Sports retailer announces closure of 175 underperforming stores nationwide – UK Times

JD Sports is planning to close about 175 Hibbett stores across the U.S. over the next three years to focus on fewer, more profitable locations.

The British retailer bought Hibbett, an Alabama-based sporting goods chain, for about $1.1 billion in 2024 as part of its push to rapidly expand in North America and strengthen its position in the fast-growing sneaker and sportswear market. At the time, Hibbett operated nearly 1,200 stores across the U.S., with a heavy focus on smaller Southeast markets.

But since then, it’s been dealing with tougher competition, especially from Dick’s Sporting Goods, which bought Foot Locker for $2.5 billion and has been doing well with its bigger, experience-focused House of Sport stores, CoStar reports.

Now, roughly two years after the acquisition, JD Sports is reworking its approach by cutting back on smaller, underperforming stores and focusing instead on stronger locations. Company leaders say the goal is to build “fewer, bigger, and better” stores that generate more sales and allow for greater investment in technology, store design, and the overall customer experience, CFO Dominic Platt said on an earnings call Thursday, CoStar added.

“In terms of last year, you saw we closed 39 stores overall,” Platt said. “We will see the beginning of the closure of the stores in North America with Hibbett, 175 stores probably over around three years.”

JD Sports CEO Régis Schultz added that even though smaller stores can have strong sales for their size, they don’t always generate enough profit to justify keeping them open.

“The problem of our small stores is that you need someone to open, you need someone to close,” Schultz said on the call. “When sales [are] going down a little bit, you have no leverage, whereas with a larger store, you have leverage because you can invest in technology and all that stuff.”

JD Sports has already started trimming and reshaping the Hibbett store base, with 999 locations at the start of fiscal 2026 dropping to 982 by year-end after a mix of closures and new openings, WWD reports.