Turf wars

Here's an interesting fact to tell your mates: The history of the sports business can be traced back to a bitter feud between a family of German cobblers over sixty years ago.

Read the corporate history of sports behemoth Adidas, and you'll probably stumble across a few dusty black and white photos of a cheery chap tinkering with a pair of football boots.

There he is, Adolf ‘Adi' Dassler, the sports-obsessed cobbler extraordinaire, the man who founded an empire in his mother's washroom in a small German town sixty years ago and put his name to a legend that, by the time of his death in 1978 was producing 180,000 pairs of three-striped shoes a day in factories across seventeen countries.

What you're unlikely to learn about, however, is that Adi's shoe business began long before 1948, with his older brother Rudolf in fact, but a bitter rift between the siblings would see them set up rival companies practically spitting distance from one another, companies that would go on to dominate the world sports market and turn the industry on its head.

Established at the beginning of 1920 in the Bavarian town of Herzogenaurach, Adolf Dassler's little shoe business began life as a very small outfit indeed.

Family members were drafted in to help and employees sometimes had to clamber over Adi's bed which he had set up at the workshop entrance in case a brainwave struck him in the middle of the night.

Sports shoes were his forte, notably running spikes, which were forged and driven through the soles by Adi's friend Fritz Zehlein, who just happened to be the son of the town's blacksmith.

In 1923, the company was joined by Rudolf and Gebruder Dassler (Dassler Brothers) was born. With experience in marketing, Rudolf exploited the growing sports craze across Germany by sending packages of Dassler shoes to clubs. Thankfully, the quality of Adi's designs were unquestionable and the response was overwhelming.

By the time of the 1936 Berlin Olympics - dubbed the ‘Nazi Olympics' because of Hitler's rise to power two years earlier - Gebruder Dassler's spikes had developed a following and the company was already Germany's leading sports-shoe supplier.

The hero of the Olympics was undoubtedly Jesse Owens, the black US athlete who ruined Hitler's hopes for an Aryan-dominated event by taking four golds medals in spectacular fashion.

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