The archive · Marketing & Growth · Marketing decision · 2024–2025
Sela's haptic Sound Shirt lets deaf fans feel Newcastle's crowd roar — Grand Prix
A NUFC replica shirt woven with sensors turns stadium noise into pulses and waves, so deaf fans feel the match — 5B reach, adopted by La Liga and Serie A.
Sela · Newcastle United
What it had to solve
Sela, the Saudi live-experience company and Newcastle United's principal sponsor, needed to prove its 'Spectacular Experiences' promise was real. Research with the UK charity RNID found deaf fans felt excluded from matchdays — 71% of deaf fans believed technology could make live sport more accessible.
How it works
For 12 million UK adults with hearing loss, the electric atmosphere of live football is largely inaccessible, and traditional accessibility solutions left them feeling excluded. Sela, the Saudi live-experience company sponsoring Newcastle United, saw this as an opportunity to make its 'Spectacular Experiences' promise concrete.
Working with VML, charity partner RNID and technology firm CuteCircuit, Sela built the Sela Sound Shirt: a replica NUFC shirt woven with haptic actuators that convert the sound of the crowd into real-time tactile sensations — pulses, waves and tingles that let deaf and hard-of-hearing fans feel the game. The shirt debuted at St. James' Park on 13 April 2024, ahead of Deaf Awareness Week, before 50,000 people in-stadium and millions on TV, with Sela donating its front-of-shirt sponsorship to RNID for that match.
The launch film of deaf fans experiencing the crowd for the first time went viral. The campaign reached 5.08 billion people globally, produced a 520%+ surge in traffic to Sela's social channels, and was covered by 771 media outlets. It won the Grand Prix for Brand Experience & Activation at Dubai Lynx 2025, and the technology has since been adopted by La Liga and Serie A clubs, turning a one-off activation into an accessibility standard.
Why it lands
- It inverted a sponsorship cliché: instead of putting the sponsor's name on the shirt, Sela put the sponsor's promise into the shirt.
- Research with RNID grounded the idea in a real, quantified gap — 71% of deaf fans believed technology could improve their matchday experience.
- Haptic wearables were not new, but no one had applied them to translating live crowd noise for deaf fans at a Premier League match.
- The launch match donation of the shirt sponsorship to RNID made the brand action itself newsworthy, driving earned media.
- The emotional launch film — deaf fans feeling the roar for the first time — turned the technology into a shareable story, not a spec sheet.
What it did
The campaign reached 5.08 billion people globally, drove a 520%+ surge in traffic to Sela's social channels, earned 771 media outlets and 15,400 mentions, and won the Dubai Lynx 2025 Grand Prix for Brand Experience & Activation.
What you can take
When a brand's promise is 'experience', find the audience that experience excludes and rebuild it for them — fixing the exclusion made the sponsorship itself the story.
Since then
Unsilence the Crowd became a global benchmark for accessible sport: the Sela Sound Shirt has been adopted by clubs in Spain's La Liga and Italy's Serie A, with Sela in talks with other major rights holders. The campaign also swept industry awards, including the Dubai Lynx 2025 Grand Prix for Brand Experience & Activation, a Clio, and top honours at The Drum Awards and Digiday Awards Europe, while Newcastle United and Sela kept expanding accessible matchday experiences.
Sources
- Unsilence the Crowd — Sela and Newcastle United
- Unsilence The Crowd — Sela x Newcastle United
- All the 2025 Dubai Lynx Awards
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