Sport Zone Brand Guidelines: Sonae’s 1997 Portuguese Sports Chain, ISRG & JD

A Portuguese sports chain started by a retail group.

Sport Zone is a Portuguese chain of sports clothing and sports equipment stores. Portuguese and English Wikipedia both say it was launched in 1997 by Sonae, the Portuguese retail group, and both give Matosinhos, next to Porto, as the chain’s headquarters. The date fits what the company said in October 2023, when its marketing and e-commerce director told Dinheiro Vivo that Sport Zone had 26 years of history behind it.

When Sonae later combined the business with a Spanish partner, the deal ran through its subsidiary Sonae MC Modelo Continente, ECO reported in February 2018.

The chain built its public profile around running. From 2007 to 2018, Portuguese Wikipedia says, Sport Zone sponsored the Porto Half Marathon, a half-marathon race open to the public and held every year in the city. In July 2013 it launched the Secret Run, a running event in which participants had to solve puzzles to find out the date, time and place of training sessions organised by the brand; Portuguese Wikipedia cites the marketing trade site LigateàMedia, which reported the launch that month.

In the October 2023 interview, the company said its latest opening had been in Póvoa de Varzim in August 2023, with a team of about 15 people made up of new hires and internal promotions. During 2023 it had also refitted its stores in Marco de Canavezes and Vila Real and closed one of its smallest shops, in Porto Alto, Dinheiro Vivo reported.

Sport Zone, JD and Sprinter under one roof.

The chain’s ownership changed in 2017 and 2018. On 14 September 2017, ECO reported, Sonae announced an agreement to combine Sport Zone with JD Sprinter Holdings. Portuguese Wikipedia describes the plan as a joint venture with the British retailer JD Sports Fashion and JD Sprinter Holdings, joining their businesses in the Iberian Peninsula with Sport Zone. The deal was completed on 31 January 2018, after approval from the European Commission’s competition directorate, which had been notified on 18 January, according to Sonae’s statement to the market as reported by ECO on 1 February 2018.

The combined business was named the Iberian Sports Retail Group, or ISRG. Portuguese Wikipedia says it brought four shop names together: Size?, JD, Sprinter and Sport Zone. By May 2023, Dinheiro Vivo reported, ISRG held the Sprinter, Sport Zone and JD names in Portugal and Spain, the online sports retailer Deporvillage, the fitness-equipment maker Bodytone, and the Perry and Aktiesport retail names in the Netherlands.

The ownership was split three ways. JD held a majority; Sonae held just under 30 per cent, and Balaiko, the owner of Sprinter, just under 20 per cent, according to the same report. In May 2023 Sonae told Portugal’s securities regulator, the CMVM, that the two minority shareholders had notified JD of their decision to exercise a buy-or-sell option in their shareholders’ agreement. Sonae linked the step to a change in its relationship with JD after the British group said it would concentrate on sports-fashion retail. Under the option, either JD would buy the minority stakes, or Sonae and Balaiko would buy JD’s majority, Dinheiro Vivo explained; at that point Sonae said it could not predict the outcome, because the choice lay with JD.

JD chose to buy. Portuguese and English Wikipedia say the purchase of the Sonae and Balaiko stakes was announced in July 2023 and completed in October 2023, citing Dinheiro Vivo and Expresso. That ended Sonae’s ownership of the chain it had started 26 years earlier, and left the JD Group as the sole shareholder of ISRG and, through it, of Sport Zone.

Shop signs and owners.

European sporting-goods chains present themselves most visibly through the shop sign. A name, a logo and a set of colours have to work on a high-street fascia, a shopping-centre unit, a large out-of-town store and a website at once, and the companies show these marks on their own sites and in their store photographs. The colours and type in this guide are our own interpretation, not official specifications.

Store formats vary widely. SportScheck, the Munich chain, runs city-centre stores and an online shop, and in 2024 it opened a 2,000-square-metre Berlin store under a concept it calls “Future Retail,” FashionUnited reported. Sport 2000 separates a general multi-category shop from specialist running and team-sport formats that carry names of their own.

Ownership takes several forms, and it is worth stating plainly. Buying groups such as Sport 2000 and Intersport link independent shops that keep their own owners while sharing a name, buying terms and marketing; Germany’s competition authority named both groups as competitors when it reviewed SportScheck’s sale in 2020. Other chains belong to larger retail groups: SportScheck was owned by the Otto Group from 1991 and by Signa Retail from 2020, and since 2024 it has been part of Italy’s Cisalfa Sport. Own ranges sit beside outside brands, as with Witeblaze, the label Sport 2000 launched in 2023.

Corporate pages tell the founding story in each company’s own words, from Otto Scheck’s Munich clothing business of 1946 to the 36 French retailers who formed Sport 2000 in 1966. This guide sets out what can be checked about each chain — founders, owners, insolvencies and sales, with dates — and marks what rests only on the company’s own account.

A Portuguese name inside a British-owned group.

As of September 2026, Sport Zone still traded under its own name in Portugal while parts of the network had changed sign. Jornal Económico reported on 17 September 2026 that, in the financial year to 31 January 2026, several Sport Zone stores had been converted to the JD Sports name and others had closed for a time for planned refits. The stores in Cascais and Leiria were fully remodelled in what the company called its new brand concept, built around convenient, customer-focused shopping; the store in Viana do Castelo was restructured, and new stores opened in Famalicão and Covilhã. The company said it had also modernised the technology behind its store network to make shop operations more efficient.

The same report described a tidy-up of the group’s company structure. Sport Zone transferred its whole holding in Sport Zone Canarias, its company in the Canary Islands, to Sprinter Megacentros del Deporte, and received in return a stake of 12.62 per cent in the Spanish sports retailer Sprinter.

In October 2023 the company told Dinheiro Vivo that it was entering a new phase, with a new positioning to be seen mainly in its stores and its communication channels in 2024. In September 2026 it pointed to the remodelled Cascais and Leiria stores as the places where that new concept had been put in place.

For a design guide, Sport Zone shows how a chain started by a Portuguese retail group can keep its own sign after moving into a larger sports-retail family, next to sister names such as JD and Sprinter. Compare its owner’s guide, JD Sports, and the French sports retailer Decathlon. For this guide we use track blue, court orange and chalk with a sturdy grotesque sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Sport Zone’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.