Guinness Spent Match Days with Real Fans from All 20 Premier League Clubs for New Campaign

Good things come to those who wait - and football fans have been waiting patiently for the new season of the English Premier League to kick off. With the 2025/26 season starting this weekend, Guinness has launched a new campaign that features fans from all 20 clubs, and celebrates the sense of community that is spread across the globe.

It’s Guinness’s second season as the Official Beer and Official Non-Alcoholic Beer of the Premier League. As a brand that has traditionally been closely associated with rugby, football was a new territory for the Diageo-owned stout. This time around, Somnath Dasgupta says the aim is to build on the foundations and deepen the connection with real fans.

“Consistency is the name of the game. We’re in it for the long haul,” says Somnath, global marketing director, Guinness “Last year our goal was all about landing ourselves in the Premier League space, it was all about association, it was about activation at scale and the role Guinness can start to play in football.

“This year we go one step further in terms of we start having conversations with the community, it’s much more engagement-focused now. It starts to get deeper into brand meaning and how we use the platform to drive connection with the brand. Ultimately, at the end of the day what we’re trying to do is to establish our role and our point of view in sport, which is around really shining the spotlight on fans.”

​Last year’s campaign featured the Scottish Island of Eriskay, where 10% of the population play for the only local football team - this year the globetrotting campaign features everything from parties in apartments overlooking stadiums to fancy fan nail art. And while last year’s launch campaign was pulled together in just four months, from signing the deal to launch, for the second season they’ve been able to really take their time. That’s because this campaign was shot with real fans throughout the 2024/25 season, spending time with real fan communities on match day.

“We shot it on actual match days. All of these are real fans, real stories, starting with the DJ who plays at Stamford Bridge on his balcony every game to the Newcastle supporter who has her nails done. There’s so much depth in these stories - it still gives me goosebumps! It is spine-tingling stuff,” says Somnath, noting that Stink director Tom Green, a long-time collaborator, was “like a kid in a candy store”.

According to Somnath, the big insight that really moves this year’s campaign along is that football is as much about the sense of belonging as it is about the game itself.

“There’s a chance that you pin everything on the game itself, the 90 minutes of the match, and that’s the approach a lot of marketeers have taken historically. I think the biggest learning for us is the real communities, where our centre of gravity lies, are just beyond the 90 minutes. Of course the 90 minutes is the most important part of a football game, but the real power of communion is around the game and what happens in the periphery of the game.

“It took a while to get there,” Somnath says. “The one big insight for us was that football is about belonging and shared emotions. And it’s not just about the highs of the game - and that’s what most people gravitate towards, the wins - it’s also the real feeling of dejection. It’s both sides of the emotional spectrum.”

The ambition of the campaign to really encompass the sense of belonging that spans the whole league is palpable. While they could have spotlighted five or six club communities, the Guinness team was determined to showcase communities of fans linked to all 20 Premier League clubs. “Why 20 clubs? We believe that the Premier League is a function of the clubs and we wanted to deliberately make an effort on ensuring that we feel that everyone in the league is included,” says Somnath. “We are doing some targeted partnerships with a few clubs but the essence of the brand is inclusion. Everybody’s welcome. So that’s why we chose to engage with all the clubs, all the communities, where the richest stories will be.”

And that sense of inclusion extends to fans around the world. The nature of the way the campaign was constructed, heading to local fan communities, means that there’s something distinctly English about the places shown in the visuals. However, the team was keen to make sure that there was a balance between that authentic Englishness that is a big part of the league’s international appeal while also providing something for fans wherever they are from to connect with.

“We have to balance the authenticity of the game, which is a deeply English game - it used to be called the English Premier League, it’s not any more. It’s in real locations, real spaces, it’s unmistakably the English Premier League. But we wanted to showcase the fact that the Premier League is not just an English event, it’s a global event. If you look at the representation of fans that we have we have people of diverse colours, some from different countries. We’ve got stories about people who come from Uganda, Punjabi fans. We have, through representation, shown how broad the appeal of the Premier League is beyond the traditional heartlands.

“We truly believe that true and good insights transcend geographies and this feeling that it’s all about the sense of belonging and shared emotions, that insight is true for everybody in the world. The films are going to be representations based on that insight, which I’m very very confident, working with our markets around the world, resonates everywhere.”

Advertising nerds will also note that the name of this campaign is ‘Lovely Day for a Guinness’. It’s one of the classic Guinness advertising lines that has been used throughout its history in Great Britain and Ireland. “It is now going to be the overarching brand platform across everything and sports is launching that platform globally,” says Somnath.

‘Lovely Day for a Guinness’ is debuting in Great Britain and Ireland tonight, during Sky Sports’ live coverage of Liverpool FC vs. AFC Bournemouth, and NBC in the USA. The campaign will be featured across at least 215 live games on Sky Sports this season and on NBC in the United States, it will air weekly with more than 200 commercials scheduled to run throughout the season. (In anticipation of the new season, and a reflection of the growth of both Guinness and the beautiful game in the USA, a separate campaign film also launched this week. Hope, narrated by Gary Neville, was created by Uncommon to get American fans hyped ahead of the season.)