SPORT > Fancy footwork

Next month one of the bitterest contests at the football World Cup will take place not between national teams but between sporting goods companies. The three stripes, swoosh and leaping cat - otherwise known as the logos of Adidas, Nike and Puma - will all be jostling for position in the month-long competition in Germany.


Adidas and Puma, the two German companies, are under particular pressure to perform. Adidas, the bigger of the two, intends “to dominate” the competition by spending an estimated €150m on marketing. Puma, which has only a fifth of Adidas’s revenues, is sponsoring more teams than any other brand. The fight is global, but at its heart is a story of a tiny Bavarian town and a bitter split between two brothers.


The two companies are still based in Herzogenaurach - a town of 23,000 inhabitants, where residents seem more likely to wear discount-store clothing than the latest trends.


Pitch Invasion by Barbara Smit, a journalist at the industry bible Sporting Goods Intelligence, is at its best when detailing the extraordinary genesis of the two companies and their fierce rivalry. Two brothers, Adolf and Rudolf Dassler, set up a sports footwear company in the 1920s. The idea of shoes just for sport was unusual at the time, but they were soon pulling off triumphs such as equipping Jesse Owens for the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.


The 1948 split between the brothers - the details of which are laid bare for the first time in this book - divided not only the Dassler family but the entire town with Adidas (derived from the name Adi Dassler) on one side of the river Aurach and Puma (a softer form of a similarly derived Ruda) on the other.


Today, executives from both companies reserve a special sort of enmity for the other; Adidas attempts not to belittle itself by talking about its smaller rival, while Puma believes its cross-town competitor is a country bumpkin compared to its own urbaneness.


Pitch Invasion is a breathless account of how the rivalry brought money and sharp branding into sport - long before upstarts from across the Atlantic such as Nike burst on to the scene in the 1970s and 1980s. Telling anecdotes abound on each page, from the petty - Adidas officials cancelling Puma’s hire cars at big sporting events - to the commercial - Pele and Mark Spitz flashing their logos when they shouldn’t, just to earn their sponsorship dollars.


Even more striking than the rivalry between the brothers, however, is that between the generations in the Adidas family. Adi Dassler, through his focus on product and relationships with sportsmen such as the successful West German football team from the 1954 World Cup, had soon beaten his brother. But his more formidable rival was his son, Horst.


Adi made Horst head of Adidas in France but the son had soon constructed a parallel network. Distributors would face two pitches, one from Adidas Germany and one from Adidas France. Often they would be caught in the middle of family crossfire. Horst even managed to build up an entire sporting goods conglomerate - consisting of Le Coq Sportif, Arena and Pony and the sporting rights company ISL - without his parents knowing. When they found out, it broke their hearts.


Beyond the company rivalry, the book runs out of some steam. It also highlights that ultimately this is the story of Adidas - with a few words and less sympathy for Puma. Other flaws include a fairly uncritical view of the deep and money-oiled relationship Adidas built up with the most important sports officials, men such as Juan Antonio Samaranch, president of the International Olympic Committee, and Joao Havelange, head of the football governing body Fifa.


Smit herself acknowledges in a foreword that the book fails to tackle the Far East factories, described as sweatshops by critics, where sport shoes are produced these days. The book would have been better if she had looked at the question.


Smit shows an unremitting focus on producing a page-turner. While at times this it to the detriment of deeper analysis, she pulls it off with aplomb. Ultimately she highlights how two companies outgrew their traditional family roots and finally prospered after brushes with extinction in the early 1990s. They now stand as two of the most successful German consumer companies, although globally they lag behind their US rival Nike.


And by the World Cup final, both Adidas and Puma will know whether they are headed for promotion or relegation in the next stage of their battle.