Hi everyone, welcome back to SportsVerse, my twice-weekly newsletter that tells stories you can’t find anywhere else about the intersection of sports, fashion, business, and culture. SportsVerse is now on Instagram, where you can find even more content and analysis. Follow along here.
I’m back after a 1.5-week-long summer break. The big life news since I’ve been gone is that I brought an end to my time working at OffBall. It was so much fun helping it grow from a start-up to the thriving media business it is today, alongside such a great team. The good news is that my attention is now focused on SportsVerse full-time. It was thanks to conversations with so many of you in recent months — when people told me they thought I was already working on SportsVerse full-time — that it led me to wonder exactly what could be achieved were that actually to be the case. In reality, SportsVerse has grown from zero to nearly 8,000 subscribers since the beginning of 2025, with me spending little more than a few hours on Monday and Wednesday evenings writing the next day’s newsletter. I’m excited to share my plans with you all now that I can commit to growing it full-time. More soon. For now, go follow SportsVerse on Instagram.
Since 2020, investing (wisely) in the sportswear sector has been a surefire way to see consistent gains for investors looking for growth opportunities outside of tech. Sportswear brands were major beneficiaries of pandemic-induced buying trends which saw activewear and sneakers truly cemented as core parts of the every day wardrobe. Sales skyrocketed, and for many brands, so too did their share prices. Others, like On and Amer Sports (the group that owns brands like Salomon and Arc’teryx), saw the years following the pandemic as the perfect window to launch IPOs.
Other sneaker, sportswear and outdoor gear brands used this period of growth as a chance for reinvention, pivoting their brands to capitalise on their newfound mainstream appeal and attention from fashion consumers. Asics stock is up 700 percent in the past five years, while fellow Japanese sportswear brand Mizuno is up nearly 400 percent. Wolverine Worldwide, the American holding company that controls brands like Saucony and Merrell, is up 160 percent in the past three years. Though New Balance isn’t a public company, the Boston-based sneaker brand has also experienced astronomical sales growth, and will pass $10 billion in annual revenue for the first time in 2026, up from $3.4 billion in 2020. Vuori, also a private company, reached a valuation of $5.5 billion following an $825 million investment round in November 2024.
But in the past few months, investors have become increasingly concerned with a perceived slowdown in the sportswear market, which has had a significant impact on the stocks of many of the largest companies in the sector.
Last Monday, Nike broke unwanted ground, with its stock closing at $39.09, which marked its lowest close since 2014. The week before, On stock plunged nearly 22 percent, which was its largest ever single-day decline since its listing after the brand narrowly missed earnings targets. On’s share price is $29.61, which constitutes a 15 percent decrease from the company’s share price after its first NYSE trading day following its IPO in September 2021. Adidas stock is down 8 percent since the beginning of the year, while Lululemon and Amer Sports are down 40 percent and 14 percent in the same period, respectively.
While fears of an industry-wide “slowdown” may be exaggerated, it’s clear that the growth many brands have enjoyed over the past few years could not be sustained at the same velocity.
“Certainly the heady days of pandemic free money are over for all retail,” said industry analyst Matt Powell. “The biggest brands have hit a rough patch.”
For Nike, which has been in the midst of a deep crisis for the past few years, the reasons for the slump in its share price are clear. For a company like On, which seeminly is still growing at breakneck pace, the answer is less obvious. In the brand’s second quarter of 2026 alone — the three-month period ended June 30 — it generated CHF 850.3 million ($1.05 billion), marking an increase of 13.5 percent from the same period in 2025. On estimates that it will generate annual revenue up to CHF 3.56 billion ($4.4 billion) by the end of 2026. Yet it was this set of earnings which caused the brand’s stock to fall over 20 percent in a single day of trading earlier this month. The $1.05 billion generated fell short of Wall Street’s estimated $1.08 billion target for On’s quarterly revenue, which appeared to stoke fears even further that the fastest-growing brand in the market was dealing with a slowdown of its own.
“In terms of On, I think the stock market expected its meteoric growth to go on forever. That was never going to happen,” Powell said. Though On’s growth continues to outpace every other brand in the sportswear sector, Powell believes the Swiss sportswear giant has three issues holding it back from further success in the US market: 1) a lack of resonance with teen consumers; 2) over assortment; and 3) a limit to how far one technology and its permutations can carry a brand.
The good news for On is that it still has huge runway to expand across North America and beyond. With brand awareness in the region still on the lower side, the brand has room to make mistakes and pivot, especially while still growing at such a steady clip. Meanwhile, it continues to eye expansion into new sports.
Despite the stock market downturn, the long-term tailwinds are very much in favor of the sportswear category. Many of the above brands are still experiencing huge sales growth quarter over quarter, outpacing many other sectors.
“We are in a sports driven, wellness obsessed activewear world,” Powell said. “That is not changing.”
That’s all for today, friends. Thanks for coming along for the ride.
See you next time,
DYM
