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.
