DEEP in the heart of northern Bavaria, a German global giant is making plans.

“You have seen we are building a football stadium,” nods Herbert Hainer, gesturing outside the floor-to-ceiling glass window that runs the length of his first-floor office. “We want to put more into this campus. We have to do more than you in London to attract people here.”

Hainer, chief executive of Adidas, the sportswear specialist, can afford the odd expansive gesture. After more than a decade of being trounced by its snappy American rival Nike, the German giant’s prospects are looking up.

A new “intelligent” running shoe (microchipped to alter cushioning support according to terrain) is launched in March, the first in a range of intelligent products Adidas plans to develop. The company’s annual results, released around the same time, look set to be its best ever. And in 18 months, the Adidas-sponsored World Cup kicks off in Germany.

Hence the flurry of building at Adidas’s global HQ, a converted old US Army barracks near Herzogenaurach. The stadium, intended for exhibition games and practice sessions, joins the tennis facilities and beach volleyball sandpit, the glass-and-steel staff café overlooking landscaped ponds, and the tastefully refurbished, three-storey blocks that sprawl across this campus-style centre.

Adidas, now one of the biggest brands in the world, has even started its own international school, so worried is it about getting foreign managerial talent into its rural base.

All of it, says Hainer, is a price worth paying. Company founder Adi Dassler was making sports shoes in Herzogenaurach before the second world war, while his brother Rudi set up rival Puma there soon after. If Adidas, with sales of €6.5 billion (£4.5 billion), is going to succeed globally while sticking to its roots, it has to make the extra effort.

And in Hainer, a Bavarian butcher’s son trained in marketing at Procter & Gamble, it has a global boss who cuts a dash. A compact man, just 50, dressed in brown polo-neck jumper and beige tweed slacks, he speaks fluent, accented English, and underscores his reputation as a demanding number-cruncher with a brusquely informal touch.

“My communications director hasn’t told you everything already?” he grins on greeting me. “He must be the first PR man who can keep his mouth shut. Ha.”

Hainer, a rising star in German business, likes to mix the grand and pragmatic. Just across from the new stadium development sits a hastily stacked block of portable offices — all the football- related staff on site put into one temporary building for the run-up to the World Cup.

“We are not building palaces here,” he says. “We build sports facilities to attract the best people and because we make a living out of people doing sports. We have more important things to do right now than build a new office building. We’ll do that when the World Cup is over.”

The German World Cup, he promises, will be the biggest and best yet. Adidas will be backing its own stars, supporting the event with sponsorship, helping with the organisation.

Adi Dassler and his son Horst, both now dead, had a long and controversial involvement in the commercialisation of sport from the 1970s onwards. Those links still pay off for Adidas.

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