Meet the challenger: Joma, the brand that never chased fashion

A borrowed Singer sewing machine and 15 shoe lasts in the back room of a house in Portillo de Toledo, a village of three thousand souls on Spain’s Castilian plain. It’s 1965, and a young man named Fructuoso López is making football boots to sell to his neighbors.

In 2024, 59 years later, the company that began in the back room is dressing 15 percent of the athletes at the Paris Olympics. The same family is in charge, and the company is headquartered in the same village.

In October 2024 Joma Sport signed a four-year top-tier partnership with European Athletics for ten championships through 2028. Included are the 2026 and 2028 European Championships, the first such long-term apparel deal in the federation’s history, and Joma’s first such deal with an international athletics body.

In May 2025 Joma announced a multi-year kit deal with Brentford FC, its first with the Premier League since Norwich City (2021–22). In April 2026 it announced a five-season agreement with Real Sociedad, to begin in July 2026. Here it replaced Macron, sponsor of eight years, and added a third LaLiga club, after Villarreal and Getafe. In March 2026 it became the official footwear partner of the Carvana PPA Tour, the top professional pickleball circuit in the US.

The revenue behind this activity is hard to pin down. Joma is privately held and made its last public filing with the Spanish mercantile registry in 2022. According to multiple Spanish trade publications, however, the brand did cross €200 million in revenue in 2023, thanks to a year-on-year rise of about 25 percent. A Joma-sponsored article from September 2024 set annual revenues at €300 million – a figure to be taken as indicative, but it aligns with reported growth.

In any case, Managing and Marketing Director Marina López told Diffusion Sport in January 2024 that Joma was planning to double revenue within five years, and could perhaps triple it in what the Spanish paper called a reasonable period. A doubling would yield more than €400 million; a tripling, €600 to €900 million. This is ambitious, but what are the odds?

There’s a structural question here, for the brand and the sportswear industry alike: where is the ceiling on pure performance sportswear?

The hierarchy

At least for now, Joma is not in direct competition with sportswear’s reigning triumvirate. Nike has posted $46.3 billion, Adidas €24.8 billion, Puma €7.3 billion in revenues for their respective FY 2025s. Joma is far behind. Like Joma, though, all three began in performance sport. Unlike Joma, all three have spent decades channeling revenue streams from the wellsprings of fashion and leisure, not just sport.

Nike’s Jordan brand started with a legendary player but now deals in luxury streetwear. For a while Adidas had a cash cow in Yeezy. Puma recently launched “Go Wild” by conducting research with consumers (not athletes), pushing its marketing expense up 40 percent year-on-year and designing its new brand’s products for “inspiring self-expressers” and “convivial belongers.” Of course, Puma is now retreating from that beachhead, after a difficult FY 2025.

Joma’s true peers are others – comparable in scale, focus and region. These others generate hundreds of millions in sales, they design and produce shoes and clothes for athletic performance, and they are peering over the fence at the green, green lawn of leisure-land, wondering whether to climb over.

Macron, headquartered near Bologna, provides the closest parallels to Joma. It too has long focused on performance sportswear, although it has begun to test, around Bologna, an athleisure line called O.N.E. Its revenues lie between €200 and €300 million – €244.6 million for FY 2025, to be exact, with a pro forma EBITDA margin of 21.1 percent. That second, exceptional figure seems due to Macron’s B2B architecture for teamwear.

Macron’s infrastructure for distribution is significantly more developed than Joma’s. It boasts an international network of more than 180 Sports Hub franchises, each a mono-brand specialist serving local clubs. And to this Macron adds more than 800 multi-brand retail partners. Macron lost the Real Sociedad contract to Joma in April 2026 after eight years.

Hummel, the Danish brand owned by Thornico Group, reported €326 million in 2024, scoring its fourth consecutive record year after returning to profit – €1.6 million after a loss of €13 million in the prior year. Like Macron, though, Hummel has been pursuing an athleisure line, described by CEO Lars Stentebjerg as a complement to, rather than a replacement for, the brand’s heritage in sport. Hummel’s loss was due to investment in this very experiment, and its recovery, it seems, to a refocusing on team sports.

Hummel’s most significant recent marketing has been a political statement: the muted kit it produced for Denmark at Qatar 2022 was meant to protest Qatar’s policy on rights.

BasicNet, the Italian group that owns Kappa alongside K-Way and Jesus Jeans, reported €409.2 million in group revenues for 2025, but the figure covers multiple brands with different positioning. Kappa itself has long operated with a split identity between team kit supply and streetwear.

Erreà, headquartered in Parma, supplies Sheffield United and QPR and leads Italy’s volleyball federation, FIPAV. It is Joma’s purest peer in the performance segment, but no reliable revenue figures are publicly available.

The village, the boots, the 59 years

Fructuoso López was born in 1942 and founded Joma 20-odd years later, in 1965. The back room was in his parents’ house and the Singer sewing machine on loan from his former employer, a shoe shop specialized in football boots where he’d worked afternoons during his military service in Madrid.

The Joma name is the first two syllables of his eldest son’s given name: José Manuel. That son is now CEO.

Joma’s first product, football boots, sold in Portillo and the surrounding villages. By 1968 there was a 500-square-meter factory with more than 20 employees and by 1980 a second, 2,000-square-meter factory. Sometime around then Joma launched its first collection of apparel. In 1988 it opened its world headquarters, whose 65,000 square meters are now 90,000.

International expansion was planned out. In 1984 López decided to exhibit at more foreign trade fairs, first in Germany (Joma was at ISPO Munich in 1980), then in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America. Subsidiaries ensued in the US, Brazil, Italy, the UK, China and Panama. Exports accounted for about half of revenues by the mid-2000s. They reached 65 percent in 2016 and passed 70 percent in the early 2020s. That’s where things stand now as well.

Football was long the dominant category. By 2016 it and futsal represented 60 percent of the business, but the textile operation that began in 1980 eventually overtook footwear in sales. The mid-1990s produced what López has called the brand’s inflection point. That was when Joma launched its first colored football boots, for Alfonso Pérez and Fernando Morientes of Real Madrid. All other brands were producing boots in black only. The dash of color opened markets that conventional sales could not.

Athletics became a formal category in 1990, when José Luis González, holder of the world record in the 1,500 meters, joined the sponsorship roster with the German subsidiary’s opening. The 1992 Barcelona Olympics produced two gold medals in Joma kit: Fermín Cacho in the 1,500 meters and Alfonso Pérez in football. And the Olympics anchor Joma’s marketing to this day.

Futsal leadership came in 1997. The UK subsidiary opened in 2003 alongside the first Premier League partnership, with Charlton Athletic. Tennis was formalized with the Royal Spanish Tennis Federation in 2022. Padel and pickleball are the current bets.

Sixty years’ accretion has produced a major sportswear brand that has never taken outside capital, never gone public, never been acquired and never even gestured toward athleisure or fashion.

The strategy as stated

In multiple interviews Marina López has been clear. Joma’s first principle is product integrity. “Joma is a technical sports brand, which has focused on the product since its birth, and maintaining this in the vision of the company has also been key,” she told the Forum of Renowned Spanish Brands. The refusal to drift into lifestyle, apparently, is no constraint; it is a competitive asset, enabling the brand to survive and grow while others succumb to distraction.

The second principle is a model for market entry: “through sponsorships, because the visibility and the technical brand image that professional sport provides is very important,” López has said. The sequence is fixed: professional sponsorship in the target sport first, distribution infrastructure second. The brand enters markets not by selling but by being seen.

The third principle: standardization. “The key to expansion,” as Fructuoso López has said, is having the same product, built to the same specifications, available wherever the distribution network reaches.

Thanks to these three principles, Joma is present in 134 countries, dresses more than 500 professional athletes and teams, and grew in the last confirmed year at a rate of 25 percent, outpacing every peer.

Joma has poured €24 million into an expansion of its logistics. The headquarters in Portillo, with its 90,000 square meters, is largely operational and has five robot-filled warehouses to hold more than four million references and dispatch up to 300,000 units per day. But it doesn’t make the products.

Where the strategy leads, where it might stop

To judge by a search snippet drawn from the corporate magazine, Joma farmed out its manufacturing in the mid- to late 1990s. It was either that or close up shop, Fructuoso López appears to have said at the time. Joma apparently began with Korea, then tried China and Indonesia. Nowadays it deals mostly with India and Vietnam. Like every brand among its peers, and like the triumvirate, Joma has no competitive edge in this part of the business.

Joma’s market – technical teamwear and federation kit – sits within a broader landscape of sportswear. Athleisure was worth about $422 billion in 2025, with nearly 10 percent annual growth. Premium sportswear, which includes performance product but extends beyond team kit, was worth about $107 billion; football kits – Joma’s core – about $14.3 billion, with 4.9 percent growth.

Joma, then, competes in the smallest and slowest-growing segment of an industry whose largest and fastest-growing segment it has purposely avoided. If Joma is to remain steadfast in its production and yet triple revenues in a reasonable period then it would seem to have at least four options:

• raise prices
• persuade customers to wear premium sportswear when not playing sports, and therefore buy more of it
• draw in new customers for the same products, perhaps by expanding geographically (into Africa, Southeast Asia, new parts of Latin America)
• wait for society to evolve in favorable ways – to embrace performance sportswear as it has embraced athleisure

So far Joma has used sponsorships to convey credibility to purchasing managers and federation officials. Its marketing has a B2B flavor, as in the brand hashtag #AllForSport – which is not far from “Spain Is Sport,” the slogan of Spain’s association of sporting goods companies, Afydad. There’s some boosterism in these, but they’re not an inspirational dig at a retail customer’s character in the manner of “Just do it.”

Joma’s distribution outside Spain, meanwhile, depends for the most part on subsidiaries and wholesale partners – a network that Fructuoso López built over decades. Joma has no equivalent to Macron’s Sports Hub franchise model: 180 consumer-facing mono-brand stores to establish a local environment around amateur clubs – the very market Joma has in mind. Macron’s 21.1 percent EBITDA margin rests on that architecture. Joma’s margins are not public, but a brand that reaches retail customers through wholesale chains and B2B kit orders would seem to be leaving pricing power on the table.

And yet there’s a down-home story at the root of Joma: a youth with a borrowed sewing machine in a village who, without outside capital, without going public, without chasing fashion, builds a brand that now dresses a significant share of the world’s best athletes, and who keeps it all in the family. But what does the family want?

Fructuoso López remains president, Marina López is the public face of Joma’s ambitions, and the third generation does not yet appear in the public record. What’s the conversation back home? Does it involve outside capital, a partial sale, a generational shift in strategy, a redefinition of tripling?

Joma is growing at 25 percent a year and has been run for six decades by a family that has been right about almost everything. Brand and family have probably earned the benefit of the doubt.