Two brothers built the same company. Then they stopped speaking, and split a town in half for sixty years.

In a small Bavarian town called Herzogenaurach, two shoe factories face each other across a stream you could throw a stone over. On one bank, Adidas. On the other, Puma. They were founded by brothers who once made shoes together in their mother's laundry room, until something happened between them that neither would ever explain, and the quarrel they started outlived them both.

Adidas vs. Puma: The True Story of Two Brothers, One Town, and the Sixty-Year Feud Behind the World's Biggest Sneakers tells the dramatic story of the most bitter rivalry in the history of business.

From the washroom where the first shoe was cut to the Olympic tracks where their spikes made history, this narrative history brings the Dassler feud to life through the people who lived it. Behind the swoosh and the stripes were an air-raid shelter, a workforce forced to pick sides, two wives who fought harder than the men, and a feud so total it divided the town's bakers, butchers, and football clubs.

Inside, you'll discover:

• What may have happened in the bomb shelter that broke the brothers for good
• Why a whole town learned to check a stranger's shoes before speaking to him
•How Adi the maker and Rudolf the seller built the best shoe company in Germany together
• Why the split created not one global brand but two • How a single pair of spikes at the Olympics changed sport forever
• Why the wives, not the brothers, may have run the war
• How the feud shaped modern sponsorship, marketing, and the sneaker itself
• What the surviving documents prove, and where the legends fall apart
• Why the brothers were buried at opposite ends of the same cemetery

This was not simply a business dispute. It was a family that tore itself apart and handed its wound to a whole town to carry.The Dassler brothers built an empire of speed and style. They also spent their lives refusing to forgive each other.

Step into the factories, the shelter, and the divided streets of Herzogenaurach, and meet the brothers, wives, and townspeople caught in the feud that built two of the world's biggest brands.

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