Morgan and his co-founder Jackson Quinn are each expected to bank around £100 million from the transaction, announced on 17 August by the US owner of Buffalo Trace, Southern Comfort and Svedka.

Sazerac said Au Vodka had “grown from a local start-up into one of the UK’s most recognisable spirits brands”, pointing to the brand’s distinctive gold bottles and its dominant position in the British ready-to-drink cocktail market. The deal is expected to close within weeks.

For Morgan, the payday closes a loop that began on the turf of Swansea’s Liberty Stadium on 23 January 2013.

The kick that made him famous

In the 80th minute of a League Cup semi-final second leg, with Swansea leading Chelsea 2-0 on aggregate, the 17-year-old ballboy dropped onto the ball to run down the clock. Hazard, then 22, tried to hook the ball out from under him and connected with Morgan’s midriff instead. The Belgian was shown a straight red card for violent conduct.

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Chelsea went out. Morgan went viral. Within a day, his Twitter following had climbed into six figures and his name was on the front of every British newspaper.

Gold bottles and 35,000 a day

Two years later, Morgan and Jackson Quinn launched Au Vodka out of Swansea, betting on a heavy, gold-colored bottle engineered for social media. The bet paid off. Production climbed from 2,000 bottles a day to about 35,000 during the pandemic, according to BM Magazine, as the brand pushed into ready-to-drink cans backed by celebrity investors and endorsements from Floyd Mayweather, Jake Paul and Paddy Pimblett.

By 2026 the company employed more than 80 people, with products sold across the UK and a growing international footprint. In the domestic ready-to-drink market, Au Vodka ranked second only to BuzzBallz, a US brand Sazerac already owns.

Morgan had made no secret of wanting to push further, telling interviewers earlier this year that his brand was still barely known outside Britain.

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“If you asked a 25-year-old target market consumer in America, would they know Au? Probably not yet. So there’s still so many more people who don’t know about us,” he told BM Magazine.

Sazerac’s stated plan is to use the acquisition to “deepen its presence in the UK” and slot Au Vodka into the same portfolio as BuzzBallz and Svedka.

Hazard, a golf course and a glass of blue raspberry

The most-shared image of Morgan’s transformation was not from a boardroom. In January 2024, on the 11-year anniversary of the incident, Hazard posted a photograph of the pair on a golf course, each holding a glass of Au Vodka.

“A nice thing about retirement is catching up with old friends. You have come a long way in 11 years my friend @charliem0rgan,” Hazard wrote on Instagram.

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Eighteen months later, the ballboy is worth around £100 million.

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