Liverpool cash in as £820m boom revealed, Adidas and Standard Chartered deals key

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Liverpool are among the biggest beneficiaries from a surge in sponsorship revenues in elite football.

In 2023-24, the last full published financial year, Liverpool generated £308m through sponsorship, merchandise sales and non-football events at Anfield.

It was the 12th successive year that the reigning Premier League champions set a new record for commercial income, and they are expected to do the same once the 2024-25 accounts are released.

Liverpool fans will have to wait until the spring for confirmation, but football finance experts generally forecast that the club’s overall revenues for the title-winning season will have surpassed £700m.

And while Arne Slot and his players have faltered on the pitch in recent weeks, the Merseysiders’ commercial operation overseen by owners FSG has always been remarkably resilient.

Over the summer, the new kit deal with Adidas generated nearly as many headlines and social media engagements as the successive British transfer record signings of Florian Wirtz and Alexander Isak.

The club boasted of record sales when the new home kit was released in August, outstripping the previous season’s launch day with Nike by a purported 700 per cent.

Under Fenway Sports Group’s self-sufficient financial model for Liverpool, every pound earned through shirt sales, sponsorship deals or concerts at Anfield is another pound reinvested in the club.

And the latest facts and figures illustrate the sophistication of their commercial operation.

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New analysis sheds light on deals driving Liverpool’s financial growth

The two biggest deals in Liverpool’s sponsorship portfolio are those with Adidas and their front-of-shirt partner Standard Chartered, worth £60m and £50m annually respectively.

New analysis from market researcher Ampere suggests that Adidas has increased its spending on kit supplier deals in Europe by almost £75m this season.

That reinforces the German company’s position as the highest-spending sponsor across the continent’s five biggest leagues, and the upswing is part of a wider £820m uptick in sponsorship in 2025-26 to date.

The Standard Chartered deal meanwhile is one of the partnerships in the financial services industry that accounts for 16 per cent of global sponsorship revenue, by far the biggest category in the sport

FSG will see the research from Ampere as vindication for their commercial strategy.

Liverpool have 26 sponsors in total, the next most valuable being their shirt sleeve and training ground naming rights partnerships with Expedia and AXA.

Their agreement with Visit Maldives, the club’s tourist destination partner, is also namechecked in the reports as one of the most notable new entrants to the football sponsorship racket.

Why Liverpool’s Adidas deal is actually worth much more than is reported

While the new alliance with Adidas has been referenced in headlines as worth £60m annually, Liverpool’s final take-home from the deal could actually be significantly higher.

Figures in UEFA’s official financial survey of European clubs show that FSG actually understate their sponsorship revenue, taking conservative estimates on the value of their commercial partnerships.

In reality, after royalties and performance-related bonuses, Adidas will actually pay Liverpool somewhere in the region of £90-100m per season.