Bata was backing African sports stars 30 years ago - footwearbiz: Lead

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Bata was backing African sports stars 30 years ago

29/08/2013
To prove that there are very few genuinely new ideas under the sun, reports from Africa have been commemorating the impact 30 years ago of Ugandan footballer, Issa Sekatawa, a striker for the national team in the 1980s and early 1990s, who also played for a number of the country’s top clubs.

These days, an African player of Issa Sekatawa’s talent would be snapped up on a lucrative contract by one of Europe’s biggest football clubs before the age of 20, but his big move came in 1982 when he moved from provincial club Nytil FC in Jinja to the capital, Kampala, to play for Express FC.

After he topped the scoring charts in the Ugandan league in 1982 and 1983, footwear firm Bata launched an Issa Sekatawa sneaker, which proved highly popular in the local market. Endorsements with textile firms followed, and for a time in the 1980s, when a young Kampalan wore the face of sports star on his or her T-shirt, the star was most likely to be Issa Sekatawa and the writing underneath his slogan: ‘Goals are my business’.

A series of injuries brought an end to a great, but local, career in the early 1990s.


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