Arsenal’s commercial department are in the final throes of a three-year plan to double revenue from secondary sponsorship, TBR Football can exclusively reveal.
The Gunners’ commercial income – that is cash generated through sponsorship, retail and events – reached a club-record £218m in the last financial year, buoyed by the renaissance on the pitch inspired by Mikel Arteta. The next set of accounts, due in the spring, are expected to break the £250m barrier.
The club’s biggest deals are with Emirates (front-of-shirt, training kit, stadium naming rights), Adidas (technical partner), Visit Rwanda (shirt sleeve) and Sobha Realty (training ground naming rights), who are all principal partners.
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The Emirates partnership yields around £50-60m annually and the Adidas deal upwards of £75m, with those figures scaling up or down based on sporting performance and commercial targets.
Eberechi Eze hits at shot at the Emirates Stadium, with the Visit Rwanda logo prominent in the background
Photo by HENRY NICHOLLS/AFP via Getty Images
TBR Football is told that the deal with Visit Rwanda, which is up for renewal at the end of the season and subject to heavy scrutiny due to the East African nation’s alleged arming of insurgents in the neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo, is worth £9m annually, slightly less than the £10m quoted in the press.
The value of the Sobha Realty deal meanwhile isn’t known, though it too is understood to be less than the £15m sometimes cited in the media.
Arsenal believe there is buried treasure in the next rung of sponsorship arrangements down and have been aggressively expanding their inventory. To date, the men’s team has 26 global partners.
Adidas Emirates Sobha Realty
Visit Rwanda Air Wallex Asahi Super Dry
Athletic Brewing Co Betway Bitpanda
Chivas Regal ComAve Google Pixel
Guinness Hotels.com Konami
L’Oréal Paris Mastercard MG
NTT Data Persil TCL
ZC Rubber Cadbury Lavazza
Octopus Energy Starling Stanley
Every Arsenal sponsor
The baseline entry point for a sponsor in a secondary category is now north of £1m, with other more lucrative categories – soft drinks and technology, for example – fetching significantly higher prices.
Football finance sources have informed TBR Football that Stan Kroenke and his enforcers in North London set Arsenal’s commercial department a target to achieve a 100 per cent increase in secondary sponsorship income by the end of the 2025-26 campaign.
Arsenal don’t provide a granular breakdown of their commercial income, but doubling secondary sponsorship income would likely result in a respectable middle eight-figure boost when compared with their financial statements in 2022-23, when the three-year plan began.
Chart showing Arsenal's revenue over the years, broken down into commercial, matchday and media income
Arsenal revenue chart Credit: Adam Williams/TBR Football/GRV Media
Under the business model favoured by the Kroenkes, which expects spending to be funded by revenue and not owner handouts, that is a significant sum.
Stan Kroenke has underwritten Arsenal’s losses to the tune of nearly £400m in recent years, but his investment in the transfer and wage markets is starting to bear fruit. They are aiming to make it nine wins on the bounce and reinforce their lead atop the Premier League in tomorrow’s trip to Burnley.
The masterplan, which is being overseen on a day-to-day basis by Josh Kroenke, is for the club to now stand on its own two feet financially.
Stan Kroenke and Josh Kroenke attend an Arsenal match at Emirates Stadium
Photo by Catherine Ivill – AMA/Getty Images
The vision to expand the Emirates Stadium to at least 70,000 but potentially as high as 80,000 is a fundamental part of the patchwork here too, with Arsenal looking to surpass Manchester United as the country’s biggest matchday income generators.
That plan is likely to cost north of £400m, though that will be primarily funded by debt.