Aston Villa have reached an agreement with Visit Rwanda as the club’s new official sponsor.
Villa’s president of business operations Francesco Calvo has been tasked with bringing sponsorship to the club since joining in July 2025 and was required to add a main sponsor this summer under Premier League rules banning betting companies. Increasing revenue is paramount in the club’s fight to protect itself from financial sanctions.
Club sources familiar with the deal, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, said the partnership was the most lucrative in Villa’s history and an improvement on previous sponsor Betano. Club sources claim the agreement could be worth up to £20 million a year if bonuses are met.
Villa are exploring ways to increase revenue, such as becoming a stadium naming rights partner and sponsor of the Bodymoor Heath training ground. Villa unveiled their home kit last month, but it went on sale without an official sponsor. Calvo spent a lot of time negotiating the deal and recently finalized an agreement with Visit Rwanda.
In January, Villa announced that the training kit would be sponsored by Egyptian hotel chain El Gouna Red Sea. It belongs to Samikh Sawiris, brother of the villa’s co-owner Nassef Sawiris.
Visit Rwanda’s European partners currently include Paris Saint-Germain and Atlético Madrid, but the deal with Arsenal, worth £10 million a year, was concluded after eight years at the end of last season.
Visit Rwanda serves as the country’s national tourism brand, which aims to promote the country as a leading travel and investment destination, but this has proven controversial. As previously reported AthleticSponsorship deals with other European clubs have been the subject of protests and accusations of sports fraud.
Rwanda has been led since 2000 by President Paul Kagame of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF).
United Nations (UN) reports link the Rwandan government to the M23 movement, which the UN says is an “armed group” operating in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), a mineral-rich country that borders Rwanda to the west. In February 2025, the UN called on the Rwandan government to “cease support for M23 and immediately withdraw from DRC territory.”
The UN said the Rwandan army had “de facto” control of the M23, and in an August 2025 report said it had received “first-hand reports indicating that at least 319 civilians were killed by M23 militants supported by members of the Rwandan Defense Forces” a month earlier.
The UK government suspended aid to Rwanda in February 2025 due to its support for the M23 movement in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Following accusations that Rwanda was supporting M23, fans of Arsenal, Bayern Munich and PSG staged protests in 2025 against the country’s commercial ties to their clubs. PSG fans, for example, launched a petition “Stop visiting Rwanda”, which was signed by more than 75,000 people.