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The 2025-26 season is well underway and now feels like a good time to remind ourselves of AC Milan’s sponsorship revenue. Has anything changed from last season? How much money are we talking about? You get the point.
Note: This article was originally published on SempreMilan Insider back in August. To get access to the full archive, and any future bonus articles, you have to subscribe to our Substack. You can try 7 days completely for free.
Given just how busy it has been this summer in terms of signings and departures, it’s not strange that some of the sponsorship announcements have fallen through the cracks. Most of them aren’t that exciting either, truth be told, as the revenue involved is never disclosed by the Rossoneri. It’s a good thing that Italian media stops at nothing and more often than not, figures it out somehow.
I’ll walk you through some of the sponsorships that have been made official during the summer, explaining what they entail and how they will help Milan financially. We could actually be looking at a significant boost for the Rossoneri’s accounts, so let’s dive in!
Short Version
- The value of Milan’s shirt for the 2025-26 season has remained the same at €54.2m, with no changes to the sponsors. It’s possible that the deal with Emirates, worth €19m per year according to the latest available financial statements, could increase thanks to rumoured bonuses. We don’t know for sure right now.
- At the start of July, Milan announced the expansion of their partnership with Clivet. The climate control company has secured the naming rights to Milanello, now known as “Milanello powered by Clivet”, as well as a sleeve sponsorship for the training kit. By my estimation, this could all bring in €5m per year.
- The long-awaited partnership with DRC was also announced this summer and reports suggest that Milan will get €14m per year for promoting tourism to the country. There will also be a back-of-shirt sponsorship for the 2026-27 season, but not the current one as the deal was signed too late (due to delays).
- Milan have been very active on the sponsorship front, as you can tell, and the fact that they could potentially pocket an additional €20m this season is fantastic. Having said that, we will have to wait for the club’s financial statements to get the official figures.
The value of Milan’s 2025-26 shirt
The most obvious place to start is the shirt sponsorships for this season. Not just because they are the most lucrative ones, but also because they are very easy to understand. In this case, we’re also helped by the fact that nothing (sort of) has changed compared to the 2024-25 campaign, with the same sponsors still present on the Rossoneri’s shirt.
Puma is the technical sponsor, as has been the case since 2018, and the new deal that was signed in 2022 means Milan are banking around €25.2m per year. This is a pretty good figure when you consider that Inter get around €28m from Nike, despite a lot more success in recent years. Juventus are (strangely) in a league of their own, meanwhile, with around €46m from Adidas.
Moving on to the agreement with Emirates, while there was initially talk of €30m, the financial statements for 2023-24 confirmed that the renewal signed in 2022 was actually worth €19m. It’s been reported that the amount could increase over the duration of the contract, getting closer to the aforementioned €30m, but we won’t know for sure until we see the financial statements for 2024-25.
When I last delved into the shirt sponsorship revenue, in February this year, I said that the worst-case scenario would be a Champions League clause in the Emirates deal. In other words, a clause that prevents the amount from increasing if Milan were to miss out on the competition, which they did. Let’s hope it isn’t the case, but we need to be realistic and keep all doors open.
Finally, Milan also get around €10m from the sleeve and back-of-shirt sponsorships with MSC and Bitpanda respectively (€5m each). This is more or less the standard amount for these sponsorships if you look at the big clubs in Italy, and you won’t get much more than that. As such, the shirt is pretty valuable all things considered, even if small improvements could be made.
It should be noted that the Bitpanda agreement was signed in February this year, following several months of just having ‘Fondazione Milan’ at the back of the shirt. It was an important addition for the Rossoneri but, as we will explain below, the crypto company won’t be the back-of-shirt sponsor for the 2026-27 season.
Naming rights (finally) and DRC deal
Let’s face it, the shirt figures and sponsorships have been talked about before. I more so brought them up to refresh your memory, and any opportunity I get to re-use the shirt revenue graphic, I take! Jokes aside, it’s a lot more interesting to discuss the new sponsorships that have emerged during the summer, as they are ultimately what will make a difference for this season.
The major change over the summer, without a doubt, has to do with Milanello of all places. In early July, Milan announced the expansion of their partnership with the climate control company Clivet, selling the naming rights to the training ground. You might have seen it on social media already, as some of the Rossoneri’s training pics posts say ‘Milanello powered by Clivet’ at the end.
It sounds a bit silly, I know, but it’s actually a huge step in the right direction for Milan. Those of you who have read my many bonus articles on the stadium situation will know that I love the idea of capitalising on naming rights. Weirdly enough, I kind of didn’t see this one coming. I suppose that’s because we all consider Milanello to be sacred ground, but in that sense the ‘powered by’ compromise was a good choice.
What kind of dough are we talking about, then? It’s a boring answer but we will have to wait for the financial statements from Milan, and even then it might be difficult as they don’t always specify the value of each sponsorship. We could look at the other side of town for some kind of indication, though, as Inter sold the naming rights to their training ground in Appiano Gentile to BPER for around €3m per year.
The other thing to consider here is that we aren’t just talking about a naming rights sponsorship for Clivet. In fact, the logo is also present on the training kit’s sleeve (see the image above), so I wouldn’t be surprised if the whole package is worth around €5m per year for Milan. The company still counts as a ‘Premium Partner’ on the website, which isn’t the highest tier, so the figure sounds reasonable to me.
If we compare it with a very relevant ‘Principal Partner’ in this case, namely Konami, Milan collect about €7.2m per year from the entertainment company. This partnership comes with various perks, from Konami’s perspective I mean, but the main thing is having the logo on the chest of the training kit. It’s possible that Clivet’s deal could be worth more than €5m, but I would prefer to make a cautious estimation.
Having said that, money-wise, the Clivet agreement isn’t actually the most lucrative one signed this summer (I still hold it as the most important, though). Perhaps you read my bonus article from almost a year ago on a partnership with DRC, and perhaps you have asked yourself since, whatever happened to that? Well, at the end of June, the contract was finally signed between the parties.
Some very high figures have been mentioned in the media throughout this process, which is questionable – to say the least – from a moral point of view. I spoke about that in the aforementioned bonus, so if you want to see me elaborate on the issues of the deal, that is where you can do it. In any case, the reliable Romain Molina has stated that Milan will pocket an impressive €14m per year from the deal.
The ‘Experience DRC’ logo will be present on the back of Milan’s shirt only from the 2026-27 season, as a delay in the negotiation prompted the Rossoneri to sell the slot to Bitpanda for the 2025-26 season instead. There will be some sort of ‘compensation’ for the omission this season, as Molina states, but it’s clear that Milan have got a very good deal on their hands here.
Let’s wait and see if €14m is the actual figure for the sponsorship, especially given the lack of the logo this season, but either way it should be a very decent amount. Just to tie back with the terms mentioned earlier, namely Principal Partner and Premium Partner, DRC is listed as the latter so it’s possible that we could be looking at a lower amount for the first season.
All things considered, both deals could potentially fetch an additional €20m for Milan this season, which you have to admit is very good. Just imagine how much of this could have been invested in the mercato if the Rossoneri had been in the Champions League. We’re still far away from the biggest European clubs in terms of sponsorship revenue, but it’s getting a lot better.
BMW renewal and more
As for other agreements signed during the summer, Milan renewed their partnership with BMW as a Premium Partner and Official Automotive Partner. I don’t think it involves that much money, though, as BMW supplies the players and staff with a car each while hosting events in conjunction with the club. The financial statements also don’t mention BMW at all, but do mention some of the other sponsors (a hint, indeed).
In addition to that, the following sponsorships were announced…
- Q8: Official Fuel Partner (Regional Partner)
- Eneos Motor: Official Motor Oil Partner (Regional Partner)
- Aqua Santa Croce: Official Water Partner (Regional Partner)
- Castelli Cycling: Cycling gear collection with Milan
- PUMA Golf: Golf gear collection with Milan
As you can tell, Milan have been relatively busy on the sponsorship front and that’s very important, above all since many sponsorships (especially the less prominent ones) are evaluated on a year-by-year basis. What’s clear is that the Rossoneri have managed to collect additional revenue in a financial year (2025-26) when they really need it, as we have talked about so many times before.
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