By Satish Sekar © Satish Sekar (March 28^th 2026)

Africa’s Other 1966 Football Claim to Fame

Prolific sports author and journalist, Keir Radnedge, has covered many tournaments and written several books. He was, of course, aware of Africa’s major claim to football fame strike in 1966 – led by then African champions, Ghana, Africa boycotted England’s World Cup to protest against the lack of an automatic qualification spot for Africa.[1] However, he was unaware of another important African football event that took place in 1966.

After 40 years, Africa’s first international football tournament, the Gossage Cup ended – it was then rebranded as the East African Challenge Cup in 1967, which lasted five years. In 1973 it was rebranded again in its current incarnation, the CECAFA[2] Senior Challenge Cup.

The Gossage Cup, named after British soap manufacturing firm William Gossage & Sons, which had been a subsidiary of the controversial British soap giants, Lever Brothers[3] since 1911, had sponsored football in the region, culminating in the first international football tournament in African history bearing its name. 

Nevertheless, the Gossage Cup is an important part of Africa’s football history and its centenary deserves to be commemorated. Keir Radnedge agrees.

“I think it is important,” Radnedge told me in an exclusive interview on the subject (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otye4x8DFBs Keir Radnedge on the Gossage Cup Centenary Anniversary).

“Football history is important and it is extremely important to maintain and remember and mark the outstanding milestones in the game’s history and so, this would fall into that category.”

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[1] Africa won their protest against only one slot at the World Cup being allocated for Africa, Asia and Oceania combined. North Korea made their World Cup début at that World Cup and impressed greatly. Africa won an automatic slot at the next World Cup and Asia and Oceania was awarded with an automatic spot at the next World Cup as well. Morocco won the first slot reserved for Africa at México’s first World Cup in 1970, and Israel, then a member of the Asian Football Confederation, won the slot for the AFC and Oceania.

[2] CECAFA – the Council for East and Central Africa Football Associations.

[3] Among the subsidiaries owned by Lever Brothers was HCB – Huileries du Congo Belge which provided palm oil for luxury soaps that other Lever Brothers subsidiaries manufactured. HCB’s methods in the Belgian Congo as it then was, were brutal and outrageous. Hesketh Lever, later Viscount Leverhulme, was once a Liberal Party MP with a reputation for caring about the welfare of workers in the Wirral, but that did not translate to the treatment of African workers who had to be compelled into agreeing to work and live in poor conditions in his plantation in the Congo.