The story of Arsenal’s past half-decade has been one of recovery and rejuvenation, a return to strength and challenging once more after years in the competitive wilderness.
As on the pitch, also off it.
Elite clubs’ finances are less and less wedded to sporting performance, yet Arsenal’s time away from the top coincided with off-field slippage too. In the transfer market, rivals routinely and significantly outspent them. At the top line, Arsenal’s revenue dipped to the sixth-highest in England for five straight seasons around the turn of the decade, and fell out of the world’s top 10 between 2018-19 and 2020-21.
Revenue doesn’t equal rich, but it helps. Arsenal’s spending power was for years hamstrung by the cost of building the Emirates Stadium; when Arsene Wenger departed and Champions League football went with him, it left the club’s hopes for a return to the top reliant on owner funding.
Such owner funding has flowed steadily since Kroenke Sports & Entertainment (KSE) assumed full control of the club in 2018. £335.5million has been provided by KSE since then, a further £13.5m of it last season.
That, however, marked a notable drop on the £108m pumped in in the prior two seasons. Arsenal’s need was less in 2024-25, in large part because of soaring revenues. At £691m, turnover hit a clear club record, up 12 per cent in a year and almost doubling over the last three.
It put them third for revenue in England and seventh in the world, positions they’d have climbed from were it not for others enjoying the benefits of last summer’s Club World Cup.
If Arsenal look a better team now than at any point in the past two decades, and growing revenues dovetail with the performances of Mikel Arteta’s side, a glance at the club’s bottom line could paint an inverse picture.
Between 2005 and 2018, they were profitable every year, yet on the pitch they struggled to compete. Four FA Cup wins in that time shouldn’t be sniffed at but when it came to mounting a title challenge, Arsenal were mostly left lagging.
In significant part, that was a consequence of unfortunate timing. At the same moment, those stadium costs limited squad investment, Chelsea and Manchester City came under the ownership of spendthrift benefactors. It is no coincidence Arsenal lost several key players to that duo.
Now, with Arsenal competing once more, money matters look worse: the recent announcement of 2024-25 figures confirmed a seventh straight loss-making year. The club that was once a bastion of profitability has racked up £330m in pre-tax losses in less than a decade.
Yet just peeking at finances is foolish. Arsenal made a loss last season, but at £1.3m they just about broke even, and would have were it not for £15.2m in player value impairments. Club finances have turned around after four straight years, between 2019 and 2023, of registering annual deficits above £45m.
Powering the march back towards the black are those soaring revenues. Arsenal’s top-line growth in recent years has been remarkable, and they only trailed Liverpool and Manchester City domestically last season. The gap to that pair was £11m and £3m respectively; just three seasons ago, Arsenal trailed each by over £200m.
Being better at actually playing football has helped. Arsenal earned £272.8m in TV money, a club record and the sixth-highest broadcast income figure in English football history.
The continued uptick in TV rights deals naturally helps that, but progression to the last four of the Champions League boosted earnings from UEFA by around £17m from a year earlier, more than offsetting the £4m dip in Premier League earnings (where overall distributions to clubs fell compared to 2023-24).
Broadcast revenue has increased in line with performance but the money swirling around the Premier League means there’s a naturally high floor to that revenue stream anyway. In 2021-22, Arsenal’s first season without European football since the mid-1990s, TV money fell to £146m yet was still the highest of the club’s three income streams.
It has been Arsenal’s largest revenue sector in every non-pandemic season since 2013-14, and was again last year — though only just. Just £9.6m behind were commercial revenues, an income stream which has grown hugely under KSE’s sole ownership.
Arsenal’s commercial income has risen 146 per cent since 2017-18, and they’ve moved into the top 10 commercial earners worldwide. Among ‘Big Six’ peers, only Tottenham Hotspur have topped their 13.73 per cent compound annual growth rate in that time. At £263.2m, commercial income was higher than the total turnover of 12 Premier League clubs in 2024-25.
A key driver has been a kit deal with Adidas, first inked for the 2019-20 season before being extended in September 2022. Data is spotty, as clubs don’t release breakdowns of such agreements, but information laid out in UEFA’s annual European Club Finance and Investment Landscape report (ECFIL) shows the importance of that link-up.
Arsenal generated £55m from kit and merchandising revenues in 2021-22, a mark that 10 European clubs exceeded that season. Fast forward to 2024-25 and income related to the Adidas deal has more than doubled: at £127m, Arsenal’s earnings from their kit deal rank fifth in Europe. They even out-earned Premier League champions Liverpool last season.
The Adidas agreement is Arsenal’s biggest commercial deal, but far from their only notable one. Front-of-shirt sponsorship with Emirates (£60m annually), a training centre naming rights deal with Sobha Realty (£15m) and sleeve sponsorship from Visit Rwanda (£10m) are supplemented by a growing list of partners. In 2025-26 alone, deals have been announced with Airwallex, Guinness, Bitpanda, Coca-Cola, Starling, Paramount+ and Deel. The latter will replace Visit Rwanda as sleeve sponsor from next season.
A clearer focus on driving commercial revenues is reflected in club staffing levels. Commercial and administrative staff numbered 564 last season, a 10 per cent rise in a year and nearly a third up on pre-pandemic levels.
Growing rapidly, too, are revenues from the Emirates. Matchday income at Arsenal has leapt in recent years, from consistently around £100m in the 2010s to £153.9m last season. In England, only Manchester United generate more at the gate.
Matchday income at the Emirates was the third-highest in Europe last season (Jasper Wax/Getty Images)
Arsenal benefited from five extra men’s games at home last season, including three in the Champions League. Meanwhile, the women’s team played an extra seven games at the Emirates in 2024-25, raising their own matchday income from £4.4m to £5.9m — by some distance the highest gate receipts in women’s football. In all, Arsenal’s matchday revenues were up £22.2m (17 per cent) last season.
According to UEFA, Arsenal’s £5.1m revenue per home match last season was the third-highest in Europe, up 19 per cent in two years and now only behind Real Madrid and Paris Saint-Germain. Total matchday income at the Emirates is up a dizzying 50 per cent in those two years. With club spending limits increasingly hitched to revenue, the rapid growth in income from Arsenal’s home stadium is timely.
Footballing performance impacts all revenues, but Arsenal’s lowering reliance on TV money insures against any downturn in form. In the Premier League, only they and the remainder of the ‘Big Six’ earn less than half their income from broadcast revenues.
Rising wage bills are ubiquitous in football, and Arsenal’s staff costs increased again last season, hitting £346.8m, up £19m (six per cent). That growth was much more modest than a year earlier, when spending on new signings Declan Rice, Kai Havertz and Jurrien Timber combined with new contracts for, among others, Bukayo Saka, William Saliba and Martin Odegaard to drive a £93m (40 per cent) uplift on the club’s 2022-23 wage bill.
Significant transfer incomings in summer 2025 — alongside further renewed deals for Saka, Saliba and Gabriel — should push the current season wage bill yet higher, and especially if Arsenal end the season victorious domestically or in the Champions League. But for last season, they had England’s fourth-highest wage bill (fifth-highest, if we include the cost of redundancies and terminations at Manchester United) and Europe’s eighth-highest. In that light, finishing second in the Premier League and as Champions League semi-finalists represented overachievements.
It was, in fact, Arsenal’s third consecutive season of finishing higher in the league than their wage bill ranked, after three years in five of underachieving.
Each of the past three seasons have seen Arsenal pipped to the title by a club paying more in wages than them, and champions Liverpool’s £428m wage bill was 23 per cent higher than Arsenal’s last season (though Liverpool do also employ over 200 more off-field staff).
Of greater pertinence is the gulf between Arsenal’s wage bill and Manchester City’s. In each of the two seasons City pipped them to the title (2022-23 and 2023-24), Arsenal were contending with a club whose accounts detailed a £400m-plus wage bill. That was again the case last season, when City finished behind them in third.
Yet City’s accounts don’t provide a like-for-like comparison. Their place in the multi-club City Football Group (CFG) means a spate of costs, around £60m last season, contribute to City’s football operations but are recorded elsewhere in the CFG sphere.
Those costs are all captured in that UEFA ECFIL report, and benchmarking Arsenal’s wage bill against City’s using those figures shows a huge difference in recent spending. City’s wage bill was £121m higher than Arsenal’s last season, £148m higher in 2023-24 and an enormous £247m higher, more than double, in City’s treble-winning 2022-23 season. Put that way, Arteta’s team finishing just five points shy of City then is worthy of more praise than has been forthcoming.
Arsenal are competing for the title with Manchester City despite a gulf in wage bill (Justin Setterfield/Getty Images)
With wages up six per cent but income rising by double that, Arsenal’s wages to revenue metric was down to 50.1 per cent, an eight-year low. On most recent figures, that’s the fifth-lowest (i.e. fifth-best) in the Premier League, or fourth if we include those termination costs at Old Trafford.
Wages as a proportion of revenue fell, yet Arsenal’s operating result worsened to a £65m loss. Even after adding back £15.2m in one-off player impairment charges (whereby the club wrote down the book value of several players who left subsequent to 31 May 2025), the underlying, pre-player sale result was unmoved at £50m in the red.
That seems peculiar, and gets more so when we identify the reason: a £52.9m (36 per cent) rise in ‘other operating charges’. Operating costs topped £200m last season. They have risen £126.7m (171 per cent) in just three years.
Such costs are up generally across football, the inevitable result of inflation both in the wider economy and in terms of games played. As team calendars expand, so do the costs of meeting commitments, particularly for those clubs dotting across the continent during the week.
Arsenal are hardly alone in seeing expenditure increase, and in that UEFA ECFIL report they were listed as one of five teams, alongside Real Madrid, Barcelona, Chelsea and Aston Villa, where operating costs increased by more than €50m (£42m) in 2024-25.
Arsenal played more games last season, and had more staff racking up more costs. But the size of the increase is huge, and the opacity surrounding operating costs in club accounts — UEFA’s ECFIL report labelled international financial reporting requirements “inadequate” for the purposes of understanding such costs at clubs — merits greater inspection.
To unravel the mystery, The Athletic has attempted to reproduce a consolidation of the companies sitting beneath Arsenal Holdings Limited. Below Arsenal Holdings are 17 companies, five dormant and several further holding companies, but also specific entities covering the activities of the men’s team, the women’s team, management of the Emirates Stadium and a smattering of other low-activity property businesses.
The (re-)consolidation exercise is imperfect but instructive.
Unsurprisingly, the bulk of operating costs arise in The Arsenal Football Club Limited (AFC), the entity housing the men’s team and the majority of overall club operations. Over the past decade, 90 per cent of the group’s other operating charges appear there.
Last season, those costs in AFC totalled £157.1m, comfortably the most in the group and up £23.8m in a year. £3.5m of that was driven by an increase in retail costs, but the source of the other £20m is undisclosed.
More curious still is that AFC’s proportion of the group’s other operating charges dropped notably last season, from an average of 90 per cent to 78 per cent. Operating expenditure elsewhere in the group rose from £14.6m to £43.7m, and increased spending on the women’s team only accounted for £3.8m of the rise, meaning £25.3m of it occurred elsewhere.
According to ASMC’s accounts, operating costs in the stadium management company rose by £14.3m in 2024-25. Whether that would translate to the same proportion of increase in the overall group figures is unclear — ASMC pay fees to fellow subsidiaries that will net out in the consolidated numbers — but, even if they did, it would still leave an £11m rise in costs beyond AFC unclear, to go alongside that £20m of increase within AFC’s numbers.
Arsenal’s statement when releasing last season’s financials said operating costs rose sharply due to “increased staging costs, specific direct costs of delivering increased revenues, certain residual property matters and inflationary pressures”.
The former two have been, at least in part, covered above. There was little in the way of cost in the various property companies within the group for 2024-25, though one entity, Highbury Holdings Limited (2023-24 operating costs: £219,000), has extended its accounting period, so is yet to publish 2024-25 figures. Inflationary pressures are commonplace but seem unlikely to be the sole remaining explanation for the remaining increase, both last season and since 2022.
One unavoidable knowledge gap arises from how, of the 17 companies beneath Arsenal Holdings, one is registered in the U.S. state of Delaware, so we have no detail on its financials. AOH-USA, LLC is a data management company owned by the club, housing StatDNA, a U.S.-based football data analytics company Arsenal bought in 2012. The extra costs could feasibly sit in there, though it seems unlikely. According to The Athletic’s workings, for that to explain the difference it would require costs in AOH-USA to have quintupled in a single year.
The Athletic presented its findings alongside a number of questions to Arsenal in order to determine the cause of the huge increase in operating charges, both in 2024-25 and across previous seasons. The club declined to comment.
Naturally, increases in operating costs limit profitability. Arsenal only neared break-even by virtue of over £80m in player sale profits — an income stream they’ve barely tapped in 2025-26.
Yet it is also worth highlighting that squad cost rules (SCR), introduced by UEFA in 2023 and operated in the Premier League from next season, encourage revenue growth even if it comes with low margins. SCR is tethered to turnover, and operating costs are excluded from the calculation. Clubs have an incentive to employ revenue-generating tactics even if they don’t boost the bottom line all that much.
Whether Arsenal, or others, have done that is unclear, but the recent trend of significant rises in operating costs arriving at the same time clubs have come under the purview of SCR may not be a coincidence.
Arsenal’s wage bill is up, but more pronounced spending in recent seasons has been made on transfers. For much of the 2010s, their transfer spending trailed domestic rivals; from 2010 to 2018, Arsenal spent £651m on new signings, while the two Manchester clubs and Chelsea each topped £1billion.
Subsequently, in the first six seasons of full KSE ownership, Arsenal spent £1.1bn on new players and £857m net, both marks only surpassed by Chelsea in England in that time.
That spending slowed in 2024-25. A further £123.9m went on new players but £105.9m was recouped, principally on sales of Emile Smith Rowe, Aaron Ramsdale and Eddie Nketiah.
Yet the size of the spending before then still meant, as at the end of last May, Arsenal boasted the fourth-most expensive squad in world football. The side then at Arteta’s disposal had cost £926.1m in transfer, agent and other fees to assemble; only the two Manchester clubs and, of course, Chelsea had spent more than that on registering players.
What’s more, last season’s restraint was followed by the biggest splurge yet. Arsenal spent a net £268m on transfers last summer, their highest single-season net spend and an outlay which took the cost of their squad well clear of the £1bn mark. Their activity in 2025 marked them out as a club firmly looking to win now, with more than two-thirds of spending going on players already at peak playing age.
The change in Arsenal’s approach to the transfer market has been marked, and has played a large role in the recent shift to loss-making. Player amortisation expenses (the result of spreading transfer and related fees across the life of player contracts) have doubled since KSE took over in full.
In 2018-19, Arsenal’s amortisation expense was £89.7m, only the Premier League’s sixth-highest and even trailing Everton at the time. Last season, their £171.6m bill was the third-largest in England, and last summer’s spend has only ensured a further rise since.
Key to that shift have been the actions of KSE, first in paying off the club’s stadium debts in 2021 and then in providing further cash for the coffers since. Arsenal’s free cash flow — cash generated after covering operating costs and capital spending, like that on transfers — has dipped into the red in recent seasons. The funding to plug the gaps has come from the ownership.
Debt to KSE sat at £340.1m at the end of May 2025, split £330.1m in funding received and £10m in unpaid, accrued interest on the monies loaned. £5.4m of KSE funding went in as equity, returning us to that £335.5m total funding figure since the 2019-20 season.
The largest tranche of owner funding came in 2020-21, when £184.8m was provided to pay off the Emirates Stadium loans during the Covid-19 pandemic. Yet even as operating cash flows have rebounded since then, KSE have provided a further £135.7m, helping to fund the net £572.3m cash outlay on transfers in that time.
It marks a clear shift in how Arsenal are run, and has enabled the significant squad spending of recent years. It also means Arsenal have received greater owner funding than most since the turn of the decade, though five Premier League clubs have received more: Chelsea, Aston Villa, Fulham, Everton and Newcastle United.
In terms of regulatory compliance, Arsenal had little trouble adhering to either the Premier League or UEFA’s profitability-based rules last season. Domestically, the Premier League allows clubs to lose up to £105m over three seasons, with pre-tax figures adjusted for ‘good’ expenditure on infrastructure and the like.
After nearly breaking even in 2024-25, Arsenal’s rolling three-year pre-tax loss was £71.2m — or already within their PSR loss limit. Spending on the women’s team and depreciation costs together exceeded that amount, even without considering other deductibles; in other words, Arsenal were profitable from a PSR perspective over the three-year period.
That naturally meant there was little trouble complying with UEFA’s Football Earnings rule, even as the loss limit there is lower (€60m over three seasons, potentially increased by €10m per season to a maximum of €90m overall).
Arsenal’s success so far in this season’s Champions League has helped their finances (Carl Recine/Getty Images)
Where Arsenal had a closer eye on things was with UEFA’s squad cost rule. As The Athletic has reported previously, there was concern during the summer window that they’d be close to UEFA’s 70 per cent SCR limit. We projected them to be at 68 per cent then, albeit that was before Arsenal went and won all six of their Champions League games in late 2025, generating around £11m in prize money and enhancing their SCR position.
UEFA’s SCR assessment period runs from January to December, with clubs competing in 2025-26 assessed to the end of 2025. We don’t yet know for certain if Arsenal were compliant with SCR for this season, but it’s a safe assumption they’ll be in Europe again in 2026-27, and that huge summer spend, alongside increasing wages this year, has served to tighten their position for the 2026 calendar year.
Winning the Champions League would generate around £30m more in UEFA prize money than last season. Yet even if that historic achievement was to occur, rising player spending has left Arsenal in a position where they may need to generate noteworthy money from a player sale, or sales, before 2026 is over.
Record revenues, strong wage control and a return to break-even point to a club in rude health. Arsenal’s turnover growth is impressive; lower reliance on KSE funding last season points to a club edging back to self-sustainability.
Good results on the pitch are helping off it.
No club has earned more in Premier League prize money over the past three seasons than Arsenal’s £519.2m, and winning a first league title in over two decades would only widen that advantage. Abroad, they have earned an estimated £262m from the Champions League over the past three seasons including this one, with a further £11m to come if they beat Bayer Leverkusen in the last 16 this month. Those sums dwarf the £129m earned from UEFA during six years of Champions League exile between 2017-18 and 2022-23.
Yet the most recent figures also throw up curiosities, huge operating costs chief among them. ‘Other operating charges’ now consume 29 per cent of Arsenal’s revenue, up from an average of 21 per cent in the pre-pandemic era. The lack of clarity around what those costs include is commonplace in football but that gives little comfort in understanding whether they’ll continue to rise. If they do, Arsenal will need to become more reliable sellers, or lean on KSE for greater funding.
Moreover, the ‘win now’ mentality of this season comes at a cost. Continued underlying losses in 2024-25 were offset by £81.2m in player sale profits. This season, Arsenal have sold only a smattering of squad players for low fees. Revenues will rise again but likely at a slower rate than before; combined with increased wages and the inevitable amortisation bump from the summer splurge, it means the club could be facing a sizeable loss in 2025-26.
That will feel of little consequence if a long yearning for major trophies is sated this season. Arteta, with KSE’s backing, has moulded Arsenal into one of the best teams in world football. They have spent large sums in the process, but that is the way of things. Other teams’ squads cost more, and are paid more.
Arsenal have spent years playing catch-up, both on and off the field, but success is nearing their grasp.