Thousands of loyal customers are unaware of the jaw-breaking fact:
Adidas and Puma were born from brotherly hatred
.
The resentment that divided a family generated, paradoxically, two empires.
Rivals por siempre
, the German series that Europa Europa broadcasts and is already complete on Flow, clearly details
that fracture between brothers that gave birth to two corporate tanks.
Before the Dasslers (Adolf, alias “Adi”, hence the Adidas firm, and Rudolf, Rudi, promoter of Puma) were antagonists,
there was love and a modest business union, from a small workshop in a Bavarian town, Herzogenaurach
.
It happens in the best families and even more so if that tribe founds a pioneer kingdom.
This fiction with a marked biographical intention tells us how water and oil, Adolf (Christian Friedel) and Rudolf (Hanno Koffler), face a successful youth alliance that ends in divorce.
To begin with, we see Adi, an old man, in the middle of the 1974 World Cup in Germany, inspecting the loot boxes between Franz Beckenbauer and his teammates.
About to go out onto the field with his three-striped jacket, he is notified of an urgent phone call.
“It's about Rudi,” says a voice on the other side of the tube.
We immediately found out that
they have not had dialogue for
26 years .
“He doesn't need a brother, he needs a doctor,” warns the serious Adi, without compassion.
We are facing a battle led by rivals of the same blood.
The business grew too much, but so did the egos.
The immediate flashback to the 1920s is hypnotizing.
We see Adi run in a forest with bloody feet and show us
how a gold mine can be born from a need
: the blisters on his feet require special shoes for his jogging.
Nothing better than the son of a great shoemaker to draw and execute the innovative model.
Craftsman, patient, the artistic mind behind the design, Adi will complement perfectly with Rudi, the commercial brain, the negotiator, the one who knows how to seek financing, how to sell, how to generate consumer desire, how to expand.
The series "Rivals Forever" about the Dassler brothers.
Under the name Dassler Brothers, the company that started with special shoes for athletics and football is expanding.
A company supported by some great containers, will manage to fit the German team into the 1928 Amsterdam Olympic Games. Of course,
the bigger the fortune, the bigger the problems will be.
Clashes, disagreements, friction.
Glory will be accompanied by misfortune.
The industrial, the technological revolution and the great change that this brings to sport are threaded into four chapters with the birth of marketing, war and the political events of much of the 20th century.
Did the Nazis force the Dasslers to join the party?
Was it just an “alliance” as a business opportunity?
Did one of the brothers have an affair with his sister-in-law?
What really triggered that painful breakup?
Fiction leans towards some theories as opposed to others that are told so well, for example, in the book
Sneaker Wars
by Barbara Smit.
The series "Rivals forever"
Although with a certain didactic tone at times and lack of emotional depth,
Die Dasslers
(the original title) is worth it for the weight of this true story.
It documents
how two of the most important sports multinationals in the world soar from that humble workshop.
The influence of the women in the family also has its place in the plot: when each brother marries and creates his own clan, interests, jealousies and vanities multiply like the weapons of that family tree.
The end of World War II is the end of brotherhood
.
The distribution of the factories (Adi keeping the original one on the right bank of the Aurach river and Rudolf with the rest) will drive fierce competition and even a division of the city.
The pulling will be up to a couple of feet, those of Edson Arantes do Nascimento, Pelé.
File
Rating:
Good
Drama
Director
: Cyrill Boss, Philipp Stennert
Starring
: Christian Friedel, Hanno Koffler, Hannah Herzsprung, Alina Levshin
Broadcast:
Europe Europe (four chapters now available on Flow).