The missing stripe on Cruijff’s shirt

Johann Cruijff and Franz Beckenbauer , and already so your breath is out. One in front of the other exchange handshakes and pennants. Around the air is warm and suspended. On the lawn and in the stands of the Olympiastadion there is adrenaline and tension. Seventy-five thousand spectators. Munich, West Germany, 7 July 1974 , 4.00 pm, and the final of the World Cup between the hosts of Germany and the Netherlands of the totaalvoetbal, of total football.
A football that is transforming itself, with constancy and progression. It is not just a question of tactics and modules. Media attention, image, sponsors. Players who now have a second “usefulness” and, even if it is a slap in the face to the nostalgic purists a little clouded, even and already 40 years ago, the major sports companies had understood that through sport, through football you could take flight .
And if you think about it, the youngster from Ajax and Holland, the idol of a losing generation, but with eyes in love, falls perfectly into the role of modern icon. He was the watershed with modern football . Unique because over the decades he will be able to preserve and preserve a mythological aura of purity, despite underneath he had precise contractual “commitments” .
His number 14, from the club to the national team, we all remember it: Cruijff is tied to the jersey number, the first to come out with “arrogance” from the consolidated and outdated schemes of the one in the eleven. Barcelona, ​​more rigid, instead imposed the classic numbering on him: he accepted 9, but under the Blaugrana shirt, he always wore a shirt with his number.
Elegant, damn elegant, able to challenge Cronus in the fight against eternity, he “the Prophet of the goal” became an image man. In 1971, when the French magazine France Football awarded him the Golden Ball overcoming Mazzola and Best (he won two more in ’73 -’74), Johan attended the ceremony to receive the award wearing a Puma suit and with the logo in plain sight.
And he was testimonial of the German company also during the aforementioned World Cup in West Germany. And we arrive at the final, we arrive at the photo of the handshake between the Dutchman with the bewitching forelock and the Kaiser. Holland and West Germany, both sponsored by Adidas rubbing their hands for international media coverage. But it doesn’t take an expert of the puzzle week to notice a sensational difference: the Dutch captain’s shirt had one less black stripe than the canonical three, the unmistakable Adidas trademark . [/ Vc_column_text] [/ vc_column] [/ vc_row]

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The shimmering orange, then, certainly doesn’t help. Stained by a long and long-standing family feud that later became entrepreneurial: an internal war between the brothers Adolf and Rudi Dassler, one father of Adidas and the other of Puma, and who split Herzogenaurach , a German village that saw the birth of two most powerful brands in the sports sector. The feud, in the 1974 final, moves to Cruijff, the attractive symbol of the world championship event and so on the third stripe on his shirt. Unstitched. The Dutch 14 and a Puma man, not touched.
After all, the two brands had already chosen a very specific line: Adidas focused on partnerships with national teams as candidates for success, Puma aimed at the feet of the players. Four years earlier there was another clash: the object to contend was Pele and who else but him .
Shortly before the 1970 World Cup in Mexico, Horst and Armin, the successor sons of Adolf and Rudolf, entered into a non-belligerent pact in which they mutually agreed not to offer a sponsorship contract to “O Rey”. How did it end
Well you judge …
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