It's A Nike marketing executive's worst nightmare - a World Cup Final between Germany and France (both sponsored by adidas) with Juergen Klinsmann and Zinedine Zidane (both with their own individual adidas contracts) starring for their respective countries.

Then, with just seconds remaining in the final, Klinsmann, wearing his shiny new Predator Accelerator boots (made by adidas), scores a late, spectacular winner, volleying the official World Cup ball (made by adidas) high in to the roof of the net. Similarly, the company Adi Dassler gave birth to back in 1920, when he made his first sports shoes in the German town of Herzogenaurach, is probably fretting about the prospects of an all-Nike final between Holland and Italy . . . although they would be consoled if either Marc Overmars or Alessandro Del Piero, playing for Nike-sponsored teams, but both with adidas boots on their feet, stole the show.

The one scenario that has Adidas people coming out in a cold sweat is Ronaldo living up to his weighty reputation and scoring the goals that help Brazil retain their World title.

Back in 1996 Brazil signed a 10-year contract with Nike, worth an estimated £250 million, just under half the amount the American company, which made profits last year of £5.6 billion, has invested in the game since the last World Cup finals in America. In France six nations will sport the Nike logo on their jerseys - Brazil, Holland, Italy, Nigeria, South Korea and the US - while adidas will kit out nine teams, including Germany, France, Spain, Argentina and Romania.

Therefore the advertising battle this summer between the two biggest sports manufacturers in the world football market should prove just as intense as anything we see on the field. With an estimated audience of 500 million people in 195 countries expected to tune in to the finals Nike and adidas are determined that the Ronaldo and Del Piero wannabes amongst them will buy their products once the finals are over.

They will also face intense advertising competition from Reebok, Puma (the company formed by Adi Dassler's brother Rudolf after a family feud) and Umbro (who beat off rival bids from Nike and Puma to sign a five-year contract, worth £50 million, with the English team this week), all three of whom trail adidas in the UK football boot market but are ahead of fifth-placed Nike.

Unlike Nike, adidas is one of 12 official sponsors for the finals, paying £20 million for the right to use the World Cup logo on their products and to have advertising boards at the side of pitches. Nike, however, learnt at the Atlanta Olympic Games that they didn't need to be official sponsors to cash in on the commercial success of one the great sporting extravaganzas - they simply signed up most of the athletes expected to star in the Games, ran spectacular advertising campaigns to coincide with the event and bought up the majority of poster sites throughout the city. They have adopted a similar marketing strategy for France, spending up to £20 million on their campaign for before, during and after the finals.

Adidas, who will have their World Cup headquarters in a specially constructed `football village' under the Eiffel Tower, have a similar budget to spend, just over £1 million of which went on the official launch of their Predator Accelerator boot and the Tricolore, the FIFA World Cup France '98 Official Match Ball, to give it its full title. And where else would you stage such a launch but in a . . . train station.

"Paul?," shouted Ray Stubbs, the BBC sports presenter and Master of Ceremonies for the day.

"Yeah," Gascoigne shouted back.

"Do these boots really make a difference to what you can do with the ball?"

"What? I can't hear you."

"Do they really make a difference to what you can do with the ball?"

"Pardon?"

"The boooooots?["]

"Whaaaat?"

Marc Overmars looked bemused, Graeme Le Saux amused, Juergen Klinsmann confused and Paul Ince simply dissolved in to a fit of giggles.

Maybe it seemed like a good idea at the time, but the problem with using the Eurostar Terminal in London's Waterloo Station as your venue for the launch of a pair of boots and a football is that you're competing with the noise generated by trains going about their daily business.

Just as Stubbs tried to get Gascoigne to reveal how the Predator Accelerator had changed his life a Eurostar train pulled in behind him and reduced the questions and answers session to a lip-reading challenge.

Even by then the only sentence audible on this reporter's tape recordings of the event went something like this . . . . `Ding. Would passengers for the 3.30 Eurostar train to Paris please make their way to Platform Two. Thank you. Ding'.

One suspected that the sound-people for the many television crews that turned up for the event were vowing to kit their kids out in Nike gear from that day on. What you desperately need in a situation like this is a consummate professional like Klinsmann who, while Gazza and Ince roll around the floor laughing, will pretend this is a perfectly normal situation and will wax lyrical about the excellence of the Predator Accelerator. Which is exactly what the German captain did, much to the relief of Stubbs and the watching adidas people.

Time for questions from the gathered media. "Hi, Steve Bradshaw of Panorama. Can I ask Paul Gascoigne . . . (Uh oh. Panorama? What's Gazza done now? He hasn't been selling arms to Iraq, has he?) . . . for his views on the difficulty English and Scottish fans are having in getting World Cup tickets. (Phew). "Well obviously it's very hard, yeah. What I'm doing is eating plenty of Big Macs in MacDonalds and trying to get some tickets that way," Gascoigne offered, helpfully. "Thank you Paul," said Steve Bradshaw. And that was that. Except adidas had a treat in store for all of us. A large chunk of their expenditure for the day had gone on the commandeering of a Eurostar train, on board which we were to have 10 minutes to interview each of the five football stars. Disappointingly there were no plans for the train to actually leave the station, although when the one on the opposite platform began to move for one glorious moment we all thought we were Paris-bound. Groups of up to 10 journalists were put in one of five carriages where we waited for a footballer to turn up for a chat. "Trolley coming - tea, coffee, biscuits," announced Graeme Le Saux as he walked in the door. The man branded with the tag of `the only Guardian-reader in English football' took a seat and shared his thoughts on the prospects of playing in the World Cup finals. "When you're involved as a player you don't think of it as the same World Cup you used to watch as a kid. It's suddenly a much more normal, down to earth thing than it was in '78 when I was 10 and was watching this amazing spectacle on television.

"It loses a certain amount of its glossiness when you're a player because it has to have some kind of normality, otherwise you could never perform. If you're involved in it it's very difficult to take that step back and appreciate it in the same way if you were just somebody in the street or a 10-year-old boy."

"Okay, that's it. Graeme? Thank you," said the adidas employee, whisking away England's left-back just as he was getting warmed up. Next, Klinsmann. Can you see Tottenham having success with Christian Gross as coach? "No comment," he said grinning. You'd rather not talk about it? "No." Forget that then.

How would you compare this German squad to the one that won the World Cup eight years ago? "I would say that the balance in the team is similar. In 1990 we had the older experienced players like Mattheus, Brehme and Voeller, the bosses in the team, who had a very good relationship with Beckenbauer. "We have the same situation now with Berti Vogts - he has around him experienced players like Juergen Kohler and myself, so the system is kind of similar. We still have very good individual players who are always able to decide a game on their own, like Thomas Haessler and Andy Moeller in midfield and strikers like Oliver Bierhoff and myself. So it is a similar side in how it is constructed.

"We may not be the best team from a technical or tactical point of view - we know that we weren't that either in Euro '96 - but we have enormous mental strength, even if we go two goals down we still believe we can win the game. We are very positive about the tournament, but you need also a bit of luck - sometimes we had it, sometimes we didn't, we hope this time we have it again."

"Juergen? Thank you," and off went the German captain. So we sat and waited for our next visitor . . . only to discover that Gascoigne and Ince had left early ("prior commitments") and Overmars had just left for the Eurostar VIP lounge.

"Run,["] shouted an adidas person, "if you want to catch him before he leaves, run!"

Now, there is every chance that the journalists who had the task of chasing Overmars through Waterloo Station refused to chuckle at Newcastle right-back Alessandro Pistone's abject failure to cope with the Dutchman's pace in the FA Cup final. Overmars only had a 10 second start on us in the race to the VIP Lounge (down an elevator, through security, down a corridor, right, left and past a beefy security man), but by the time we arrived, gasping for breath, he was sitting comfortably, munching a chocolate muffin, sipping a cup of coffee (half drunk already) and deep in conversation with a Dutch journalist. The boy done well. "Oi, this is the VIP Lounge," said Le Saux when he saw us recuperating in the corner of the room. "Yeah, so what are you doing here," replied a colleague. Le Saux grinned. One-nil to the press, he conceded.

Finally Overmars finished his muffin and joined us for a chat. He spoke about Arsenal's season, which, apparently, was reasonably successful, refused to apologise for scoring the winning goal at Old Trafford in March, and predicted Holland would have a very good World Cup. "Marc? Thank you," and the Dutchman zoomed out the door. The ultimate Predator Accelerator.

Sponsored by adidas, of course.