Highlanders members have questioned the club’s wisdom to give free mileage to mobile network operator NetOne after Bosso donned a NetOne branded kit in their opening Chibuku Super Cup encounter against Bulawayo Chiefs last Sunday.
NetOne withdrew its sponsorship for Bosso last year, stating that it wanted to channel resources towards the fight against Covid-19 and bought out the partnership.
Bosso also parted ways with sportswear manufacture Roar before unveiling UK-based sports apparel OTB Looks as their technical partners.
The deal OTB Looks deal is worth US$300 000 over three years.
Highlanders’ members took to social media platforms to express
their unhappiness about the decision to continue using a NetOne branded kit.
“This is a company which abandoned Bosso and left the club in the middle of nowhere without a sponsor. This is a company making millions of dollars daily yet Highlanders keep marketing it with no financial returns or any form of benefit. Something is not adding up; poor business all day long,” wrote Bosso member Ezra ‘Tshisa’ Sibanda on Facebook.
Highlanders’ spokesperson Ronald Moyo said when the relationship with NetOne ended, the kit had already been printed, although the mobile network operator terminated its sponsorship in April last year and the partnership with OTB Looks was launched in November of the same year.
“The relationship is that they are our immediate former main sponsor. When they bought out the partnership, the kits were already printed,” said Moyo.
Even at the club house, there is a large NetOne branded billboard.
Moyo said once the club finds a new sponsor or anyone willing to buy the space, the NetOne logo will be removed.
At the moment Bosso haven’t found a sponsor and Moyo said they were ‘losing nothing’ by using kit branded with their former sponsor.
“At the moment we haven’t found a new sponsor or anyone interested in buying that space, so we lose nothing by having our former sponsor on our chests in a scenario where the kits were already printed when the agreement was mutually terminated. Our approach has been that we maintain relations with our former partners and sponsors because this becomes a spiderweb of our networks. In any case, the same NetOne paid the club in 2020, but did not get the mileage they had paid for,” Moyo said.-chronicle..zw
