Arsenal are going from strength to strength commercially and enjoying a significant payoff for their efforts in the transfer and wage markets.
Arsenal, who turned over £613.5m in the last financial year, have three primary revenue streams:
Media – TV and streaming cash redistributed as prize money by the Premier League, FA and UEFA
Matchday – Gate receipts at the Emirates Stadium, proceeds from hospitality, ancillary services etc
Commercial – Money from sponsorships, merchandise sales, non-football events, pre-season tours
[
Click to subscribe to the podcast ](https://www.youtube.com/@BeyondTheBackFour?sub_confirmation=1)
The Gunners, Manchester clubs, Liverpool, Spurs and Chelsea are in a different universe than the rest of English football when it comes to commercial income. Six sells – brand deals and replica kits, in this case.
Chart showing the revenue of the Premier League's 'Big Six' clubs vs the rest of the division
Premier League Big Six vs Non Big Six revenue
But of the so-called ‘Big Six’, Arsenal had, until recently, fallen significantly behind their rivals. Under the self-funding model favoured by Stan Kroenke, that was a big problem.
Their billionaire owner has presided over a huge increase in expenditure to get them back into the Champions League, with Mikel Arteta and, since his appointment in March, sporting director Andre Berta entrusted with a budget that has allowed Arsenal to behave like a predator in the transfer market once again.
That strategy, alongside an annual wage bill which is now among the very highest in world football at around £350m, means the club has spent more than it has earned in recent years.
And Kroenke – who still makes the very biggest decisions at the Emirates despite his son, Josh, now being the public face of the regime in North London – has underwritten the excess to the tune of almost £400m.
Chart showing Arsenal's revenue vs their squad cost with the introduction of PSR and FFP
Arsenal squad cost vs revenue vs PSR Credit: Adam Williams/TBR Football/GRV Media
Kroenke’s net worth sits at £17.5bn at the time of writing and he is not in football for charitable reasons. Eventually, he wants a return on his investment in Arsenal, which now totals in excess of £1bn. And while every penny he spends in N5 can, in theory, increase the value of the club as an asset he will one day sell, he also wants it to stand on its own two feet financially.
That’s among the reasons the club plans to expand the Emirates Stadium, despite the fact that they are likely to generate the highest matchday income in the country this season.
As part of that project, Arsenal will also be considering the future of their naming rights, front-of-shirt and training kit deal with Emirates, the United Arab Emirates-based airline.
That deal is worth £50-60m per season, subject to performance-related bonuses and inflation-indexing clauses. In place since the stadium opened in 2006, it is one of the longest-standing commercial relationships in football and, TBR Football understands, both parties want it to continue.
Arsenal sponsor Emirates airlines display their logo at the Emirates Stadium
Photo by Robbie Jay Barratt – AMA/Getty Images
However the current contract expires in 2028 and the pending makeover of the stadium will move the goalposts in negotiations. The deal won’t survive on sentiment alone, and Arsenal’s commercial department – headed by CCO Juliet Slot – is exploring all available options.
Incidentally, TBR Football understands that the previous contract with Emirates weighted the naming rights component of the deal at around £4m annually, a relatively modest sum compared with the branding deals struck by Manchester City, Atletico Madrid, Barcelona and others in recent years.
Adjusting for inflation, the naming rights element deal has barely moved in its near 20-year history.
Until recently, Slot’s second-in-command was commercial director Olly Dale. However, he has now moved laterally into a new role with Kroenke Signature Properties (KSP), a new department set up earlier this year to sell shared sponsorships across the whole Kroenke Sport & Entertainment (KSE) portfolio.
In recent weeks, reports suggest that KSP is on the verge of its first major win, with Kroenke-owned LA Rams having signed a partnership with Visit Rwanda and Arsenal on the verge of renewing their own agreement with the tourist board of the East African nation.
Arsenal sport the Visit Rwanda logo on their shirt sleeves in a deal worth £10m annually. After the Gunners’ relationships with Adidas and Emirates, the shirt sleeve category is the most lucrative in Arsenal’s commercial inventory.
The Visit Rwanda deal expires at the end of 2025-26, but City AM report that the club are in advanced talks to extend the partnership with a healthy pay bump, though TBR Football understands there is still competition from other would-be partners.
The relationship has been intensely scrutinised in recent times. Rwanda is accused by the United Nations of arming insurgent rebels in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which borders Rwanda to the east.
Arsenal have a somewhat tangled relationship with ‘sportswashing’. Former executive vice-chair Tim Lewis, after all, had been one of the most vocal critics of state involvement in Premier League football until his surprise departure in September, albeit from a position of realpolitik rather than on ethical lines.
The fact that Rwandan president Paul Kagame is a dedicated Arsenal fan and occasionally sighted in the most salubrious areas of the Emirates Stadium on matchdays has perhaps not helped from an optics perspective, either.
And while Arsenal’s commercial department might have winced at the sight of the ‘Visit Tottenham’ billboard erected outside the Emirates by the Gunners For Peace in April, they may well have doffed their cap to the campaign group for their ingenuity from a marketing perspective.
A billboard outside the Emirates Stadium reads 'Visit Tottenham', satirising Arsenal's sponsorship deal with Visit Rwanda
Photo by Justin Setterfield/Getty Images
Elsewhere, Arsenal have inked seven new deals with Coca-Cola, Asahi Super Dry, Airwallex, Guinness, Stanley 1913 and Bitpanda this season, while Konami have extended their contract with the club.
That takes the total number of partnerships in the men’s team’s portfolio to 26, while the women’s team – whose profile has been raised by 2024-25’s Champions League triumph – boasts 18 sponsors.
At 26, Arsenal have the same number of sponsors as Spurs, more than Man United (21), Chelsea (21) and Liverpool (24), but fewer than Man City (35).
As any commercial guru will tell you, the balance is between quantity and quality. Arsenal’s recent blitzkrieg in the sponsorship department, as well as the creation of Kroenke Signature Properties, perhaps suggests a slight recalibration in their weighting here.
The most important deal, with Adidas, is as high-quality as they come. That partnership has been a riotous success. The latest ‘drop’, as they say in the biz, is the reissue of the club’s vaunted 1992-94 kit, though the price tag has raised an eyebrow or two.
The Adidas deal combined with overall merchandising revenue yielded approximately £105m in 2023-24 (last full financial year on record), according to UEFA’s own in-house figures. That is more than double their takings across the same verticals in 2018-19, the final year of the previous alliance with Puma.
They are also now into the third year of their training ground naming rights deal with Sobha Realty.
Again, that partnership has been a success, though TBR Football is told that it was penned at a far more modest value than the £10-15m frequently reported elsewhere.
Returning to the Emirates, the fact that the planned expansion will raise capacity to at least 70,000 and potentially as high as 80,000 will reinstate the stadium as the biggest at club level in London.
When it comes to multifunctionality, it’s conceivable that a superior capacity combined with the overall modernisation of the stadium could give them the edge over their neighbours in North London for certain non-football events.
To squeeze more juice from that fruit, however, Arsenal will likely need to apply to Islington Council for a licence to host more events. The current quota is six, while Spurs’ agreement with Haringey Council is for 30. For context, Spurs earned £52m in 2023-24 under the previous arrangement – for 16 non-football events.
The new-look regime at board level will help. Directors Kelly Blaha, Otto Maly, Dave Steiner and Ben Winston are all close consiglieres of Kroenke and, to varying degrees, have assisted with his other massive capital expenditure projects in the United States.
An aerial view of the SoFi Stadium under construction
Photo by DANIEL SLIM/AFP via Getty Images
Chief among those projects is the SoFi Stadium, home of the LA Rams. Opened in 2016, it is perhaps the best-monetised stadium in the world. It’s a gigantic mixed-use complex and a jumping-off point for other commercial activities in the area, not just a sports venue.
It’s a similar story at Ball Arena, where Kroenke’s Denver Nuggets (NBA), Colorado Avalanche (NHL) and Colorado Mammoth (NLL) franchises are housed. As world-leading stadium architect Dan Meis told TBR Football earlier this year: “*Almost every project we see now, no matter what the sport or where it is – in the US, Italy, the UK – has become more of a real estate play.*“
A crude pro-rata calculation based on Arsenal’s last annual matchday income figure (£131m) and their current capacity would suggest that a 70,000-capacity stadium would deliver revenues of around £153m. However, Kroenke’s commercial vision for the Emirates, as well as in increasing emphasis on lucrative premium seating, means the true value of the project will soar far higher.
Update infographic showing matchday income and stadium capacities of Premier League clubs
Premier League matchday income and stadium capacity graph Credit: Adam Williams/TBR Football/GRV Media
Indeed, this kind of exponential value creation will be necessary to justify the cost of the project, which industry sources say could be as high as the £400-500m range and will likely be funded by debt.
Whatever the chosen route with the stadium, Arsenal’s patchwork of brand deals has seen them close the gap on their rivals in the Big Six. In the last financial year, total commercial income was £217.5m, taking them to within touching distance of Chelsea.
Projections from football finance analyst Gregg Cordell suggest that Arsenal will be close to £250m once the accounts for 2024-25 are released in the spring, which will likely see them surpass Chelsea and close in on Spurs.
If Arteta avoids the unwanted record of finishing second for a fourth successive Premier League season, a long-awaited title could push Arsenal closer to the Manchester clubs and Liverpool, fuelled by a merchandise boom and sponsor bonuses.
Chart for TBR Football showing commercial income of Big Six, Liverpool, Manchester United, Manchester City, Chelsea, Tottenham and Arsenal
Big Six commercial income chart Credit: Adam Williams/TBR Football/GRV Media
Speaking exclusively to TBR Football, Liverpool University football finance lecturer and Price of Football author Kieran Maguire said: “Historically, I think they were simply relying on the Arsenal badge alone to sell sponsorships.
“But commercial revenues have doubled from £116m in 2019 to almost £218m in 2024, and I’d expect another uptick in 2025.
“To me demonstrates that the club have realised that, in order to compete, they need to spend more. And given that expenditure is ultimately a subset of revenue, they have to give greater focus to commercial revenue. Out of the three categories, you have the greatest degree of control with commercial.
“Why? Because, to a certain extent, you are constrained by matchday with a fixed-size stadium. The number of cup games you have at home is a big variable. You’ve got 19 guaranteed Premier League games and four Champions League games, so that’s 23 guaranteed games at the Emirates. In a good year, however, that could be as high as 32. And given that the yield per match is probably £4-5m, those variables are problematic when you come to set your budget.
“Similarly, media income is largely outside of your control. Therefore, commercial is an area where Arsenal feel they can drive the train as opposed to being a passenger.”
Like every battleground the Premier League, the commercial sphere is wildly competitive. But success on the pitch begets success with sponsors.
If Arsenal execute their strategy properly then, after several years of Kroenke funding, the club can benefit from this virtuous cycle into the long term.