Dodgy pricing tactics at Sports Direct 'may be breaking the law'

A Which? investigation has uncovered questionable and dodgy pricing tactics at SportsDirect.com that we believe may be breaking the law. 

In particular, we found SportsDirect.com using reference prices that appear to be misleading. 

Our researchers analysed the prices of 160 different products sold on the Sports Direct website and found examples where the saving suggested by the higher reference price did not appear genuine.

We've now called on the Competition and Markets Authority to investigate.  

Read on to find out more about our investigation or watch the video.

Sports Direct RRP concerns

Using Recommended Retail Prices (known as RRPs) to show a saving is a common pricing tactic. When we asked Which? readers for examples of suspicious RRPs, Sports Direct was a name that cropped up repeatedly. 

Sports Direct's website uses RRPs but also related terms such as MSRPs (Manufacturer Suggested Retail Price) and SRPs (Suggested Retail Price), which sound the same as an RRP to us.

The Advertising Standards Authority says shoppers would understand RRPs to be the price the item is generally sold at – meaning shoppers may think the Sports Direct price is a great deal compared to the ‘normal’ price across the market.

But we found examples where we could find no other online retailers selling at the RRP or MSRP price used by Sports Direct. Often, their prices were the same as Sports Direct’s or lower.

• Find out more: how to get the best price when shopping online

Sports Direct brands in the spotlight

Sports Direct’s owner, Frasers Group, has a large portfolio of other brands that are sold by Sports Direct. Indeed, sometimes, Frasers Group retailers appear to be the only sellers of these particular brands. 

This is relevant since the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) says: ‘If a marketer is the only seller of a product, and so has set the price themselves, it’s unlikely to be acceptable to refer to the price as an RRP.’ Whether that applies where the only sellers are members of the same group is unclear. 

So we dug into the pricing at Sports Direct to see what was going on.

Are Sports Direct's RRPs genuine?

We looked at 160 products at SportsDirect.com, both those from Frasers Group own brands (73) as well as other branded products (87). We checked their prices at other online retailers to see if the RRP, or MSRP, used by Sports Direct was the price at which they were being generally sold across the market.

For 58 of the 160 products, we found no retailer selling them at or above the Sports Direct reference price – leading us to question if those were genuine. 

When we looked at the 73 Frasers Group own-brand products, 53 were sold at or above the SportsDirect.com reference price at other retailers – but these were all websites owned by Frasers Group. 

These included the following examples: 

In our view, some of Sports Direct’s uses of RRPs and MSRPs could be ‘misleading actions’ under the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008 (which were in force when this research was undertaken), as they could mislead people about the value of a product and savings they could make. 

If the product is available across the market at significantly less than the RRP or MSRP, the price advantage the comparison suggests isn’t genuine. We’ve called on the CMA to investigate.

Sports Direct did not provide a comment for publication.

Which?'s pricing work

Our Sports Direct investigation was part of Which?'s wider work on improving pricing practices. 

This has included Ticketmaster’s sale of Oasis tickets. We called it out as a potential breach of consumer law for failing to make clear to consumers that the price of tickets may increase while they sit in virtual queues for hours. 

It also risked misleading people into buying so-called ‘Platinum’ tickets for nearly two-and-a-half times the price of standard tickets, without clearly explaining that ‘Platinum’ offered no extra benefits. 

We're calling on Ticketmaster to refund the difference to fans who may have been misled into paying higher prices than they originally expected to. 

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Strengthening the law

Which has also been campaigning to strengthen how consumer law deals with misleading pricing tactics. 

We successfully pushed the last government to update the law to stop so-called ‘drip pricing’, where businesses can tempt customers with low prices, then push the price up with extra mandatory charges. 

Now, we’re focusing on making sure firms comply with pricing laws. But ultimately, we need stronger enforcement of consumer law so that businesses are deterred from using unfair pricing tactics in the first place.

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Our research

We looked at the pricing of 160 popular products on SportsDirect.com on various days in February, March and April 2025. 

This story was part of an investigation called 'Dodgy pricing tactics exposed', which first appeared in the June edition of Which?

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