Adidas vs. Puma Feud to Become a TV Series with Support from Founders Families
A dramatic new TV series will explore the real-life rivalry that led to the creation of two of the world’s biggest sports brands — Adidas and Puma. The show will be based on true events from the 1940s in Herzogenaurach, a small German town where both companies began. Producers announced the project on Sunday, revealing that it will include never-before-seen materials from the Dassler family archives.
The series is being developed by Hollywood production company No Fat Ego, with full support from the Adidas founding family. It will tell the powerful story of two brothers — Adolf “Adi” Dassler, who created Adidas, and Rudolf “Rudi” Dassler, the founder of Puma.
Before their falling out, the brothers worked together at a family-run shoe company. But during World War II, tensions between them exploded, ending both their business partnership and personal relationship. Their feud divided their hometown, and that divide is still felt today.
Mark Williams, the writer behind Netflix’s hit series Ozark, has been hired to lead the project. He’s currently studying the Dassler family’s home videos and keepsakes to shape the story.
“Everyone knows Adidas and Puma, but not many people know how it all started,” Williams said at the Cannes Film Festival.
One of the more delicate parts of the story will be how the brothers are shown during the war. Both were members of the Nazi Party in the 1930s, a common move for German businesspeople at the time. Rudi fought in the war and was later captured by the Allies. Adi stayed home, running the business and keeping it afloat. During the war, their shoe factory was taken over and used to make weapons.
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According to Williams, the show will be a multi-generational family drama, similar in style to the hit HBO series Succession. It will focus on the emotional and business conflicts that tore the family apart.
Niels Juul, the head of No Fat Ego and a producer on several Martin Scorsese films, said the project caught his attention because of Adidas’s historic link to athlete Jesse Owens. Owens, a legendary Black American sprinter, wore Adidas shoes when he dominated the 1936 Berlin Olympics — an event Hitler had hoped would celebrate Aryan supremacy. Owens’s success, partly due to Adidas’s innovative spiked footwear, made global headlines.
No Fat Ego plans to finish the series independently before pitching it to major streaming platforms.
“We want to keep full creative control,” Juul said. “Mark needs peace and space to write something authentic.”
Adidas vs Puma Feud to Become a TV Series with Support from Founders Families
