Sports Direct International PLC

And what I could see with Reform was, well, was a group of people saying to the, to the, the protesters, "You know, look, we share your diagnosis, and we share your anger, and we share quite a lot of your language.

But for the love of God, please stop dressing up like the provisional wing of Sports Direct."

[laughs]

You know?

chess board.

And also, I'm not trying to be funny here with Julie, but which board are we talking about here? Are we talking about the board of Newcastle United Football Club? Are we talking about the holding company that owns Newcastle United Football Club? Are we talking about Sports Direct? I mean, you know, it's a multiplicity of companies.

It really is.

We've got John on the phone.

Shorthand.

Andrew says this.

Is Porky trying to get on the board at Newcastle or perhaps free Velcro shoes? He keeps mentioning Sports Direct.

Hamid says, I thought Blackpool held the title of Basket Case Clubs.

And it also began to come before the courts because The courts were for the first time really being faced with casual workers, but these casual workers appeared qualitatively different from the sort of casual workers the courts had come across sort of decades and centuries previously.

And this, particularly with some high profile scandals from the use in Burger King initially and then Sports Direct, later on although it's not confined to those those companies it became no this phenomenon came to the public eye basically and it became necessary to conceptualize what was going on and the only way it could really be conceptualized was by what it lacked compared to what people expected and what had become the norm and that's where the nomenclature zero hours really comes from and What I think is particularly interesting, and it actually comes through in the Employment Rights Act 2025, is legally speaking, it's very, very difficult to conceptualize what a zero hours contract is.

Because a lot of those things that we colloquially refer to as zero hours contracts lack the basic features of a contract because they are so one-sided.

If you think about it, this is an arrangement whereby an employer doesn't agree to offer any work or regular work and a worker doesn't necessarily agree to accept any work.

JD tried to buy the company.

Sports Direct put an offer in, and JJB in those days also.

However, when it came to due diligence, Richard would take them into the car park, open up a container, and it was a 40-foot high container with all the invoices and receipts.

I met the chief executive of Canterbury, industry titan Joe Middleton, and a chap called Hap Klopp, the owner and founder of North Face.

It was originally called Sports King in the East Midlands.

Yeah.

And rather than selling to Sports Direct- He flipped the business to KitKing, and in the late '90s was one of the first, if not the first, Nike teamwear accounts.

Okay.

I do, yeah, yeah.

Sports Direct.

Yeah.

In the Epsom.

Thanks for the free advert.

No, well, I'm telling you about the stories, you see, because Sports Direct is owned by Mike Ashley.

It is.

Who owns Newcastle United.

So, eh...

Then I had birthday money to spend, so Sports Direct, got myself a couple of pairs

of

shorts.

thinking.

It's like a sale

on Sports Direct, though, isn't it? It's like DFS, isn't it? Aye.

So, then...