It's not often Tom's Hardware reports on the sports world, but Qualcomm has forced our hand with a major advertising move: Qualcomm has made its Snapdragon logo the new front-of-shirt sponsor for Manchester United Football Club, the most popular football (soccer) team in the United Kingdom.
The Premier League team's claimed 1.1 billion fans will now be presented with the Snapdragon logo on all three variants (home, away, and third) of the Manchester United gameday kit. This massive claimed number is largely thanks to the popularity of Cristiano Ronaldo, one of the most famous athletes of all time, who played with Man United from 2003-2022.
A single football match at Old Trafford, Manchester United's home pitch, gets more exposure than a single Super Bowl ad, and making Snapdragon the front-and-center brand image associated with the team is a powerful move by Qualcomm. Neither Qualcomm nor Manchester United wishes to share how much the deal costs, but reports from Bloomberg indicate a price tag of $75 million per year for at least five years.
Qualcomm makes the major advertising move just as the news cycle is beginning to cool down from the release of the Snapdragon X Series processor in Microsoft's Copilot+ PCs. The new laptop processors have taken the PC world by storm for being the first Arm-based processors to power modern mainstream Windows laptops, providing higher efficiency and longer-lasting battery life than Windows thin-and-light competitors.
Microsoft and Windows had a terrible PR event over the launch of the Copilot+ PCs, thanks to the now-recalled Recall function, which was decried as a major security flaw. Perhaps Qualcomm's Manchester United announcement couldn't come at a better time to separate itself from Microsoft's PR nightmare.
Qualcomm's Manchester United partnership isn't new, having been a major sponsor of the football club since the beginning of the 2023 season. After a year of brand activations and awareness, Manchester United followers polled before the jersey change reported that more than 65% are aware of Snapdragon, and 80% of that group said they loved it. Qualcomm has pledged to increase brand activations and perks for Snapdragon Insiders, the official "fan club" for the brand.
Soccer, or football to most of the world, has a tradition of front-of-shirt sponsors becoming associated with a team's public identity. Growing up in Seattle, the Seattle Sounders iconic green and blue jersey design with the Xbox logo front-and-center convinced me to give up PlayStation and Nintendo for Team Green. Qualcomm surely hopes that the Snapdragon logo's placement will similarly attract a new cadre of fans to Snapdragon-powered devices — or, at the very least, get more Man United shirt sales than the dreadful TeamViewer-branded jerseys of the 2021-2022 seasons.
