Premier League shirts break £1bn earning barrier ... even as Chelsea fail to get sponsor

As England's top-flight clubs prepare to resume the season after the first international break, we detail the cash that each of their shirts will earn them in 2024-25

By Alex Miller and Nick Harris

Premier League clubs in England will earn more than £1 BILLION from their shirts alone this season, taking into account the value of their kit supplier deals, front-of-shirt sponsors and income from sleeve sponsors.

Sporting Intelligence has routinely gathered and published shirt sponsorships in England’s top division since the first full football season after we launched in our original incarnation in 2010.

Back then, in the 2010-11 season, the 20 clubs collectively earned £100.45m from front-of-shirt sponsors. The graphic below is what that era looked like, with Liverpool and Manchester United earning £20m per year each from Standard Chartered and AON respectively, and six clubs earning £1m or less each for that season.

How things have changed! For the 2024-25 season, the 20 current top-flight clubs are earning more from their sleeve deals alone, collectively, than they earned from front-of-shirt deals 14 years ago, or £111.25m from sleeve sponsors in 2024-25 against £100.45m from main sponsors in 2010-11.

Front-of-shirt sponsors will earn the current 20 PL clubs £422.5m for this season, and that is despite one of the “big” clubs, Chelsea, having no shirt sponsor for the time being.

The biggest single source of “shirt income” now is kit supplier deals, which collectively will earn a guaranteed £513.7m this season for the 20 PL clubs.

The graphic below breaks down all the numbers by club, and beneath that is some brief analysis of the numbers.

Manchester United remain the “biggest” club in England by global popularity and earning power from sponsors, despite not having won a Premier League title since Alex Ferguson’s last title win in 2012-13.

United remain the most prolific all-time winners of English top-flight titles (20) ahead of Liverpool (19) and Arsenal (13).

United and Liverpool remain the two most popular  English clubs, globally, in various metrics including social media followings and TV audiences. So it’s no surprise United’s shirt income this season (from kit deal, front-of-shirt and sleeve combined) is No1 in the Premier League at £170m, followed by Manchester City* in second place (£150m) and Liverpool in third (£137m) with Arsenal in fourth (£125m). 

All the figures in the table have been sourced from one or both sides of the deals concerned, and all have been run past the clubs for pre-publication checks. 

(*Manchester City face 115 charges of alleged financial wrong-doing in a case where investigations began in 2018, and they were charged in February 2023, and there’s more about that case, which will be heard by an independent commission starting this month, here.)

To put Manchester United’s earning capability in context, their £170m from shirt-related income this season is more than fellow Premier League clubs Leicester, West Ham, Brighton, Palace, Wolves, Fulham, Forest, Bournemouth, Southampton, Brentford and Ipswich combined (£154.45m).

The shirt income this season of United, City, Liverpool and Arsenal combined (£582m) is 55.5% of the entire division’s shirt income.

More than half of the current Premier League clubs still have a betting sponsor as their front-of-shirt sponsor. 

As we have noted over the years, it is tempting to conclude that if you are a “big” club with enough clout to attract a major international corporation or business, then your owners would rather stay away from “tawdry” sponsorship deals with gambling firms.

All clubs, by definition, see themselves as rooted in their communities, and are therefore “community” clubs and “family” clubs. Why would any club in the truest sense want to be pushing gambling companies at children? If you can’t get big bucks from a non-betting multinational, then gambling firms are evidently the genre willing to inject millions to boost their market share.

Thanks, as ever, for reading. The journalism on this website can only be sustained thanks to paying subscribers, to whom we remain hugely thankful. The next series coming up is a deep dive into “The never-ending season”, or in other words, details of the new and expanded Champions League in 2024-25, the FIFA Club World Cup of summer 2025, and the impact on players of so much football, and how their unions are reacting.