Pitch Invasion

Destined to be one of the sports books of the year ... Like Dynasty rewritten by Le Carre.

Unlacing the story of how sport became so full of money. Today, sport is big business, and Adidas and Puma are two of the biggest global brands, paying stars, clubs and competitions to wear their label, dominating everywhere from football pitches to magazine pages. This is the incredible story of how the rivalry between two brothers turned sport into an industry. It all began in the 1920s, when Adi and Rudi Dassler started a shoe business in a small German town. It was an instant success, but soon personal rivalries began to pull the two brothers apart, and by the end of the Second World War it was outright warfare. Forced to split the company between them, Adi and Rudi not only split their family and their hometown, but went on to divide retailers, sportsmen and countries for the next five decades with their rival brands: Adidas and Puma. Charting the story of how these businesses revolutionized the world of sport - exploiting advertising, influencing fashions and following the money at every turn - "Pitch Invasion" also tells the tales of some of the greatest sportsmen of all time, revealing the Pele pact, Boris Becker''s unfortunate contribution to the demise of Puma, and just how Adidas helped Mohammed Ali win his biggest fight. Reaching right up to today''s world of multibillion-dollar corporations, looking at how the arrival of Nike affected the pitch and the significance of Adidas''s recent takeover of Reebok, this is an incredible sporting drama of competition, greed, bribery, passion and shoes.