Arsenal are one of the world’s richest football clubs and, after several years in the wilderness, have now reasserted themselves financially under Stan Kroenke.
The catalyst? A sporting revival led by Mikel Arteta and a re-think of how Arsenal do things commercially.
That revival has not yet delivered a coveted Premier League or Champions League trophy, but it laid the foundations that allow the Gunners to compete with the biggest and best in the transfer market.
Stan Kroenke has loaned the club over £300m since he bought the club outright. Factor in the price he paid for his shares and the 78-year-old investor is well over £1bn deep into his project in North London.
As a result, the owner is reluctant for the club to run on a benefactor model. Instead, he wants any signings Arsenal make to be fully costed against their own revenues.
So the blockbuster addition of Viktor Gyokeres owes more to Arsenal’s commercial department than it does the ownership regime, while the pursuit of Eberechi Eze depends on matchday income at the Emirates, not the depth of Kroenke’s pockets.
For several seasons in the post-Arsene Wenger era, the club underachieved both on the pitch and in the revenue stakes. For context, 10 years ago, Arsenal’s annual revenue was just shy of £330m, while Liverpool’s was £298m. The Gunners remained ahead until 2017-18, when Liverpool soared past Arsenal, where they have remained ever since. In the seasons since, Liverpool have generated somewhere in the region of £4.4bn, around £1bn more than Arsenal over the same period.
The single biggest differentiator between the two clubs has been lucrative Champions League football, of course. But that doesn’t entirely explain the gulf between the two sides.
The feeling within football finance is that Arsenal underperformed commercially in this period, which in turn damaged their ability to compete on the wage and transfer front.
But they have since turned a corner, with income from sponsorship, shirt sales, retail, events, ticketing and other revenue streams currently skyrocketing.
And now, Arsenal have struck another commercial agreement with one of the world’s biggest and most iconic brands.
In 2023-24, the last season for which a full financial data set is available, Arsenal’s commercial income totalled £218m, which was a remarkable rise from the previous campaign’s total of £169m.
In 2024-25, that total is expected to be somewhere around the £250m mark, thanks in part to new sponsorship deals with the likes of training ground naming rights partner Sobha Realty.
And the Gunners have continued to aggressively expand their sponsorship portfolio this summer too.
So far, they have announced five new deals. Asahi Super Dry, Airwallex, Guinness and Stanley 1913 have all inked new contracts, while Konami have extended their pre-existing deal with the club.
And, according to football business analyst and reporter Lukasz Baczek, perhaps the biggest deal of the summer is soon to be announced.
Baczek writes that Coca-Cola are set to join as Arsenal’s official soft drinks partner. The contract is said to run for at least two years with the option to extend for a third.
The iconic soft drinks conglomerate has a market capitalisation of £303bn, which is more than 10 times greater than the net worth of Kroenke, who himself is one of the world’s richest men.
The specifics of the deal aren’t yet known, but soft drinks partnerships are typically one of the more valuable sponsorship categories outside front-of-shirt, shirt sleeve, and kit manufacturer deals.
The news comes shortly after it emerged that Arsenal would not be renewing their deal with Prime, the celebrity-backed hydration drinks company.
In 2024-25, it was reported that Arsenal’s sleeve sponsorship deal with Visit Rwanda, the tourist board of the East African country, was due to expire at the end of the season.
However, Visit Rwanda have continued as the club’s sleeve sponsor, with all of Arsenal’s kits for the upcoming campaign featuring their branding.
Like the Coca-Cola deal, it could be that the Gunners have activated an extension.
That is somewhat surprising given the controversial nature of the deal. Campaigners have urged Arsenal to ditch Visit Rwanda as a partner due to the nation’s foreign and domestic policies.
It also happens that Rwanda’s president, Paul Kagame, is a huge Arsenal supporter.
Visit Rwanda had also expanded their stable of partner clubs in recent months, though not without controversy.
Paris Saint-Germain and Atletico Madrid are also signed up with the brand, while Bayern Munich have been forced to alter their partnership with Visit Rwanda towards a more non-commercial angle following a backlash from fans to the deal they initially signed in 2023.
