One year after I revived Stylo Matchmakers, Nwankwo Kanu wore the boots at his own charity match—and brought the brand back to something close to its heart

There are moments when rebuilding an old football brand suddenly stops feeling like an idea.

It is not when you register the trademark.

It is not when the first boxes arrive.

It is not even when somebody buys a pair.

It becomes real when football accepts you back.

For Stylo Matchmakers, one of those moments came at The Hive, Barnet, on 30 September 2018.

Nwankwo Kanu had brought together a remarkable collection of former Premier League and African footballers for the Kanu Cup. Arsène Wenger was there, along with Robert Pirès, Michael Essien, Sol Campbell, William Gallas, Steve McManaman, Louis Saha, Jens Lehmann and Yakubu.

These were men who had won Premier League titles, FA Cups, European trophies and international honours.

And sitting among their kit were pairs of Stylo Matchmakers.

A football boot brand once worn by Pelé, George Best, Kevin Keegan and Billy Bremner was back in a dressing room full of elite footballers.

Then something better happened.

They put them on.

This Was Kanu’s Day

The most important part of the story is why everybody was there.

Kanu’s football career could easily have been taken away from him. After he joined Inter Milan in 1996, a medical examination revealed a serious problem with his aortic valve. He underwent surgery in Cleveland and faced the possibility that the career he had spent his life building was over.

He came back.

And then he built some career.

Ajax. Inter Milan. Arsenal. Portsmouth. Nigeria.

Olympic gold. Premier League titles. FA Cups. European success. Three World Cups and two African Footballer of the Year awards.

But what he did with the experience mattered more.

In 2000, Kanu established the Kanu Heart Foundation to help children from disadvantaged backgrounds in Africa receive life-saving treatment for heart conditions. By the time of the Barnet match, he said the foundation had helped save 542 lives.

That was what the Kanu Cup was about.

This was not another legends match assembled because somebody had discovered that nostalgia sells tickets. There was a purpose. Footballers gave their time. Supporters bought tickets. Sponsors contributed. Kanu used the profile football had given him to help children facing the fear he had once faced himself.

That gave the afternoon weight.

It also made Stylo’s involvement feel right in a way I did not fully appreciate at the time.

The Connection to Paul Ziff

Stylo Matchmakers had supported famous footballers before. Under its founder, Paul Ziff, the brand had signed some of the finest players in the world.

But Paul’s legacy was never confined to football boots.

During the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, he devoted an enormous amount of time and energy to helping children with heart disease. Through the Leeds committee of Variety, he worked with his team and Dr Gordon Williams to help establish the original children’s heart unit at Killingbeck Hospital.

Paul served twice as the committee’s Chairman and Chief Barker, first in 1975 and again in 1981. He organised major fundraising events, chaired the building committee for an extension to the hospital’s non-invasive heart wing between 1981 and 1983, and later helped secure funding for pioneering ultrasound equipment.

The work was serious. It was sustained. And it helped build the service that developed into today’s Leeds Congenital Heart Unit.

Paul received Variety’s Silver Heart from the then Prince Charles in recognition of his contribution. Decades later, the unit’s lead clinician said Paul’s role in its development could not be overstated.

So when Stylo supported Kanu’s charity match, the connection ran deeper than sponsorship.

Kanu had survived heart surgery and dedicated his life beyond football to helping children receive the treatment they needed.

Paul Ziff had built Stylo and dedicated much of his life beyond business to helping create better heart care for children in Leeds.

Different men. Different generations. Different continents.

The same instinct.

Use football to help somebody else live.

That is why supporting the Kanu Cup was more than a good opportunity for the revived brand. It was in keeping with the values of the man who had built Stylo Matchmakers in the first place.

We were not simply taking Paul’s name and his football history into a new era.

For one afternoon at Barnet, we were carrying forward something of his heart as well.

The Heritage Trap

When you bring back an old football brand, everybody naturally wants to talk about the past.

With Stylo, that is understandable. The archive is ridiculous.

Pelé. George Best. Kevin Keegan. Billy Bremner. Trevor Francis. European Cup winners. England internationals. Some of the best footballers of their generation.

That is an extraordinary inheritance.

But heritage can become a trap, because if everything important about your company happened before half your customers were born, you have not really revived a brand.

You have opened a museum.

When I brought Stylo Matchmakers back in 2017, I was not going to beat Nike and Adidas by spending more money than them. That would have been an impressively short business plan.

The challenge was relevance.

Could we put Stylo back on footballers?

Could we make the product credible again?

Could we stop saying, Look who used to wear Stylo, and start saying, Look who is wearing Stylo now?

Barnet gave us an answer.

The Six Who Wore Stylo

Stylo was not simply a sponsor’s logo attached to the event. The boots were actually used.

Nwankwo Kanu

This was his match, his charity and his cause.

And Kanu himself wore Stylo.

That mattered enormously to me. He was not holding up a boot for a photograph or standing beside a sponsor board because somebody had written it into an agreement. He laced them up and played football in them.

Ajax. Inter Milan. Arsenal. Portsmouth. Nigeria.

Olympic champion. Premier League champion. FA Cup winner. One of the great African footballers of his generation.

A year after I had brought Stylo back, Nwankwo Kanu was playing in the boots.

Kolo Touré

An Arsenal Invincible. A Premier League champion with Manchester City. An Africa Cup of Nations winner. More than 100 appearances for Ivory Coast.

He was also exactly the sort of footballer you hope somebody will be when you finally meet him.

No performance. No nonsense. No entourage conducting a feasibility study into whether Kolo Touré could possibly put on a football boot.

He picked up the Stylos, pulled them on and played.

Daniel Amokachi

Everton. Beşiktaş. Nigeria. Two World Cups. Olympic gold. An Africa Cup of Nations winner.

Amokachi had played on some of football’s biggest stages. At Barnet, he wore Stylo.

Jonathan Greening

Manchester United. Middlesbrough. West Bromwich Albion. Fulham.

Greening was part of Manchester United’s 1999 European Cup-winning squad and went on to build a long career in English football.

He wore them too.

Sébastien Bassong

Newcastle United. Tottenham Hotspur. Norwich City. Cameroon.

Premier League football. Champions League football. A proper centre-half who had spent years putting football boots through considerably more punishment than a marketing department ever could.

Eric Djemba-Djemba

Manchester United. Aston Villa. Cameroon.

His name became part of Premier League folklore, but beneath the jokes was an international footballer who had reached a level almost nobody ever reaches.

He wore Stylo too.

Six former internationals. Six men who had spent their careers in dressing rooms where the boots matter.

And there they were, wearing ours.

The Dressing Room Was the Marketing

This is probably the part modern sports marketing has forgotten.

Everything now needs a campaign, a hashtag, a launch film, an influencer strategy and a presentation explaining the “brand ecosystem”. Then somebody produces a report claiming millions of impressions because millions of people could not scroll past the advert quickly enough.

Football boots are simpler.

Make a good boot. Put it in front of a good footballer. If he trusts it, he wears it.

That is how football brands were built long before anybody had heard the phrase engagement metrics.

And that is what I loved about Barnet. The product was exactly where it belonged.

In a football dressing room.

Boot bags open. Players getting changed. Laces being pulled tight. Studs clicking against the concrete. Then the walk towards the tunnel. Then grass.

No explanation necessary.

The dressing room was the advertisement.

From History to Active Duty

The Kanu Cup did not suddenly turn Stylo Matchmakers into Nike.

Let us not rewrite history.

There was not a £100 million order waiting for me on Monday morning. Premier League agents were not queuing outside the office.

But Barnet gave Stylo something much harder to manufacture.

Credibility.

For the first time since the revival, we were not relying entirely on photographs from the 1960s and 1970s to explain why Stylo mattered. We had something happening now.

Pelé wearing Stylo was history.

George Best wearing Stylo was history.

Kevin Keegan wearing Stylo was history.

That history mattered. It gave the brand its standards and its reason for returning. But a living football brand has to be worn, marked, trusted and tested. It cannot survive forever behind glass.

At Barnet, Nwankwo Kanu picked up the boots. So did Kolo Touré, Daniel Amokachi, Jonathan Greening, Sébastien Bassong and Eric Djemba-Djemba.

They put them on, walked down the tunnel and played football.

Suddenly Stylo Matchmakers was not simply a famous name from football’s past.

It was back in active duty.

More Than a Sponsorship

That is why I still remember the Kanu Cup.

The corporate version is that Stylo sponsored a charity match.

The real story happened on the dressing-room floor.

A football brand that had disappeared from the game had found its way back into the hands of footballers. More importantly, it had returned at an event devoted to helping children with heart disease—the same cause to which Paul Ziff had given so much of himself.

Without Paul, there would have been no Stylo Matchmakers to revive. His eye for footballers built the name. His nerve put the boots on great players. His work away from the pitch showed that success was worth more when it was used in the service of others.

That afternoon joined both sides of his legacy.

The old Stylo had Pelé and Best.

The revived Stylo had Kanu and five fellow internationals.

Between them ran something more important than a logo: the belief that football could open doors, raise money and give children a better chance at life.

Pelé and Best wrote the first chapters.

On a concrete floor at Barnet, six internationals started writing the next one.