Adidas and English Premier League side Manchester United have tapped none other than Irish thespian sensation Barry Keoghan to front a new star-studded campaign showing off the club’s new kit and training wear.
The Banshees of Inisherin and Saltburn actor is a boyhood United fan and even has a familial connection to the Red Devils, with second cousin Frank Stapleton playing for the fallen giants during 1981-7, scoring 78 goals in 288 games and winning two FA Cups in the process. Stapleton also features in the film.
Tracking Keoghan through the red brick terraced houses synonymous with Manchester, the Irish actor arrives at the club’s training ground to watch a match, narrating the entire way, with Underworld’s seminal 1996 techno tune “Born Slippy”. You’ll recognise it if you’ve seen the equally iconic film from the same year, Trainspotting.
Adidas’ new kit for Manchester United (along with a host of other clubs) features a return to the brand’s classic Trefoil logo, rather than the more commonly used Performance logo for sportswear. The Trefoil logo more closely resembles a three-pronged leaf than the sloping three stripes of the Performance logo.
Manchester United, of course, is one of the most recognisable brands in the world and arguably the most-followed sports team in the world. However, after dominating the English game through the 90s and noughties — winning 11 Premier League titles in the two decades — it has hit a bit of a slump in recent years, following questionable transfers and ownership strife. Its last Premier League title came in 2013, though the team did win the 2024 FA Cup.
The club’s new this season front-of-shirt sponsor phone processor manufacturer Snapdragon is worth $US75 million ($AU113 million) annually for the next three years, with an option to extend for another two years. Snapdragon is a subsidiary of US firm Qualcomm. Its CMO, Don McGuire, told The Athletic that the deal makes “a lot of sense”.
“Football is obviously the biggest sport in the world,” McGuire said. “That provides great reach, and the premium football is Premier League.
“We could have done a deal with the Premier League centrally. We could have done a deal just with F1 versus going in at the team level. But philosophically, teams are where passion is. People love teams, they love drivers, they love players. They don’t necessarily care about the league. The league is just there to set rules and put on a show. So, we chose Manchester United for several reasons. One is scale: United have 1.1billion fans worldwide.”
“You look at jersey sales worldwide,” he said.
“They sell more than anybody. You look at engagement on social media. We broke it down by country; 253 million in China. China is their biggest fanbase, which is a really important market for me. India is their second largest fanbase and then the U.S. is third.
“It’s about the global reach of the brand and the franchise in markets that I care about, because Snapdragon is a global brand. So I need to think about these things outside of the UK, outside of the competition between Man City and Man United. That’s great drama, great fodder and great understory. But I’m looking big. I’m looking global. What is going to give me best bang for my buck for a return on investment? That’s how we narrowed in on Manchester United.”
Despite this, the deal required a lot of pushing from Maguire.
“I was pushing a boulder up a hill a little bit, because we’ve never done anything this big before,” he said.
“The equivalent of a broadcast exposure for a front-of-shirt partner for Manchester United in any given match could be as high as a Super Bowl advertisement. So imagine 40-plus matches a year. ‘You can give me hundreds of millions of dollars for me to go and just advertise around the world, or we can do this for much more cost-effective numbers’.”
Also starring in the film are current United wunderkind Kobbie Mainoo and Alejandro Garnacho and Scotland international Scott McTominay, as well as former player and Dutch international Jaap Stam, moonlighting as a linesman.
“My uncles and that followed United,” Keoghan told Manchester United’s official website, “and Frank playing for United, it was a sort of a given [that I’d be a Red].
“I used to joke. I used to call Frank my uncle. He’s my second cousin. But I used to say: ‘My uncle played for Manchester United’.
“United was a big, big presence,” he continued. “A lot of the Irish went over [to England] – Liam Brady, Frank, there was a lot of them. So you kind of picked one or the other, and my household was United.
“I just remember having United jerseys growing up and getting the David Beckham haircut, the mohawk. I remember getting that, and them doing it wrong in the hairdressers. They done it kind of slanty, so I kinda had to live with that! But it was a big influence.”
