The world changes and what we believed to be sacred, indivisible, is no longer so. Adidas and the German national team announced that In 2027 they will separate their paths after more than 70 years hand in hand. The three stripes have been much more than just a brand for the “Mannschaft”. It was also a symbol of his power, his strength.. A story that was born in Herzogenaurach, a small medieval town of 24,000 inhabitants, with its cobbled streets, its slopes, its sausages and a river, the Aurach, which divides it into two halves.
Adidas and Germany announced this week that in 2027 they will separate their paths
That place, peaceful, almost idyllic, was the scene eighty years ago of a bitter confrontation between two brothers that destroyed their family forever and ended up dividing the town into two irreconcilable halves for decades. The Dasslers set up a small sports shoe workshop in the early 1920s. Rudolf (born in 1898) and Adolf (two years younger) were restless young people who understood that the growing interest in sport would lead to the need to create different types of footwear depending on the modality that each one practiced. Adolf was the thinking mind, the designer; Rudolf, outgoing and dynamic, was the perfect salesperson for the project to grow quickly. In the laundry room of their house they made the first sneakers oriented towards athletics, with leather soles and hand-forged studs. In 1924 they founded their factory that provided employment to their neighbors in a region that, like the rest of Germany, was paying the effects of the end of the First World War and the serious economic crisis caused by the conditions of the Treaty of Versailles. His creations soon became popular among athletes who valued their resistance, comfort and lightness above all. At the beginning of the 1930s they made a giant leap when they began to design shoes for long-distance events and improved grip in those that involved greater speed. The list of orders arriving at the factory was getting bigger and bigger and skyrocketed when Jesse Owens won four gold medals at the Berlin Olympics in 1936 wearing Dassler heels.. The firm enjoys days of glory only marred by the pre-war noise that begins to reverberate throughout Germany, sickened by the virus of Nazism. For the Dassler brothers, who are building a mansion near the factory where they live with their wives, problems seem still far away. The outbreak of World War II is the turning point that forever changes the lives of the Dasslers and their relationship. The shoe factory paralyzes its production and, like the rest of Germany’s industrial fabric, puts itself at the service of the enormous machinery generated by the war. In its workshops they begin to manufacture missile launchers, the legendary Panzerfaust, and spare parts for tanks, one of the obsessions of Hitler.
Adolf, the little brother, stays in Herzogenaurach in charge of the factory while Rudolf is sent with evident displeasure to the front in Poland. This circumstance already generates significant friction between the two that would increase over time. After the German defeat in the war, the Allies detained and interrogated the Dassler brothers to find out their involvement with the Reich.. Adolf had no problems, but his older brother was imprisoned accused of being part of the SS spy service. Rudolf was convinced that Adolf’s statement had been decisive in his conviction. The break between them from that moment on was definitive. Adolf tried at first to convince him of his mistake, but Rudolf never believed him. They no longer spoke to each other again. The younger brother kept the family business facilities and compensated Rudolf financially when he was released from the prison camp in 1946. He settled on the other bank of the Aurach River where in 1948 he founded his own sports shoe factory. She wanted to take the rivalry with his brother to the extreme and compete with him directly. Workers were offered the chance to choose whether they wanted to go with one or the other. Almost seventy percent stayed with Adolf in the old facilities of what was renamed Adidas. –which arises by joining his family name (Adi) with the beginning of the surname (Das)–. Dassler Puma is born on the other side of the river. Their factories are separated by five hundred meters, but the actual distance is much greater. Businesses focused on their employees are beginning to emerge around the Dassler Puma factory. A hotel, schools, bakeries, clothing stores, restaurants… The rivalry in Herzogenaurach is taken to the extreme and the employees of the two firms barely cross paths. Neighbors who work or sympathize with Adidas do not go to the businesses on the other side of the river and vice versa. The town became known as the town of “bent necks” because the first thing a citizen did when he crossed paths with another was to lower his head to notice the brand of footwear he was wearing on his feet.
In 1954, shortly before the World Cup held in Austria, the two brands got into a fight that was important from an economic point of view, but transcendental in terms of image. The companies were beginning to join their steps with the world’s great teams and for Adidas and Puma it was essential to be the first to dress the German soccer team. It was Rudolf Hassler who was the first to move. Puma was ahead of Adidas in the negotiation that was directly carried out with Sepp Herberger, the German coach and all-powerful football personality in that country. Without any control at the federative level, Herberger asked Puma for a bonus of one hundred brands per month to give its consent. Puma bargained unsuccessfully and Rudolf decided that there was no point in such an effort and withdrew from the fight.
That gave rise to Adi Hassler entering the scene with the Adidas proposal. Very similar in sports but unlike his brother’s reluctance, he accepted Herberger’s “revolutionary tax.” But there was something during the World Cup that year that would be decisive in the relationship between the German team and Adidas. Adi Hassler’s team had been working for some time on the possibility of using interchangeable studs depending on the needs of each player or the conditions of the playing field. The Germany of the Walter brothers, which was born from the proposals of Kaiserslautern, reached the final to face the fearsome Hungary that had put them eight in the first phase of the tournament. On the day of the final, with the Magyars the undisputed favourites, it had rained in Bern; The field was heavy and slippery. At half-time the German players decided to make use of the Adidas invention and changed their studs for longer ones.. In the second half his players gained stability and ended up finding the winning goal in a play in which Gyula Grosics, Hungarian goalkeeper, slipped. The players who won the first world champion title always gave an enormous responsibility in that victory to the boots worn that day. That made the commitment of Adidas and the German team become indivisible.
The brand continued to grow and the three stripes became one of the Mannchaft’s hallmarks. It was no longer a matter of face-to-face negotiations like that between Adi Hassler and Sepp Herberger. The degree of union went much further and theirs was one of the great marriages in the history of sports. Even in the crisis of the eighties, after the premature death of Horst Dassler who had taken the reins of Adidas after the death of his father Adi, Germany stood by its leading brand. It seemed impossible for them to separate their paths until this week it became known that the German Federation was putting an end date to its agreement with the German brand and that in a few years it will begin to dress alongside Nike, its great rival worldwide. The end of an era, Germany will play without its three stripes on the side of its pants and shirt. An episode that Adi Hassler would hardly have been able to process.
Subscribe to continue reading
2024-03-25 12:28:59
#bands #scared #world
