Transcript
Introduction
"At a time when money and sports were still 2 separate worlds, the most admired athletes and soccer players enjoyed dropping by in the small Bavarian town for a chat with Adi Dassler, the ingenious German cobbler behind Adidas. On the other side of the small river that runs through the town, the guests were just as impressive."
"Just after the war, Rudolf Dassler had walked over after a blazing fight with his brother Adi and set up Puma, a competing brand. Their feud shaped the modern sports business, giving rise to corruption and ever-increasing financial stakes. For several decades, the bickering Dassler brothers ruled over the sports business from their medieval village, their shoes featured in nearly all the emblematic pictures of sports history."
"The Americans started hijacking the business in the '80s when the sons of Adi and Rudolf were spending most of their time fighting each other. Distracted by their own devious rivalry, the two Dassler cousins ignored the rise of the hard-hitting American upstart. Once it trashed Adidas and Puma in the United States, Nike set out to capture the European sports business."
Okay. So that's an excerpt from the beginning of the book -- from the book that I read this week, and the one I'm going to talk about today, which is Sneaker Wars: The Enemy Brothers Who Founded Adidas and Puma and the Family Feud That Forever Changed the Business of Sports, and it was written by Barbara Smit. The reason I started with that excerpt, I'm still not sure what I'm going to name this podcast if I -- because most of -- like what I personally enjoyed and what I want to focus on is Adi Dassler, but there's a lot of just interesting things about the family. So I have a feeling like the podcast will just be called The Dassler Family because there is a bunch of notes and highlights I have regarding how they ran their business that feels interesting.