Aiteo extends sponsorship deal by four years

Aiteo has signed a new four-year deal to sponsor the Confederation of Africa Football (CAF) Awards holding in Dakar, Senegal, on Tuesday. Aiteo beat CAF Champions League title sponsor, Orange (which wanted to take over the event) to the deal as promoter of the CAF Player of the Year for Men and Women.

Already, voters in the 2018 CAF Awards have picked Egypt’s Mohamed Salah, Sadio Mane of Senegal and Gabon’s Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang as finalists. Salah was last year’s winner and he followed up his 2017 achievements with another fine 12-month performance, breaking the Premier League’s 38-game season goals record, while leading Liverpool to the Champions League final, before ending the year on top of the league table.

Team-mate, Mane came second in 2017 and has been similarly influential in the Reds’ success, forming a devastating forward line along with Salah and Roberto Firmino, and netted in the Kiev final defeat to Real Madrid. Salah and Mane both went to the World Cup, with Egypt and Senegal respectively, but neither made it past the group stage.

In the women class, Nigeria’s duo of Asisat Oshoala, Francesca Ordega and South Africa’s Tembi Kgatlana are the nominees for the award. Oshoala and Ordega may lose out in Dakar, as footballlive.ng reports that many soccer pundits are rating them behind South Africa’s Chrestinah Kgatlana.

Although Oshoala is the current award holder and three-time winner, while Ordega dazzled at the last African Women Cup of Nations in Ghana, Kgatlana was that competition’s most valuable player and top goal scorer, such that pundits tip her to become the second South African to be voted best, after Noko Matlou in 2008.