Bruce Bannister
Footballer (born 1947)
Bruce Ian Bannister (born 14 April 1947) is an English retired professional footballer who played as a striker, and is also a businessperson in sports shoe and apparel sales and distribution.
Football career
Born in Bradford, Bannister played for Leeds United, Bradford City, Bristol Rovers, Plymouth Argyle, Hull City and USL Dunkerque.
At Bradford City, he was known for scoring a "wonder goal" in 1968, an overhead kick.
While at Bristol Rovers, Bannister and teammate Alan Warboys developed the 'Smash and Grab' method of football.
Business career
Bannister founded Sportsshoes in 1982. In 1985, Sportsshoes launched its mail order service, and later became one of the first retailers to launch an e-commerce website. The business was later taken over by Bannister's son Brett, and became an exclusively online and mail order operation.
The public source identifies “Bruce Bannister” as footballer (born 1947). This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Bruce, Bannister and Footballer.
Why this record matters
A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “Bruce Bannister”, the useful work is to connect “footballer (born 1947)” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.
The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Oct 27, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q4977102. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1947, 1968, 1982 and 1985.
Later biographies can compress uncertainty and repeat inherited reputations, so apparently settled claims may still require comparison. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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Three-step research path
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This entry incorporates text from “Bruce Bannister” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.