Bukayo Saka is one of the planet’s most marketable athletes – and that’s official.
The Ealing-born Arsenal attacker has signed deals with the apparel brand New Balance, restaurant chain Nando’s, luxury fashion house Burberry and others in recent years.
Those partnerships supplement his wages at the Emirates, where Saka reportedly picks up a basic £250,000 per week before bonuses, which – although the exact details aren’t known – likely move his total pay to north of £300,000.
Also wrapped up in that contract is a share of the 24-year-old’s image rights, which entitle Arsenal to use Saka’s name, likeness and image in their own commercial activities.
Like his basic and variable pay, his image rights will be in play as he negotiates fresh terms with Arsenal.
While he is under contract until June 2028, Saka – who is nearing his 300th career appearance for Arsenal and has scored six times this season – will soon be rewarded with a new, even more lucrative deal.
Again, the split between his image rights and wages isn’t publicly available, but industry sources consulted by Arsenal Insider suggest that around 20 per cent of the player’s pay before tax is a safe estimate.
At the elite level, players like Bukayo Saka house their patents, copyrights and other intellectual property in separate companies. In Saka’s case, that’s BS7 Rights Limited.
A new analysis from industry publication SportsPro gives a flavour of how much leverage the player has with sponsors when licensing the use of his personal brand through BS7 Rights Limited.
- READ MORE: Arsenal ace Bukayo Saka’s life outside of football from family and girlfriend to £2.3m home
SportsPro names Saka as the 19th most marketable athlete in the world for 2025. The top 10:
- Lewis Hamilton
- Simone Biles
- Ilona Hamer
- Stephen Curry
- Cristiano Ronaldo
- Neymar
- Caitlin Clark
- LeBron James
- Giannis Antetokounmpo
- Coco Gauff
In terms of footballers, only Cristiano Ronaldo (5th), Neymar (6th), Robert Lewandowski (11th), Kylian Mbappe (13th), Vinicius Junior (14th) and Lionel Messi (16th) rank above Saka, making him the seventh-most marketable footballer, above the likes of Lamine Yamal (23rd) and Harry Kane (28th).
Arsenal Women’s Beth Mead, a Champions League winner in 2024-25, was also represented on the list at number 46.
By extension, the ranking makes Saka the Premier League’s most valuable player brand, with his closest challenger being Mohamed Salah, who ranks 43rd.
In Salah, there is a neat case study that gives some indication of what a world-class, highly-marketable player earns outside of his basic wage and performance bonuses. In 2023, the player and his agent, Ramy Abbas Issa, told Harvard Business School that Salah earns around £1m per week all-told. At least half of that comes from brand deals and licensing arrangements.
Saka’s brand is unique, of course. And while it’s a crude comparator, he has only a fraction of Salah’s social media following. Salah’s profile in the Arab-speaking world is totemic, while Saka’s commercial appeal is perhaps greater in Western Europe and the United States. Ultimately, as any brand analyst will tell you, a million things make a brand – many of them unquantifiable.
However, we can probably safely say that the 50-50 breakdown between wages and other commercial income in Salah’s earnings won’t be too far removed from Saka’s own pay dynamic. Conservatively, analysts told Arsenal Insider that a 60-40 split seems a reasonable working assumption.
The accounts for BS7 show a profit of almost £5m for the 2023-24 financial year, which is the most recent on record. That is profit, i.e., revenue minus costs. Revenue figures – the total amount earned – aren’t available for small companies like BS7, so we don’t know exactly how much Saka was paid by sponsors before expenses were deducted.
After corporation tax of approximately £765k, Saka had around £3.9m available to either withdraw as dividends or retain in the company. Basically, all that is to say that Saka himself probably benefited from this company to the tune of approximately £4m for that year.
A significant chunk of that profit is owed to another Saka-owned company, BS7 Investments Limited. Like BS7 Rights Limited, BS7 Investments Limited is operated by the player’s parents, Adenike and Hamed Saka.
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