Arsenal have maintained their status as one of world football’s financial powerhouses ranking eighth in Deloitte’s annual football rich list.
The Gunners saw their annual revenue grow from €284.3m (£243.6m) in 2013 to €359.3 (£300.5m) in 2014 – an impressive 23% rise of €75m.
Amazingly, despite closing the gap on top placed Real Madrid by €44.4m (€234.6m in 2013 vs €190.2m in 2014) we remain in eighth place, the same as last year. Of slight concern is the fact the gap with seventh place Chelsea (€387.9m) has widened by over 50%, although it must be noted that these figures do not include our new Puma deal.
Manchester United are the top placed English club in second (€518m), Manchester City (6th, €414.4m) and Liverpool (9th, €305.9m) also make the top ten.
Arsenal’s matchday revenue grew by 8% as a result of our successful FA Cup run, but for the second year running it was income from broadcasting rights (€147.3m) that made up the majority of our total. The extended deal with Emirates and the addition of several second tier partners saw us notch €92.2m on the commercial front.
It is expected that our new long-term deal with Puma, which kicked in during the summer of 2014, will help ensure we keep pace with the rest of Europe’s top dogs.
Interestingly, the number of Premier League clubs in the top 20 increased from six last year to eight and all 20 Premier League clubs are now within the top 40 globally – all thanks to the latest huge broadcasting deal.
Will be interesting to see the effect of FFP on transfer activity and ticket prices. Any analysis on that? Somebody find Swiss Ramble!
we’ve already heard that city lost alexis because of it. chelsea are noticeably more restrained by their standards. city will be under more pressure as frank and milner leave, they’ll need more home-grown players that they won’t be able to just snap up for £40m (barkley) so that will be evident over the next couple seasons.
once arsenal factor in the puma deal you can see how the top 8 will pull away.
The prices will go up and you’ll still be frustrated with the transfer policy. But you’ll feel richer by association, so that’ll be nice.
Haha
“Richer by association” Indeed. The more reason to love the game of Football; even in a developing country I am excited to read about Arsenal’s revenue in an article personified with words like “we” and “our”. Kudos to the commercial team, they went about their business nicely in 2014. I hope the loss of Tom Fox will not affect them.
The time has come…we will see this on the field of play. We are a big club and we are ready to stake our claim. Arsene will make it happen. City was a foretaste of things to come.
I know we have to be commercially successful to buy players etc. but for me the soul is being sucked out of Arsenal Football Club since we moved to the Emirates. It might be misty eyed nostalgia but give me a day at Highbury in the 70’s or 80’s compared to the commercial / corporate fest that is the modern day ‘match experience’.
Yes but that’s not only with arsenal but most European football. you have to be grateful at times on the clubs vision; I think the soul would be absolutely sucked if we sold it completely to the mercy of a rich oil baron
When will TV revenues hit a plateau? Apparently the bottom team in the PL receives more TV revenue now than the champions did 3 or 4 years ago!!
Perhaps when there’s nothing more to sell? As things stand, with 3pm kick-offs still not broadcast in the UK, there’s a lot more toothpaste to be squeezed from the tube. It’ll be a drip feed process though…hence the Friday night slot that’s set to start next year. You don’t see Gillette putting 20 blades on their razors at the moment…they probably could if they wanted, but there’s money to be made adding 5-19 first.
I foresee Pay-per-view 3pm Kickoffs
I would welcome it, I would love a season ticket but it’s not possible for me at the moment. There isn’t one second of using live streams to watch a 3pm game I wouldn’t bite their hand off for £15 quid to watch it properly
Minus Jamie Carragher of course !
It’s somewhat unrelated, but in Norway, the company that shows the Premier League can only show one 4pm match on saturdays, which resulted in them not showing one single Arsenal match in the whole of October, which I felt was a waste of £23 a month.
my optimistic dream is that clubs like arsenal will eventually have a deal where they can stream all their own matches through paying subscribers to ‘arsenal tv’ online. even with an hours delay would be fine.
i can’t afford sky, or BT, but would need to have both just to see what? 3 arsenal games a month? 4?
fuck that.
For the foreseeable future, TV income will continue to go crazy. The EPL is already “the” football league watched around the globe and has long as that doesn’t change, expect to see players being paid £500,000 p/w soon. Then expect all EPL teams to follow Chelsea’s example and hover up all the young talent from around Europe and then loan them back out. So then expect to see EPL B teams in Spain, EPL C teams in Germany etc. This will happen, because the money in the EPL will continue to be ridiculous. Meanwhile us the fans, will continue to… Read more »
i haven’t missed one match in five years. (& only a small handful in the previous ten) i live in vermont, farm, & record when i have to work.
p.s. the only niceness about being the only arsenal supporter (besides the wife) within miles.
Aren’t we just starting to see FFP working ie little changes in the richest clubs from last year with FFP just cementing that in? To me, it looks like a European Super League becomes inevitable, as the largest clubs are practically guaranteed to win their domestic trophies each season, which gets boring as they will invariably beat smaller clubs. I’m not advocating this, I’d much rather see Forest (or whoever) come up and do well one season (as they did under Cloughie) or Southampton keep their great youngsters (Bale, Walcott, Ox, Chambers, Shaw etc) and succeed, but just can’t see… Read more »
And proud that we got this far without doing a Chelsea or Citeh.
I can understand Chelsea, City and Man U being above us on the league table but what – in God’s name – is Southampton doing up there? Hey boys; you have till May 19th to rectify that. If they refuse to go away, make sure you put them between us and United. After all, they can afford another season out of CL – they are the second richest in the world, hahaha.
I did tweet Swiss ramble and ask how Chelsea can have a higher match day revenue than us. Doesn’t make sense to me. Unless I misread something earlier today, but I don’t think so.
Chelsea’s matchday revenue according to Deloitte is €84.9m. Ours is €119.8m.
It’s commercial revenue where Chelsea dominate – €135.7m compared to our €92.2m.
On the plus side, it’s easier (in the short term) to improve our commercial standing than it will be for Chelsea to up their matchday revenue…well until they build a new stadium.
Thanks. Must have misread it.
This is the best we could do and other clubs are still growing faster than us. But I guess it’s a case of be happy with what you got.
ah but don’t forget the puma kit deal , a record breaker in its own right, hasn’t been included. plus you can see the direction the club is moving with players like ozil and sanchez brought in. once we can start to field these stars and compete for titles again commercial revenue will take another jump. its no coincidence that every club above us is a recent league winner, and the top four are recent champions league winners. success attracts more fans and more commercial revenue. we are definitely moving in that direction.
WAS a record breaker. United absolutely blew it out of the water with their Adidas deal- £75m a year!
Be interesting to see how much of that they get if they don’t make Champions League again!
Manch€$t€r City grew their revenue by about €100m in one year, roughly a 30% increase. All entirely legitimate, I’m sure, because Platini tells me so.
In completely unrelated news, only 5% of the football shirts sold in Manchester are City shirts.
http://www.sportsdirect.com/News/entryid/6883/Shirt-Sales-2014-15-Where-Are-Your-Teams-Supporters-Really-From
No, the figures mean that only 5% of all ManCity shirts sold in UK are sold at Manchester.
Thanks for the links. I wish they had these figure for world sales
We need more work on the commercial end. Look at how effective United’s commercial operations is. They had a nightmare year last year and the still overtook Baca and Bayen on the revenue list
Arsenal is an extremely strong brand and we can do significantly better on the commercial front than we are doing
United’s huge commercial revenue is down to their historic success on the pitch. Unless they continue to slide, their brand (and revenue) will continue to grow. When we win more trophies and look like true title challengers our brand will become sexier and we’ll sell more shirts
We’ll get there. Remember we’ve opted for a self sustaining business model, instead being bankrolled buy one sugar Daddy. Which is quite different from all the teams above us on the list bar bayern I guess. Things can only get better for us in the long run.
5 English teams in the top ten. English teams should be doing a bit better in the Champion’s League with all that money. Recently, only ChelSKI have done well.
Although I agree, the CL performance also comes back to the PL teams having so many tough domestic games whilst the Spanish and German leagues only have half/third as many, which effects the players (tiredness and injury). Also to a lesser extent, the Refs in Europe tend to play more to the laws of the game rather than the PL refs which are more interested in the game ‘flowing’, so we have to re-learn the rules for every European game.
or maybe the refs here should start playing more to the laws of the game and not their own ‘ideas’ of kickrush i will never forgive or forget what this country did to arsenal with eduardo, ramsey, diaby. a true gunner knows that our club and players got targetted and mistreated because …wenger winning the epl with children in an era of millionares investing heavy sums would have been an embarassment for all of them. we cant have french wenger and arsenal kids ( who are taking money out of the system and doing it on the cheap to repay… Read more »
Its probably worth pointing out that the Forbes index is a better gauge of a clubs real wealth as it includes cash reserves etc. Deloittes looks purely at revenue. The likes of Chelsea, Man City and PSG have their revenue artificially inflated by their owners which then don’t count for FFP. On Forbes we are fifth wealthiest, a staggering 450 million US dollars ahead of Chelsea and even further ahead of City.
Yeah was wondering how we had dropped 3 places before you rightly pointed out that this wasn’t the Forbes list- a far better gauge of a club’s value than purely revenue. We have the assets (stadium and facilities) that almost every club in the world would trade for chemical castration… including that Russian thug Abramovich whose knob the Chavskis have been sucking for success…
Once the Puma deal comes online in the accounts, I think we can target a top 4 finish
I don’t give a toss about targeting a top four finish in the rich list. With the ample budget the Arse have, we should be competing for cups and titles each season and we do not.
Shame Chelsea earn more with no dodgy sponsors unlike PSG and City.
They are earning more while still in a stadium as big as Highbury.
I thought we were supposed to have beaten off anyone who didn’t have our sized stadium.
To think we could be earning more if we had stayed in Highbury and invested in the squad and grown our sponsorship and commercial deals like they have
to be held to ransom by cunts like adebayor and nasri, because we can’t afford to go out and buy an ozil or a sanchez? remember chelsea were funded by oil money, became immensely successful, and that is the source of their great commercial revenues. without the oil money we’d have slipped away as they all picked off our star players.
You think Abrahmovic no longer puts money into Chelsea? Think again
Any chance of maybe lowering the ticket prices? Thankyou.
And where are Tottenham? Hahaha.
Middlesex. Definitely NOT North London.