Intersport, through Intersport France, has expanded into a 41st country: Portugal. The first store there, opened on Aug. 7, is in Felgueiras, northeast of Porto. Operated by Schiever Group, it covers 1,800 square meters and employs a staff of 22. It is also the first manifestation of a reorganization that has so far existed on paper.
With this new store Intersport France has begun to operate a fully Iberian subsidiary, established with its acquisition, in November 2025, of Intersport’s bankrupt Spanish operation. The subsidiary groups the 30 or so surviving Spanish stores, one of which appears to be in Andorra, with the new store in Porto. President Gérard Leclerc said at a press conference in April that Intersport France aspires to open ten more stores in Spain by 2027 (FashionNetwork).
Leclerc has described the inherited Spanish stores – small, centrally located, covering 200 to 350 square meters – as unsuited to the present state of retail, attributing their decline to mismanagement rather than to the market. He has also pointed to France’s own format overhaul, in the 1990s, as exemplary. That produced stores of 2,000 square meters or more, with heavy promotion and vigorous management of customer relations. The store at Felgueiras is just 200 square meters shy of the mark.
Leclerc has so far announced no plan to resize the surviving Spanish stores. Rather than address their format, his public remarks associate the stores with the subsidiary’s growth target. Iberia’s business, by his account, generated some €350 million at its peak but had fallen to about €100 million in the year before the takeover.
