There are some days in business that sound slightly ridiculous when you say them out loud.
One of mine involved sitting in the Leeds United boardroom, talking football boots with Richard Keys and Andy Gray, while being filmed for beIN Sports.
I was at Elland Road as a guest of Andrea Radrizzani, then owner of Leeds United.
I had been invited into the directors’ box.
Leeds then allowed us to use the boardroom to film the interview.
And I had a brilliant time.
But the thing I remember most wasn’t the directors’ box.
It wasn’t the boardroom.
It wasn’t even knowing the programme would be watched by millions of football fans around the world.
It was what Richard Keys and Andy Gray said about Stylo.
They called it an iconic brand.
That stayed with me.
Because they didn’t need me to explain why Stylo mattered.
They already knew.
Watch the beIN Sports interview with Richard Keys and Andy Gray
They knew Stylo
I went into the interview ready to tell the story.
Pelé.
George Best.
Kevin Keegan.
Trevor Francis.
The black boots.
The history.
The players.
The years when Stylo Matchmakers stood alongside the biggest football brands in the world.
But Richard and Andy knew the brand already.
Properly knew it.
This wasn’t two presenters politely humouring somebody who had found an old football name and stuck it back on a boot.
They understood what Stylo had been.
They understood its place in football.
And sitting inside Leeds United made the conversation even better.
Because Leeds was part of the Stylo story too.
The Leeds connection
I told them about Stylo’s connection with Leeds United and the era of football the brand came from.
This was football before every boot needed a launch film.
Before fluorescent colourways.
Before £250 signature editions.
Before children were told that another few grams shaved off a boot might somehow turn them into Lionel Messi.
Black leather.
Studs.
Mud.
Football.
Stylo belonged to that world.
So there was something fitting about sitting inside the Leeds United boardroom talking about bringing the brand back.
You could feel the history of the place.
And there I was trying to revive a football brand with plenty of history of its own.
It didn’t feel like manufactured nostalgia.
It felt connected.
Then we talked about the business
This was the part I really wanted to explain.
I hadn’t brought Stylo back simply to put an old badge on an expensive football boot and cash in on nostalgia.
That would have completely missed the point.
My model was much simpler.
Sell directly to football clubs and academies.
Cut out layers of traditional retail margin.
Reduce unnecessary costs.
Then pass some of those savings back to the clubs, academies, players and parents buying the boots.
Richard and Andy understood it immediately.
More importantly, they supported it.
Because why shouldn’t football work like that?
If you can make a proper football boot and get it directly to the people who need it for less money, why add another layer of cost simply because that is how the industry has always worked?
Football already has enough people taking a percentage.
A £200 boot doesn’t make you a better footballer
The sportswear industry became very good at convincing young players that performance could be purchased.
New colour.
New material.
New technology.
New signature edition.
New boot.
Every season.
And somewhere at the end of all that marketing is usually a parent putting their bank card into a machine.
I never really bought into it.
A kid doesn’t need a £200 boot to control a football. He needs boots that fit, a ball, somewhere to play, and adults who don’t coach every bit of imagination out of him.
Stylo could never compete with Nike or Adidas by trying to spend more than them.
That would have been madness.
But we could compete by asking a better question.
How much of the retail price actually needs to exist?
Sitting in that boardroom told me something
There is a strange thing about heritage brands.
Huge corporations spend fortunes trying to manufacture what some old brands already possess.
History.
Recognition.
Stories.
Players.
Emotion.
Authenticity.
You cannot create decades of football culture with a marketing campaign.
Stylo already had it.
Richard Keys and Andy Gray recognising that immediately was powerful.
They didn’t call Stylo an interesting startup.
They didn’t call it a retro brand.
They called it an iconic brand.
There is a huge difference.
I had brought the business back.
But I hadn’t created what made Stylo special.
Football had done that decades before me.
My responsibility was not to screw it up.
And then millions of people saw it
The programme went out through beIN Sports to a huge international football audience.
For an independent British football boot company, that exposure was massive.
Think about the setting.
Leeds United.
Elland Road.
The boardroom.
Richard Keys.
Andy Gray.
A global football programme.
And sitting in the middle of it was Stylo Matchmakers.
A British football boot brand that had almost disappeared.
No giant agency.
No billion-dollar parent company.
No Nike-sized advertising budget.
Just a remarkable football history and a different idea about how boots could be sold.
For that moment, Stylo was back exactly where it belonged.
Inside football.
But television exposure isn’t distribution
This is one of the lessons I understand much better now.
You can appear in front of millions of people.
You can have famous broadcasters praise the brand.
You can have legendary footballers in your history.
You can have a strong product.
You can have a brilliant story.
And the next morning you still have to sell football boots.
The big brands don’t dominate football simply because they make good products.
They dominate because they control the routes into football.
Retail.
Academy agreements.
Club contracts.
Player sponsorship.
Distribution.
Marketing.
Relationships.
Shelf space.
You don’t beat that machine by trying to build a smaller version of the same machine.
You go around it.
That was the thinking behind selling directly to clubs and academies.
I thought I was talking about boots
Looking back, this is the part I find most interesting.
At the time, I thought I was explaining a football boot business.
I wasn’t really.
I was talking about football economics.
Who creates the value?
Who takes the margin?
Who pays for it?
Why do parents, supporters, players and grassroots clubs so often sit at the bottom of the chain while everybody above them takes something?
Those questions have stayed with me.
They influence how I think about academies.
Agents.
Clubs.
Ticket prices.
Ownership.
Leagues.
Supporter investment.
And football brands.
The principle is remarkably simple.
Remove unnecessary gatekeepers.
Get closer to the people actually using the product.
And when efficiencies are created, don’t automatically send every penny upwards.
Push some of the benefit back down.
One of my favourite days in football
I’ve had some strange adventures through football.
But being Andrea Radrizzani’s guest at Leeds United, sitting in the directors’ box and then filming in the boardroom with Richard Keys and Andy Gray is right up there.
I loved it.
Not because it made Stylo look important.
Because for a few minutes it reminded me that Stylo already was important.
People who had spent their lives around football remembered it.
They knew the players.
They knew the history.
They knew what the name represented.
Richard Keys and Andy Gray didn’t need convincing.
They called Stylo Matchmakers what it was.
An iconic football brand.
Bypassing the Middleman
We built Stylo Matchmakers to give clubs, academies, players and parents an alternative to the £200 spaceship boot.
A proper football boot.
A proper football brand.
And a business model designed to put more value back into football rather than into layers of retail margin.
Running a youth club, academy or football organisation?
Get in touch with Stylo Matchmakers about direct-to-club pricing and partnership opportunities.
Want to see the current range?
Explore Stylo Matchmakers and see what we’re building.
Because the point was never to become another giant sportswear corporation.
The point was to prove football still had room for an iconic independent brand that did things differently.