The English Premier league football team, Manchester United, has signed a record-breaking sponsorship deal worth forty-eight-million dollars with the mobile phone company Vodafone.

In addition to becoming the team's main sponsor with its logo on Manchester United kit, Vodafone will be providing information about the club via mobile phones.

The company says that it will also make video tapes of the team's games available through new-generation mobile phones in a few years' time.

The new Manchester sponsor is part of Vodaphone-AirTouch, which has taken over the German company Mannesmann, creating the world's biggest telecommunications company.

From the newsroom of the BBC World Service