The brothers, Adolf and Rudolf Dassler, set up Adidas and Puma, laying the foundations for the lucrative sponsorship and marketing deals that now pervade international sport.

Barbara Smit will be speaking about the brothers and their continuing business influence this Saturday in a talk at the Carnegie Sporting Words Festival in Harrogate.

Ms Smit, the author of Pitch Invasion: Adidas & the Making of Modern Sport, said the story of the Dasslers "has all the elements of a wonderful book".

"You have this dramatic story of two brothers who set up a company together before the war and fall apart during the war and fought each other until death.

"Two brothers from the same little village in Bavaria, on either side of the river that ran through it, completely dominated the business of sport until Nike came along. It was all played out on the football pitches and Olympic arenas. And it was fairly public."

Adolf "Adi" Dassler, who was born in 1900, started making sports shoes from his home in Herzogenaurach. His brother Rudolf, who was two years older, joined the family firm in 1924. The business, which would become known as Adidas, began to flourish and the orders came running in.

Both brothers were alleged to be members of the Nazi Party and after the Second World War Rudolf was arrested by the US counter-intelligence services on suspicion of being a member of the intelligence wing of the SS, said Ms Smit.

Rudolf was embittered towards Adi and left the business to set up a rival sports shoe firm, first called Ruda and then Puma. And so the sibling rivalry led to the creation of two sporting giants; as the companies grew so did the power of brand association and the use of endorsements.

In her book, Pitch Invasion, Ms Smit tells the story of Armin Hary, the sprinter who won the 100m gold in the 1960 Olympics. He ran in Puma, but appeared in Adidas on the stand for his medal. Payments were then illegal in the Olympics.

"This happened through several decades," said the author. "With football, it was on a much larger scale. Payments were completely legal.

"You would have stories of Adidas reps with Mercedes boots stuffed with cash and football players walking away from hotels with carrier bags filled with cash and all sort of funny things going on in locker rooms and football stadiums."

While today's professional and – to an extent – amateur sports are dominated by big business, Ms Smit said she was fascinated by the examples she found of money coming into sport in the early days: "To see how it all started and the sneaky ways of going about it was very interesting."

The Dassler story takes a twist with Adi's son Horst, who entered the Adidas business. He introduced large marketing and TV deals into sport and established another Adidas organisation in France, just across the German border.

Ms Smit said: "He had a fight with his parents. He was allowed to use the name but he more or less competed against them. At the same time he had all sorts of other businesses. He was the owner of Le Coq Sportif and had a major share in Pony. One of the ideas he had was to market sports. He created big deals around the World Cup and Olympics... with sponsorship deals and TV packages.

"Not only did two brothers fall apart, but they also had major problems with their children. That's one of the reasons why they were not fighting Nike. They were distracted by fighting each other and were blinkered by that. It was a very dysfunctional family, put it like that."

Across the Atlantic in Oregon, Philip Knight had set up Blue Ribbon Sports, which later became Nike, in 1962. The athletic shoe company grew through the 1960s and 1970s and by 1980 had a 50 per cent market share in the United States.

Ms Smit's book features many anecdotes about famous sporting figures including Pele, Cruyff, Eusebio and David Beckham.

The author, asked if money had corrupted the purity of sport, said: "I'm not really into concepts such as purity. From ancient times there were some funny things going on in sport. There were stories of athletes appearing totally drunk and all sorts of rewards."

She was more forthright on how some athletes and sports figures have almost become marketing items in themselves.

She criticised Usain Bolt, the Jamaican track star of the 2008 Olympics and the fastest man on earth, singling out the way he waved his Puma shoes in front of the world's media following his victories.

"He sprinted and won. There's no question he is an extraordinary athlete. He went to take off his shoes almost as fast as he ran. (He) never had a picture taken without his shoes being
in focus, holding them close to his chest.

"I found that quite ugly. It does not take anything away from his prowess. First thing on your mind is take off shoes and wave them in front of a camera. It's not really the sort of image you assume with the giant of sport."

AUTHOR JOINS THE BILL FOR FESTIVAL

Barbara Smit will speak at the Carnegie Sporting Words Festival in Harrogate on October 4.

She will talk about her book, Pitch Invasion: Adidas & the Making of Modern Sport, which is published by Penguin.

Dutch by birth, she studied in Germany and the UK and now lives in Nimes, in the South of France.

The 40-year-old spent six months living in Sheffield after she and her husband decided they wanted to do something else. She said they threw a dart at a map and moved to South Yorkshire. They eventually returned to France because of his business.

The Yorkshire Post is media sponsor for the festival. For more information on Ms Smit and other speakers, visit www.sportingwords.com

To order a copy of Pitch Invasion: Adidas & the Making of Modern Sport, Penguin, £8.99, from the Yorkshire Post Bookshop, call freephone 0800 0153232 or go online at www. yorkshirepostbookshop.co.uk. Postage and packing is £2.75.