JD Sports dips toe into Footasylum with 8.3% stake

JD Sports has bought an 8.3% stake in fellow sports shop chain Footasylum and said it was looking to buy more.

Footasylum was founded by David Makin and John Wardle in 2005, the year they walked away from the JD Sports business they had founded 20 years beforehand.

As it confirmed the purchase of 8.7m Footasylum shares, JD said on Monday that it had acquired the stake "for investment purposes" and that it was "prepared" to hoover up more shares up to total 29.9%, while also adding that "is not intending to make an offer for Footasylum".

Makin and Wardle, who built JD up from a single shop in the Pennine village of Mossley in 1981 when Makin was 16, sold out to sports brand investor Pentland in 2001 at a price of 211p, which after subsequent share splits in 2014 and 2016 would be equivalent to 10.55p today.

In 2004, before they left, Makin and Wardle hired former finance director Peter Cowgill as executive chairman. Under his leadership JD has gone from strength to strength, with its shares rocketing more than tenfold higher over the last five years to gain a place on the FTSE 250 index.

Footasylum was floated in late 2017 at a price of 164p per share and quickly jogged up to above 250p before three profit warnings, the latest coming last month, saw its shares fall below 22p.

On Monday they were up almost 60% to 46.19p.