Sport: Some time in the next few weeks it might be advisable to have yourself tested for any damage which prolonged exposure to David Beckham may have caused.
This, for those reading online in a Tibetan monastery is World Cup season. On these benighted islands that translates as David Beckham season. From the official opening, marked by the Posh'n'Becks World Cup Party (where all displays of vulgar wealth are forgiven in the name of charity) to the time of England's (always premature) exit from the World Cup, it is Beckham Time. He will be everywhere. We shall not be able to count the ways in which he earns.
Beckham appears, for instance, on the front cover of the World Cup issue of Britain's top football magazine, Four Four Two. He has his eyebrows furrowed as he gazes into the camera lens. Furrowing his eyebrows is Beckham's way of looking as if he is thinking. Most likely he is exercising his intellect on the matter of his bank account because on the cover of Four Four Two's World Cup issue he is holding an Adidas football in his hands. Behind him stand four other English footballers. Two of them are holding Adidas footballs and all four are wearing Adidas shirts with prominent logos. The cover carries seven Adidas logos and opens out gatefold style to become a four- page Adidas advert.
When you get inside to the editorial content there are interviews with five English players. All of them are clients of Adidas and the sportswear company gets a mention in the first paragraph of the first interview. The Adidas logo appears prominently a further 10 times in the pages which follow. So it is that what footballers habitually refer to as the "honour of playing for your country" has been parlayed into the chance to sell Adidas merchandise. England's soccer captain and several of his colleagues, not to mention England's best soccer magazine, are reduced to the status of being corporate shills for a German sportswear company.
Adidas began life in a small Bavarian town called Herzogenaurach back in the 1920s. Two brothers, Adolph and Rudolf Dassler, founded Gebrüder Dassler as a small manufacturing concern with the novel idea of making shoes especially for sports enthusiasts. The corporate strategy was clear from the start and when Beckham and co tout themselves on the road to Berlin they are merely joining a long lineage. Adolph Dassler, then a Nazi party member, convinced Jesse Owens to wear his company's shoes during the 1936 Olympics.
The war which followed soon after sundered the brothers' relationship, Rudolf having become convinced that his brother had denounced him to the Allies. They split the firm in two.
Adolph Dassler contracted his first name and surname and created Adidas. His brother Rudolph toyed with the inelegant contraction Ruda , as a name for his company. He settled on Puma.
The feud between the two companies would continue through generations and it would be 2004 before an heir of one company went to work for the other. As the World Cup kicked off, 12 of the competing nations were wearing Puma kit and six wearing Adidas - a statistic which distorts the reality of the relationship between the companies a little.
Puma has fallen some way behind Adidas and Nike.
In 2005 Adidas consumed one of their chief competitors, Reebok. Now Adidas and Nike account between them for some $20 billion (€15.9 billion) of sales worldwide per annum.
Barbara Smit's excellent and painstaking history is timely in that this is an Adidas World Cup. Not only are the firm an official sponsor but their influence is such that Franz Beckenbauer, the former German captain and the chairman of the World Cup's advertising committee, appears in the flagship advertisements for the company's World Cup campaign.
There is more to it than that, of course. Having seen how the system worked from the inside, Horst Dassler, the son of Adolph (Adi) Dassler, would become quite the most influential figure in world sport in the decades before his death in 1987. As the co-founder of International Sport and Leisure (ISL), it was Dassler who developed the notion of the super sponsor or corporate partner. ISL reeled in the massive sponsorships and engineered for itself a market position where it won the auctions for TV rights to major events. ISL, by re-inventing the business of sports marketing, changed the face of the modern Olympics as well as the World Cup.
So adroit was Dassler that he personally groomed Sepp Blatter, the world's leading football executive, for the position of FIFA president. ISL went broke in 2001 having overextended itself critically on the rights to the 2006 World Cup but the company's fingerprints are all over the event.
The story of the two brothers and the business they founded in Germany between the wars has the quality of an epic movie. Smit handles it all with an understated and even tone and resists the temptation to editorialise or moralise. A great story, a wonderful work of journalism and for anyone interested in knowing where David Beckham is coming from, the best après match reading for the next few weeks.
Tom Humphries is an Irish Times journalist and author. His books include Laptop Dancing and the Nanny Goat Mambo: A Sports Writer's Year (Pocket Books/Townhouse, 2003)
Pitch Invasion: Three Stripes, Two Brothers, One Feud: Adidas and the Making of Modern Sport By Barbara Smit. Penguin/ Allen Lane , 397pp. £14.99