In any professional sport, what could be more necessary than a rule preventing one person or organisation from owning two teams? The potential conflicts of interest are obvious. One team could be used to help the other by, for instance, rolling over when they met at a crucial point in the battle for a championship, or by obstructing a third party in order to favour a stablemate.

Formula One used to have a rule like that, but it was a distant memory by the time Dietrich Mateschitz came along. The man who bought the recipe for a caffeine-based drink from a Thai businessman and relaunched it in 1987 as Red Bull was already a multibillionaire by the time he decided to add a second F1 team to the one he had launched in 2005. That first team, built on the shaky foundations of the unsuccessful Jaguar team, was immediately renamed after the drink.

When he bought the struggling Minardi team a year later, he rechristened it Toro Rosso – Italian for Red Bull, of course – and set it up as a kind of finishing school for young drivers working their way through the Red Bull junior scheme, giving him a source of talent for the top team. (We need only to mention the names of Sebastian Vettel and Max Verstappen to see how successful that strategy has been.)

The contrast between Mateschitz’s wealth – according to Forbes magazine, he is worth $16bn – and the diminishing number of people or companies willing to fund F1 teams perhaps explains why the sport was happy to let him get on with it. It was grateful that the Austrian wanted to spend his money with it and not on one of the many other sports which he uses as branches of his marketing operation.

Now, however, it looks as though he is going to be facing a stiffer challenge in one of those other sports. As the European football season nears its climax, two teams in which Mateschitz has a direct interest are both about to qualify for next season’s Champions League, which would bring them into conflict with Uefa’s strict – and hitherto strictly enforced – rules on multiple ownership.

As Roland Duchâtelet of Carl Zeiss Jena, Alcorcón, Sint-Truidense, Ujpest and Charlton Athletic, and the Pozzo family of Udinese and Watford have shown, the ownership of several clubs presents no problems as long as they never face each other in the same European competition. But with four matches to go in Austria’s Bundesliga, Red Bull Salzburg are 12 points clear at the top. And with two to go in Germany’s top tier, RB Leipzig sit firmly in second place, 10 points behind Bayern but six ahead of Borussia Dortmund. Both are now certain to qualify for Europe’s top competition.

Mateschitz was already deeply embedded in the business of using sport to define and enhance his core product’s appeal by the time he bought Austria Salzburg – a club founded in 1933 – and renamed them after his drink in 2005, hiring Giovanni Trapattoni and Lothar Matthäus to supervise the improvement of their fortunes.

Windsurfers, downhill ice skaters, skateboarders, hang-gliders, base jumpers, BMX riders and many others – including the superstars Lindsey Vonn and Ricky Fowler – were beneficiaries of the drive to create an image for a drink whose ingredients amount to not much more than caffeine, synthetic taurine and sugars.

Students drank it to help them stay awake while others mixed it with vodka in much the way that their 1960s predecessors had drowned decent whisky in Coca-Cola. Always, youth was the key. In some significant respects Red Bull mimicked the cultural appeal of Coke in the postwar era: young, carefree, a little bit rebellious. But with Red Bull the appeal was edgier, involving a sense of physical risk and a hint of rules being tested.

As extreme sports increased in popularity, as snowboarding took over from skiing and the X Games became a feature of the international sporting calendar, so the distinctive colours and logo of Red Bull became inescapable: on crash helmets, on billboards, on planes competing in a revival of prewar air racing, and, in the ultimate epiphany of Red Bullness, on the day when the skydiver Felix Baumgartner, another Austrian, took a helium balloon ride up to the stratosphere and fell 24 miles to earth, breaking the sound barrier before breaking out a parachute bearing the red, blue and yellow logo.

It was in 2009 that Mateschitz’s company bought SSV Markranstädt, an obscure fifth-division club from the former East Germany, and bankrolled a spectacular charge through the divisions. Recruitment of young players of high potential became a priority: typically, last summer Leipzig paid £13m for Oliver Burke, a 19-year-old Scottish winger who had played barely a couple of dozen games for Nottingham Forest.

Both clubs, Salzburg and Leipzig, had not only their names but their colours changed to fit the Red Bull branding. Each plays in a stadium named the Red Bull Arena. But, to get around German league rules prohibiting the use of sponsors’ names in club titles, the club insisted that the “RB” stood not for Red Bull but for “RasenBallsport”: ball games on grass. Even a Uefa committee would not fall for that.

The European governing body’s rules state that where two clubs in common ownership qualify for the same competition, the one finishing lower in its league must stand down – in this case meaning Leipzig. If push comes to shove and Mateschitz’s lawyers cannot prevail against a Uefa ruling, it will be interesting to see whether he is inclined to favour the club of his home country, which has not managed to make it to the group stage of the Champions League for the past five seasons, or the project in Germany, which may have higher and more credible ambitions.

The German football association has already forced RB Leipzig to modify a club badge deemed too close to the drinks company’s branding. Funnily enough, the only group with an allegiance to the name RasenBallsport is a band of ultras who set themselves up in opposition to other fans who embrace the corporate identity.

“Disruptive innovation” is a phrase that turns up in Red Bull’s own marketing literature and as with Coca-Cola and Levi’s jeans in the past, the company’s marketing is based on an appeal that incorporates an element of youthful rebellion against the disciplines of the straight world. Whether the rules of a major international sporting competition are built to withstand the power of disruptive innovation, backed by a virtually bottomless bank account, remains to be seen.