Arsenal Names Omar Shaikh Its First Chief Revenue Officer

Arsenal has appointed Omar Shaikh as its first Chief Revenue Officer, putting partnerships, retail and the stadium’s commercial operation under one executive. He joins the executive team after three years at the club, two months after Juliet Slot said she would leave as chief commercial officer.

The club did not post a like-for-like CCO job. It created a US-style revenue seat so a Premier League champion can sell shirts, partners and the building as one number.

A First Chief Revenue Officer at Arsenal

Arsenal confirmed the promotion on LinkedIn on 14 September 2026. Shaikh will run partnerships, ventures, commercial venue and retail operations. The club said the move reflects his leadership since he arrived in 2023 and his later brief for the wider partnerships and ventures operation in 2024.

In his new role, Omar will help drive revenue growth that supports our ambition to win major trophies, while keeping supporters at the heart of everything we do.

Arsenal Football Club, LinkedIn announcement, 14 September 2026

That line is the brief. Slot rebuilt the partner list through the years Arsenal were chasing the league. Shaikh inherits a title-winning brand and a wider P&L. Partnerships still sit in the job. So do the club shop and the commercial life of Emirates Stadium.

Long-time followers of the club read the announcement as Slot’s old seat being folded into one job rather than refilled. That reading fits the text. No successor CCO has been named. The new title is the structure.

Juliet Slot Leaves After the Title Year

Staff were told on 15 July 2026 that Slot would step down, a story that circulated the next day. She had been chief commercial officer since December 2021, arriving from Ascot Racecourse after spells at adidas, Fulham, Great British Racing and the London 2012 Games.

Her last major public act was the Emirates renewal, announced on 6 August 2026. The airline remains front-of-shirt and training-kit partner and the stadium naming rights partner through 2033. Chief executive Richard Garlick tied the deal to the league title and to a demand that the partnership keep moving.

Winning the title gives us the opportunity to be more ambitious and build on where we are today. Our renewal reflects a shared belief in Arsenal’s future and a shared determination to keep moving forward.

Richard Garlick, Chief Executive, Arsenal, Emirates renewal, 6 August 2026

Slot, still in post that day, called the relationship one of world sport’s most defining and said the two sides were in their strongest position together. Sir Tim Clark, president of Emirates Airline, said the next chapter was about the millions of supporters the airline already reaches on its network.

THE SLOT-TO-SHAIKH CALENDAR

1. December 2021: Juliet Slot joins as chief commercial officer.
2. September 2023: Omar Shaikh joins from Liverpool as partnerships development director.
3. August 2024: Shaikh becomes global partnerships and ventures director, reporting to Slot.
4. 15 July 2026: Staff are told Slot will step down.
5. 6 August 2026: Emirates is renewed through 2033.
6. 14 September 2026: Shaikh is named the first chief revenue officer and joins the executive team.

The partner board she left behind is much wider than the two heritage names. The 2024/25 accounts credit the adidas extension and a full year of Sobha Realty, the training-ground rights holder. Secondary deals rose in number and in price. Recent club posts have extended Cadbury toward a decade together, added Google Gemini as official AI assistant partner beside Google Pixel, and rolled Hotels.com forward for supporter travel.

How Far Commercial Income Still Trails?

The filed numbers show why the new seat exists. Arsenal Holdings Limited posted record revenue of £691.0 million for the year to 31 May 2025, up from £616.6 million. The overall loss shrank to £1.4 million from £17.7 million, after £15.2 million of exceptional player-registration impairments. Strip those out and the year is a £13.8 million profit.

THE FILED 2024/25 REVENUE LINES

Commercial income of £263.2 million led the rise, £44.9 million above the prior year. Retail operations were 27% up on a record year. Matchday rose because the new Champions League format and a run to the semi-finals produced 30 home fixtures. Average men’s home attendance was 60,047 in a 60,704-seat ground. Broadcasting rose to £272.8 million on higher UEFA money.

Those are champion-chasing accounts, not champion accounts. The men’s team finished as Premier League runners-up in 2024/25. The women won the UEFA Women’s Champions League, beating Barcelona 1-0. The league title that now sits on the shirt arrived in 2025/26, after the year these figures describe, so the next filing should be heavier.

Deloitte’s ranking of 2024/25 still shows the hole Shaikh is being hired to close. Arsenal placed seventh on €821.7 million of revenue, with commercial income of €314 million on that measure (a different basis from the sterling accounts). Real Madrid’s commercial line alone was €594 million, €280 million more. Manchester City made €408.4 million commercially, Manchester United €396.6 million, Liverpool €366 million, Tottenham €329.7 million. Liverpool, fifth overall on €836 million, was the highest-earning English club on Deloitte’s list.

The same study recorded commercial revenue of €5.3 billion across the 20-club Money League, 43 percent of a record €12.4 billion total, and the largest slice for a third year. For the top 10 clubs, commercial was 48 percent of income. The growth Deloitte flags is the growth now sitting in Shaikh’s inbox: better shops, richer sponsors, and much heavier use of the stadium on nights when nobody is playing.

Retail, the Stadium, and Kroenke’s Other Clubs

That is why the job title is not cosmetic. A classic football CCO lives in the partner book. A chief revenue officer, in the American clubs owned by the same family, lives in every till.

WHAT THE CRO SEAT NOW RUNS

• Partnerships: The global and secondary board Slot expanded, including Emirates, adidas and Sobha Realty.
• Ventures: The growth book Shaikh already ran, including tours, digital media and image rights across the men’s and women’s teams.
• Retail: The shop that delivered a 27 percent jump in the last accounts and now reports into the same executive.
• Commercial venue: Hospitality, non-matchday use and the commercial life of Emirates Stadium, opened in July 2006 at a cost of £390 million.

Folding deal-making, the shop and the building into one seat is a tighter structure. It is also a different craft. Partner sales and stadium operations make money at different stages, and a single boss can flatten both if the club treats them as one target. The appointment still does that, because Kroenke Sports & Entertainment already sells that way.

In January 2025 the group launched a central sponsorship unit, Kroenke Signature Properties, to pitch brands across Arsenal, the Los Angeles Rams, the Denver Nuggets, the Colorado Avalanche, the Colorado Rapids, the Colorado Mammoth, Emirates Stadium, Ball Arena and SoFi Stadium. Arsenal commercial director Olly Dale and SoFi’s Chris Sloan were named general managers, working from London and Los Angeles. Slot sat on the steering committee with Garlick and Rams chief commercial officer Jen Prince. Local teams still run their own books. The extra product is a menu of five clubs and two global cities.

Shaikh’s venue brief collides with a live building question. Co-chairman Josh Kroenke said in May 2026 that Garlick was leading talks and that board members who run stadiums in the United States were putting together a plan to renovate the Emirates. Garlick has since told supporters the club is boxed in by the railway and the Underground, and that the live options look more like renovations and better facilities than a simple capacity jump.

WHAT WE KNOW

• Who leads it: Richard Garlick is running the Emirates conversations for the board.
• The box they are in: Capacity is 60,704, and Garlick has pointed to rail and Tube limits on a bigger bowl.
• The commercial hook: Non-matchday use and hospitality now sit with the new chief revenue officer.

WHAT IS UNCONFIRMED

• Final design: No scheme, cost or timetable has been published.
• How many seats: No new capacity figure has been signed off.

Until that plan exists, Shaikh’s stadium job is to squeeze more money from the ground they already have. Deloitte’s growth story in that line is hotels, restaurants, breweries and other on-site uses. Arsenal has the champion shirt. It does not yet have a SoFi-scale building around it.

Shaikh Built the Partner Book From Inside

Shaikh is not an outside hire with a slide deck. He spent eight years in Liverpool’s commercial department, rising from strategy manager in 2015 to vice president of commercial development from September 2019 until September 2023. Before that he was a strategy consultant at Accenture. He joined Arsenal as partnerships development director and, within a year, took the global partnerships and ventures seat under Slot.

His own 2024 note on the first promotion listed eight new commercial partners and Sobha Realty as the club’s first principal training-ground rights holder. The Football Business Awards later described a ventures brief that already reached international tours and friendlies, football development, digital media and player image rights for both teams. He also sits as a non-executive adviser on UNICEF UK’s sports board.

The club is asking an insider who already sold the rebuild to now sell the prize. That is cleaner than a search firm dropping a stranger onto a champion commercial team. It also concentrates a lot of the next cycle in one person who has never sat on the executive team before.

The Squad Bill Makes the New Title Matter

Garlick’s accounts statement in February 2026 was blunt about the cost of staying in the race. UEFA qualification, he said, is a pre-requisite if the club is to operate from a self-sufficient financial base. KSE UK Inc., owned by Stan Kroenke, still supplied transfer and working-capital funds in the year. Cash at year end was £56.0 million, down from £66.8 million.

THE COST OF STAYING IN THE RACE

• Wage bill: £346.8 million, up from £327.8 million, or 50.2 percent of £691.0 million in revenue, driven mainly by player pay in both teams.
• Operating costs: £200.8 million, up from £147.9 million, on staging, the cost of delivering higher income, property items and inflation.
• Player trading: £81.7 million of profit on sales and loans, without which the near-breakeven year does not appear.
• The rule change: Deloitte notes the Premier League is moving to a squad-cost system from 2026/27, in line with UEFA’s cap, which makes every extra commercial pound a licence to spend.

Shaikh’s public target is revenue that supports major trophies. The private target is a commercial line that can live with those caps after the on-pitch bump from the 2025/26 title lands in the next accounts. Slot already closed the heritage deals. The new work is the shop, the secondary board, the KSE cross-sell, and a 20-year-old stadium that the owners want to wring harder before anyone pours concrete.

If partnerships and venue ops start to pull in different directions, the club will feel it in one office. That is the bet they placed by refusing to replace the CCO and inventing a chief revenue officer instead.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who Is Omar Shaikh and What Did He Do Before Arsenal?

Shaikh spent about eight years and eight months at Liverpool, finishing as vice president of commercial development, after five years as a strategy consultant at Accenture and short spells at Lloyds Banking Group and Barclays. He has been a UNICEF UK sports advisory board member since February 2023, a side role he kept after joining Arsenal.

Is Arsenal Replacing Juliet Slot as Chief Commercial Officer?

No replacement CCO has been announced. The club created a chief revenue officer instead and promoted Shaikh onto the executive team with partnerships, ventures, retail and commercial venue operations in his remit, which is the practical successor brief.

When Did Arsenal First Partner With Emirates?

Arsenal and Emirates first partnered in 2006, the year Emirates Stadium opened, and the club calls it the Premier League’s longest-running front-of-shirt partnership. The August 2026 renewal keeps shirt, training kit and stadium naming rights with the airline through 2033.

How Much Revenue Did Arsenal Women Generate in 2024/25?

Deloitte’s Women’s Football Money League put Arsenal first on €25.6 million for 2024/25, a 43 percent rise, after five home crowds above 35,000 and a list-high €7 million in matchday income, a separate ranking from the men’s club accounts.