The brand name of Gola is one that will resonate with the great majority of British men over the age of 40. If you owned any of their products then it’s most likely to have been trainers, tracksuits or vinyl bags, but for many years Gola was active in football boot manufacture too. This post takes a retrospective look back at some of those boots and the advertising that supported them.

We focus firstly on Gola’s 1960s advertising push to become big players in the rapidly expanding sportswear market. While football boots were never really a core segment for Gola to the same extent as a lot of their market rivals, it was one the company felt it had to be involved in. Creating the perception that this was a serious sporting company was important to help create a halo effect for the brand by association.

The strategy of using player and team endorsements to sell boots followed the industry’s marketing template to the letter. Gola lacked the budgets of Adidas or Puma to sign up the biggest names, but they still built a decent stable of player tie-ins as we see from the gallery. Gola had a long running association with Liverpool dating from the mid-60s that became increasingly valuable as the Anfield club became a more dominant force in the English game.