JD Sports

Founded in 1981 by John Wardle and David Makin in Bury, Greater Manchester, JD Sports is a British sportswear and sneaker retailer. Its interest to a lingerie encyclopedia is narrow but real: through stores in more than 35 countries it is one of the largest sellers of sports bras, swimwear and branded underwear in the sportswear channel, almost all of it made by the athletic brands it stocks rather than by JD itself.

From one Bury shop to the FTSE 100

The first shop opened in Bury in 1981. Two years later Wardle and Makin took a unit in the Arndale shopping mall in central Manchester, the move that put the chain in front of the city's shoppers and set its template: trainers, tracksuits and branded casualwear sold to young customers in high-footfall malls.

Growth came largely by acquisition. JD bought the 209-store First Sport chain in 2001 and the 70 stores of Allsports in 2005. That same year Pentland Group, the British owner of several sports and outdoor brands, bought 45 percent of the business for 44.6 million pounds, and Pentland has remained the controlling shareholder since. The company trades on the London Stock Exchange under the ticker JD. and sits in the FTSE 100 index.

The American push

The big moves of the last decade were in the United States. JD bought the sneaker chain Finish Line for 558 million dollars in 2018, and in 2024 it agreed to buy Hibbett, the Alabama-based sporting goods chain, for about 1.08 billion dollars. In June 2026 the company said it would move its North American headquarters to Fishers, Indiana, by early 2027.

Europe was not neglected. In 2023 JD added the French sneaker chain Courir and the Spanish sports retailer ISRG. Earlier, starting in 2016, it opened in Malaysia, Australia, South Korea, Singapore, Thailand and Poland. Its fascias now include Size?, Footpatrol, Shoe Palace, DTLR, Sprinter and Go Outdoors.

The Footasylum affair

One acquisition went badly. JD bought the rival chain Footasylum for 90 million pounds in 2019, and the UK Competition and Markets Authority later ordered it to sell the business on competition grounds. While the case was running, executives from the two companies were found to have held covert meetings in breach of the regulator's orders, including one in a car park in Bury. The two companies were fined a combined 4.7 million pounds.

Where intimates sit in a JD store

JD is not a lingerie retailer and never claimed to be. On its UK site, women's clothing includes a dedicated sports bra category and a swimwear category, while women's underwear is filed under accessories, next to socks and bags. That filing tells a buyer how the business sees the product: an add-on to an outfit built around trainers and leggings, sold by the brand name on the waistband.

The sports bras on JD rails come from the athletic labels it carries, with Nike and adidas the most prominent names across the site. In a sportswear chain the category usually means pullover compression bras and racerback styles, bought as gym wear and worn as casualwear. The line between that and a soft bralette has blurred over the last decade, a shift traced in this encyclopedia's comparison of the sports bra and the bralette.

Why it matters to the lingerie trade

Sportswear chains such as JD give the athletic brands a second route into the underwear drawer. A bra bought there is chosen by the logo on the band and a small, medium or large size, not by band and cup measurement in a fitting room. For lingerie houses built on fit, that is competition from outside their own trade.

JD Sports today

By the financial year ending January 2026, the group reported revenue of about 12.66 billion pounds, 3,320 stores and nearly 60,000 employees. Andy Higginson is chairman and Regis Schultz is chief executive. Underwear and sports bras remain a small share of that business, but at that scale even a small share puts JD among the larger intimates sellers in Britain, without a single bra of its own design.

Last updated October 7, 2026