Arsenal top Deloitte rankings for first time as two clubs pass £20m revenue mark

Two English women’s teams became the first to pass £20million in annual revenues last season, according to the latest iteration of Deloitte’s Football Money League report.

The annual undertaking ranks football clubs worldwide by revenue, based on figures from the most recently completed season. The 2026 version, incorporating financials from 2024-25, is the fourth time Deloitte has included a women’s team ranking in a report that is now into its 29th year of publication.

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Arsenal, who won the Champions League in May, topped the women’s listing for the first time, with revenues of £21.5m (€25.6m). Domestic rivals Chelsea trailed just behind (£21.3m), with the London clubs leaping above Barcelona Femeni (£18.5m), who led the way in 2023-24.

The report reflects continued revenue growth in women’s football, but there are caveats. For one, the United States, home to a slew of valuable women’s teams, is excluded. A note from Deloitte detailed the consultancy firm’s inability to obtain relevant information from clubs in the U.S., as well as other key women’s football markets, such as Australia and Sweden.

Also worth mentioning — and it applies to the men’s version of the report, too, which will be published later this week — is that an appearance on Deloitte’s list does not equate to financial stability. High revenues don’t necessarily equal profits. The report’s limited focus on turnover, alongside the fact that most clubs are yet to disclose last season’s accounts, means we don’t know what the world’s most prominent women’s teams spent on wages and the likes.

Chelsea had the third-highest revenues in 2023-24 at £11.5m, yet turned those into a deficit of £8.4m, a loss margin of 73 per cent. It is not yet known which women’s teams ran tight ships last season.

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Even allowing for those limitations, the report shows a clear driving force behind growing revenues in the women’s game: commercial income.

Of the £132.2m collectively generated by the 15 highest-earning clubs in 2024-25, £95.8m came from commercial revenue streams. At 72 per cent of overall income, commercial earnings were more than double matchday and broadcast revenues combined. Eleven of the 12 clubs to disclose their splits of revenue and appear in this and last year’s lists enjoyed improved commercial income.

The largest growth, and the largest commercial income in women’s football, arrived at Chelsea, who more than doubled the revenue stream to £16m. That followed the internal sale of Chelsea Women to another business within the BlueCo sphere.

The transaction helped Chelsea’s men’s team comply with Premier League profitability and sustainability rules, a factor which was widely seen as the primary motive. Yet at the time of the reorganisation in May 2024, Chelsea said they hoped to “harness the full potential of the opportunity for women’s football” and, based on these latest figures, there are signs of them doing that.

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Per Deloitte’s report, that £16m commercial revenue was “driven by both attributions from club-wide sponsorship deals, as well as exclusive partnerships with major brands”. The latter was in evidence in July 2024 when Three, the telecommunications company, became the club’s first women’s-only principal partner, and other exclusive sponsorships have followed. D.Louise became the club’s first official jewellery partner in May 2025, followed four months later by Here We Flo, a period care brand.

Arsenal, too, boasted big commercial revenue last year, albeit there are questions around the origin of some of that amount. Per previous accounts for Arsenal Women, revenue includes ‘group income’, a figure which includes a support fee paid from the men’s team to the women’s to cover costs incurred. The Athletic does not have the 2024-25 accounts yet, but since the arrangement was introduced in June 2019, Arsenal Women have basically broken even every year, in part because the ‘revenue’ provided by the wider group is used.

That support fee is included in Deloitte’s commercial income figure, but it is unclear how much it comprised last season or previously. Per the basis of preparation note in the report, Deloitte advises the group income amount within Arsenal’s £13.6m commercial revenue “includes, among other components, revenue attributable to the women’s club from full club-wide commercial agreements, and revenue contributions from the men’s club”.

As with the men’s team, Emirates are Arsenal Women’s front-of-shirt sponsor and Adidas manufacture the kit. Those and other lead partners such as Sobha Realty and Visit Rwanda presumably make up the bulk of the commercial figure, but with no way of splitting the sum into revenue from external sources and that support fee, it is unclear how big Arsenal’s true commercial earnings are — or whether removing the support fee would see them fall from the top of the overall revenue list. 

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Taken at face value, the commercial incomes of Chelsea and Arsenal’s women’s teams were higher than Sheffield United and Luton Town managed in the Premier League in 2023-24. Moreover, Arsenal’s £13.6m is higher than the most recent commercial income than 19 men’s EFL Championship clubs; for Chelsea, their £16m was higher than 21 clubs from the men’s second tier.

If there are question marks about their commercial figure, where Arsenal undoubtedly led the was in matchday income, with the £5.9m they earned from the gate more than six men’s EFL Championship clubs, per most recently available figures. It was close to double the second-highest women’s matchday income figure last season (Barcelona: £3.3m), and spoke to Arsenal’s using data analytics to appeal to attendees.

Nine of 11 Women’s Super League (WSL) home games were played at the Emirates Stadium, drawing average crowds of more than 34,000 and a high of 56,748 for the North London derby with Spurs last February. All 11 of Arsenal’s home league games will be played at the Emirates in 2025-26.

Growth at the gate was far from uniform, though, and after a record-breaking year of attendances in 2023-24, five WSL teams saw average gates drop. Nowhere was that more evident than at Manchester United, where a fall in attendances of a third led to a similar proportionate reduction in gate receipts. 

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Matchday growth as a whole across the sampled clubs (excluding Paris Saint-Germain, who didn’t provide a split of revenues for last year’s edition) was just £3m, albeit that still represented a 19 per cent rise given the lowly starting point. The increase was, however, largely driven by a couple of outliers, principally Arsenal and Bayern Munich.

Growth was even more anaemic when it came to broadcast income, which stagnated as existing TV deals continued and performance-based payments offset between clubs. Lowly money from broadcast income highlights a stark juxtaposition between the women’s and men’s forms of the game. Where in the latter, hefty TV rights drove a surge in incomes and a focus on commercial revenues came later, for women’s teams, it is sponsorship deals and partnerships doing the heavy lifting.

WSL teams will benefit from a new TV deal that began this season, but for the highest earners, commercial deals will remain the largest revenue driver.

In terms of league of origin, the women’s game has quickly come to mirror the men’s: the richest clubs primarily derive from England. Eight of the top 15 are from the WSL, the same number as in 2023-24.

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Made clear from this latest release of figures is the gulf between those at the top of women’s football and the rest. Arsenal and Chelsea surpass £20m, Barcelona are not too far off, then there is a big gap to the two Manchester clubs and Real Madrid, each of whom just topped £10m. Beyond them, the fall-off is even greater.

The revenue of women’s football’s top earners was double that of the fifth-highest earning club, and 4.8 times that of the 10th team on Deloitte’s list, Tottenham Hotspur. That dispersion of revenue has grown since 2023-24, when the highest earner generated 3.9 times the 10th-placed side.

Revenue dispersion: high earner v 10th

Such disparity might sound familiar to the men’s form, but while the differences in monetary terms are far smaller, the dispersion as a multiple is higher in the women’s game. When Arsenal Women’s revenue was 4.8 times higher than Spurs last season, the huge earnings of Real Madrid in the men’s game were only 1.9 times higher than 10th-placed Chelsea in 2023-24. We will have to wait until later this week to see the men’s dispersion level for last season.

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Revenues in women’s football are plainly growing, and it should not be forgotten that the sport remains in almost a start-up stage. Jennifer Haskel of Deloitte’s Sport Business Group advises “the shift from the start-up phase to the established phase requires consistent time, investment and effort to develop the foundations in the right manner”.

That much is clear, and this report highlights the obvious need for women’s teams to improve matchday and broadcast incomes. Women’s teams are capitalising effectively on commercial markets men’s teams have historically not appealed to — generating more money from viewership, in person and on the sofa, is now an obvious target area.

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

Arsenal, Chelsea, NWSL, Sports Business, Women's Soccer

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