The new Belgian partner of Sport 2000 International is the Belgian Sports World chain of 22 stores owned by Mike Ashley and formerly called Disport. Ashley is already the exclusive buying partner of Sport 2000 for the UK. Ashley will use Sports World’s Belgian warehouse also to service the 9 stores of the Slovenian Sport 2000 retail network, which is controlled jointly by Ashley and Stojan Sopotnik. In a separate move, Sport 2000 has picked Lifestyle Sport, Ireland’s largest sports retailer with about 90 stores, as its exclusive buying partner in the country. Sport 2000’s Austrian managers are still holding talks with prospective partners in Poland. This leaves Turkey, Portugal, Iceland and Belarus as the only European countries that Sport 2000 has yet to cover.