Real Madrid, Arsenal & Vinicius Jr: How Image Rights Work in Football

In the Vinicius Jr Saga, there is the salary question, the Arsenal interest, and the Saudi Arabia money talks in the background, but image rights keeps coming up. Specifically, the fact that Real Madrid currently own 50% of Vinicius’s image rights, and that one of the main reasons talks have dragged on for over a year is that the Brazilian wants a bigger share of his own commercial earnings in any new deal.

Now, you want to understand what image rights are and how the whole system works in practice.

When a footballer becomes well known enough that brands want to attach themselves to his face, his name, his number, or even his signature celebration, that association has commercial value. A company paying to put Vinicius in an advert, a boot brand licensing his name for a product line, a video game using his likeness; all of that falls under image rights.

In legal terms, image rights cover a player’s name, face, voice, signature, squad number, and any other attribute of their personal identity that a third party might pay to use.

Image rights are separate from a player’s salary. A footballer’s contract covers what the club pays them to play. The image rights arrangement covers what happens when the player’s identity is used to make money away from the pitch.

Like in the ongoing Vinicius contract talks, both conversations happen at the same time during contract negotiations, and they are just as important to the final agreement as the base wage figure.

How Clubs and Players Split Image Rights

In England, most Premier League clubs allow players to keep 100% of their personal image rights. The club owns its own commercial inventory. They own the shirt sponsor, the sleeve sponsor, and the stadium naming rights. The players sit separately from that.

If, for example, Marcus Rashford signs a deal with a clothing brand on his own, Manchester United have no formal claim on that income. Players use dedicated companies, often set up to hold their image rights, to manage those deals in a tax-efficient way.

Real Madrid are on a different model entirely, and it is one of the most distinctive financial structures in club football. Florentino Perez put it in place at the start of his presidency in 2000, and the idea behind it was that a player’s commercial value increases substantially by being at Real Madrid, so the club deserves a share of the commercial income that the Madrid platform helps generate.

Under this model, the club takes 50% of every commercial deal a player does. Whether it is shirt sales, personal sponsorships, or licensing arrangements, Madrid gets half and the player keeps half.

For most of the club’s history, that split was non-negotiable. Luis Figo accepted it. Zinedine Zidane accepted it. David Beckham famously almost did not sign for Madrid partly because of the image rights issue, but eventually agreed to the 50-50 structure. The deal still worked well for Beckham. Forbes revealed that during the former England international’s four years at the club, Madrid’s ‘merchandising’ revenue alone went up over 137%, and his own brand grew from the Spanish-market exposure.

Ronaldo and Mbappe Exempted

Cristiano Ronaldo was the first player to successfully push back on the 50-50 rule. When he negotiated his first contract at Real Madrid, he got a 60-40 split in his favour. This meant he kept 60% of his commercial earnings and the club took 40%. He later sold part of his image rights to a Singaporean businessman, Peter Lim, who used them to build Ronaldo’s profile in Asian markets through deals like the Shopee advertising campaign.

For years, Ronaldo was the only player who had broken Madrid’s standard terms.

Kylian Mbappe became the second when he joined the club as a free agent in 2024. He negotiated a more favourable image rights structure as part of a deal that also included a reported €100 million signing-on bonus.

The details of the exact split are that he secured 80% of his commercial earnings, making him only the second player after Ronaldo to get Madrid to move from their default position.

Vinicius currently operates under the standard 50-50 split. What makes his situation unusual is the scale of commercial activity he generates. By the time the World Cup was underway, he had 16 active sponsorship deals with major brands covering sportswear, food, tech, and lifestyle products. The brands interested in Vinicius are reportedly growing every year.

The commercial income Madrid generates from Vinicius’s image rights alone covers his entire salary. In other words, he is not a cost to the club in the way most footballers are. The 50% they take from his commercial deals pays for him.

That is an extraordinary position for any player to be in, and it is exactly why the issue of image rights is central in renegotiations.

Vinicius wants a larger share of his commercial earnings in any new deal. Real Madrid have shown some flexibility on this, which would make him the third player to get a non-standard arrangement from the club. Whether that flexibility is enough to close the gap is what determines whether Vinicius signs or walks.

Arsenal

If Arsenal signs Vinicius, the image rights situation changes, and not in a small way. English clubs do not do the 50-50 model. Vinicius would keep 100% of his personal commercial earnings under the standard Premier League structure. Given that he already generates enough commercial income to cover his Madrid salary under a split arrangement, the financial argument for joining Arsenal becomes easier to make purely on the image rights side.

He would earn more from the same brand deals simply by being somewhere that does not take half.

But then, being a Madrid player opens doors to certain global markets and brand relationships that the Arsenal name does not carry in the same way. Vinicius’s sponsorship deals were partly built on the back of his Champions League wins and his standing at one of the world’s biggest clubs. Whether the Arsenal platform can sustain and grow that portfolio is a valid question, and it is one his commercial team will carefully consider before any move is agreed, regardless of what the salary looks like.