our friends for their birthday would always get a bottle of the same old vodkas. We just felt it was a bit boring.

"We just felt we could do it a little bit better. For us, we wanted to do a gold bottle which we felt was completely different, and a couple of years later we did vibrant liquid colours of the vodka itself.

"The growth has been just phenomenal. There are so many people in the world who are involved in it now which is exciting. We thought we could do well but it's probably gone bigger than we thought we could do already."

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