Lenovo is no stranger to sports partnerships. As the official tech partner of the FIFA World Cup 2026, FIFA Women’s World Cup in 2027 and Formula 1, the tech giant has come out of the blocks quickly and announced a number of initiatives. Football AI Pro will trawl billions of pages of FIFA's proprietary match data to deliver real-time tactical insights for coaches, players and analysts. A global partnership with David Beckham, who needs no introduction. Among the ever-expanding list is also the inclusion of hyper-realistic digital avatars with advanced 3D tech to plug directly into officiating tools and broadcast graphics to help referees make accurate decisions and give fans a clearer view of those tight, centimetre-level calls.
Everyone wants a piece of the global sports sponsorship market, now worth an estimated $123 billion. FIFA tournaments are among the few events on Earth where six billion people are watching the same moment play out.
For Lenovo, a $75 billion company long filed away in the public imagination as a PC maker, the brand bet is on something harder to pull off than a logo deal. Jeff Shafer, the company’s New York-based chief communications officer and vice president, corporate marketing group, points out that the pitch board is “the most expensive real estate on Earth.” The goal isn’t to occupy it. If people walk away thinking Lenovo simply sponsored the World Cup, he bluntly says, “We have failed”.
Campaign Asia caught up with Shafer during a recent visit to Hong Kong—a city he knows well, though he admitted he'd only ever seen it through the downtown area in Central. A local colleague pointed out that Hong Kong is an archipelago of some UNESCO-listed islands, beaches, thick hiking trails less than thirty minutes on foot from almost anywhere in the city. He'd been staring at the skyline and missed the landscape entirely. It's not a bad description of what Lenovo is asking the world to do with its brand.
Campaign: Before we get into the mechanics of the FIFA partnership—why sport at all? There's an obvious commercial logic, but Lenovo is a B2B-leaning technology company and sports partnership is a highly competitive, saturated field. Talk about the strategy and rationale here.
Shafer: For a lot of brands, sport is about awareness and visibility. My logo on a pitch board. And for a consumer brand, I don't want to speak for the Coca-Colas and Adidases of the world, but they're there for visibility, consumer awareness, credibility. That's kind of the end game.
For Lenovo, the relationship with FIFA started as a technology discussion. From our standpoint, this is not about slapping our logo on a pitch board, a stadium, a tablet, or a jersey. It’s about how we can leverage technology to democratise sport, and expand it and bring it to more people. That helps level the playing field between the haves and the have-nots.
Our CEO's initial question to us was whether there was an opportunity for genuine technology integration and innovation here? If there is, then we can build the brand play around that.
Campaign: The World Cup pitch board is described in the industry as the most valuable brand real estate on the planet but Lenovo has been deliberate about making visibility secondary. Walk us through what you’re delivering as the tech partner.
Shafer: The most significant initiative is what we call Football AI Pro. FIFA has the equivalent of about 500 billion pages of proprietary data on teams and players — secure data that ESPN doesn't get its hands on, that the Argentinian team doesn't get its hands on. We're building the AI engine behind that, so teams, scouts, and analysts can assess their opposition and prepare better.
I’ll explain why it matters. England, France, and Argentina have 20 match analysts and millions of dollars in funding. They're fine. But look at Curaçao… the smallest team ever to qualify for the World Cup and they don't have that. Now, with a tool that operates in every language and every environment, they have the analytic capability of video, graphics, and multimodal analysis that big teams used to have.
The mission from FIFA was essentially that if your tier-one analysts say this is better than what they can get publicly, it's a win. And that's where we are.
We're also developing hyper-realistic avatars using a 2,432-camera scanning system to render every player. Right now, when graphics come up for an offside call, they're quite clunky and don't look like the actual players. If the graphics aren't accurate when a call comes down to centimetres—a boot length, a shoulder—that's a real problem. Once we get those avatars accurate, it gives officials more confidence and fans more reason to trust the call.
Q: With all that automation and the level of precision, aren’t you stripping the fun and humanity away from sports? Wimbledon faced a significant backlash when it moved to automated line calls. How do you think about that tension?
It's a great point, because that tension is real and a lot of people were very upset at Wimbledon’s decision to take away the humans from line calls.
FIFA's philosophy is that they're committed to technology that makes the game better without removing the human element. And they've been quite deliberate about where that line sits. One example: we talked with them about using AI, robots, and holograms to provide guidance and support inside stadiums for fans. And they said no. They have smart wayfinding — you'll have an app on your phone that helps you navigate and tells you how long lines are. But they said, people love the volunteers. The communities, the schools, the colleges that sign up to work the games, that's part of who they are. Don't replace those people. Just make it better for those people.
So there's a balance being deliberately maintained. The technology is there to improve the accuracy and experience of the game, not to strip out what makes it feel alive.
Campaign: What is the single overarching business metric that determines whether this partnership has worked?
Shafer: If the end result of this is that the world knows Lenovo sponsored the World Cup, we have failed. That is not the goal. Getting a headline that says "Lenovo sponsors World Cup" is not difficult.
What we need to see by the end of this cycle, by the end of this year, is a genuine change in perception on two fronts. One: people view us more around the full stack, and not just as a PC and device company. Two: they view us as an AI powerhouse. Those are the two most important marketing metrics.
Let me give you a concrete example of why I believe this is achievable. At our Tech World event at the Sphere in Las Vegas in January, before the show started, 13% of the 14,000 people in that building thought of us as an AI leader. After the show, which featured FIFA, Formula 1, and a full demonstration of our AI capabilities, 67% of people walked out perceiving us as an AI leader. That's a massive shift in one contained event. The question is whether we can scale that perception change globally.
And that perception shift translates directly into commercial outcomes. It makes it easier to sell those solutions. It makes it easier to move into those businesses. It makes it easier to take a company that buys 100,000 PCs from us and turn them into a company buying AI solutions. So ultimately, it has to drive profitable growth and create new opportunities. In fact, because of FIFA and Formula 1, we are now actively investing in building a sports vertical, taking all of these technologies and applying them to other sports. There's no reason why what we're doing with FIFA doesn't apply to cricket, basketball, any number of sports. We see an enormous commercial opportunity there.
Q: On a global scale, how do you rigorously measure something as arbitrary as perception change? Surveys at a single event are one data point. What does the measurement infrastructure look like across a six-billion-viewer tournament?
A handful of things. We work with Neilson and Katar and other global market research partners, and a handful of others, including Wasserman and Clutch Sports, specifically on the FIFA partnership. We'll be doing extensive market research and surveys throughout the tournament cycle.
But you also look at the hard numbers. Website traffic before the tournament versus during the opening matches, versus during the final. Transactions. Are our sales teams getting the meetings they weren't getting before? Are existing enterprise customers expanding into new product categories?
And there's the traditional coverage of media value, social media engagement, and earned media—all of those. Ultimately, we'll look at the business. We'll have to make a clear-eyed assessment of whether we got enough out of this investment to continue making it at this scale. That's the honest answer.
Q: Media is in such a fragmented state and even tentpole events like FIFA don’t guarantee the same universal reach – how do you make a case for this massive investment in partnership to the board and the CFO?
That is right but if you leverage the sport itself, you can actually overcome much of that fragmentation. Across the different formats, sport allows you to have a unified, coherent presence across TV, digital, out-of-home, live events, and customer experiences — all simultaneously, in your most important markets. Very few properties can do that. In a way, sports helps you overcome fragmentation rather than just accept it.
To the bigger question of how you justify it to the CFO, the board, the shareholders — I give a lot of credit to Yang Qing, our CEO, because this genuinely came from his direction. He has a clear aspiration for Lenovo. We're a $75-80 billion company. He believes we will be a $100 billion company within a few years. He knows that to get there, we need to elevate the brand, for us and for our partners. We need people to know we're more than a PC company. We need to be known globally as a major player, in the same breath as the other technology brands the world already knows well.
For him, investments like Formula 1 and FIFA deliver near-term buzz and sales activity, yes. But more fundamentally, they're about elevating the brand trajectory over time.
Q: The FIFA Women’s World Cup 2023 was the most attended in history, and the Matildas’ semi-final was the most-watched sporting event ever in Australia, and that moment helped push women’s sport past a long-standing plateau. Yet there's still a visible gap between the money flowing into women's properties versus men's. What's holding brands back?
We would not have done the deal for the Men's World Cup without the Women's World Cup. There are a lot of reasons behind it. The technology we're building for the men's tournament this summer will be more advanced by the time we reach the Women's World Cup in Brazil in 2027, because we'll have a year of testing and iteration behind us.
One of the things that's exciting about the women's game, especially with FIFA, is the appetite for innovation.
There's enormous pressure on the men's World Cup. Two billion people are watching one game and nothing can go wrong. How much risk can you reasonably take? But with another year's lead time, a slightly different audience profile, there's more willingness from FIFA, from teams, from everyone involved to try new things and push further. We're already in conversations with the FIFA team here about what we couldn't quite pull off for the men's game that we want to deliver for the women's.
Some of the commercial gap is just down to numbers. Six billion people will watch the men's game. Two billion will watch the final. You won't get those figures on the women's side, and costs are ultimately calibrated to scale. That's a market reality.
Smart brands recognise that women's sport offers some distinct, underappreciated advantages. There's more room to innovate and take risks. There's a very strong grassroots and community connection. And the athletes tend to be even more directly connected to their fan bases than the men. Women's football has already been bigger in the US than men's football for years. It’s also very popular in Japan.
The Women's World Cup in Brazil next year will be the largest women's sporting event ever held — the most countries, the most viewers, the most partner investment.
Source: Campaign Asia-Pacific
