Bulova and English Premier League football club Manchester United have announced a three-year sponsorship agreement which will see the watchmaker become the club’s official timekeeper.
Under the agreement, Bulova branding will be prominent on the club’s scoreboards at Old Trafford and feature on the stadium’s digital advertising boards during all Premier League home matches.
Bulova will also produce co-branded timepieces featuring the Manchester United crest, and some of these timepieces will be displayed around the Old Trafford stadium as well at the Club’s Aon Training Complex and its offices in Manchester, London and Hong Kong.
Announcing the partnership, Manchester United’s group managing director, Richard Arnold, said that although Bulova and Manchester United were from very different industries, they shared many common values.
“Founded within years of each other, we have both grown to become global leaders in our fields and the first to achieve many new innovations and milestones,” he said.
“We are confident that the popularity, craftsmanship and accessibility of Bulova’s products, combined with the club’s ever-growing global fan base will make this a successful partnership.”
Bulova Corporation president Gregory Thumm added that “innovation and thinking from the inside-out are common traits” shared by the football club and the watchmaker which both continuously strive to be the best in their respective fields.
“I believe that sharing these core values provides the chemistry for an amazing partnership between our two organisations,” he said.
Established in the US in 1875, Bulova is “a world leader in the manufacturing of timepieces and clocks”. The watchmaker “presented the first full lines of men’s and ladies’ wristwatches, invented the first clock radio in 1928 and was the first manufacturer to offer electric clocks in 1931”.
In addition its Bulova Accutron watch “revolutionised the way the world told time by offering the first fully electronic timekeeping, providing a technology of unprecedented accuracy that was used by NASA in numerous space missions including Apollo 11”.
Bulova has offices in New York, Canada, China, Hong Kong, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Switzerland and the UK along with distributors in 37 countries including Australia.