Stronger-than-expected sales of replica England football shirts as the men’s national team made it to the final of Euro 2024 helped JD Sports to beat UK trading expectations over the summer. Shares in the retailer were up more than 8% on Thursday, making the company the top riser on the FTSE 100 index, as analysts said its performance was reassuring in the light of fears about waning demand for athleisure fashion given poor performances by the big brands including Nike. While sales at established JD Sports shops in the UK fell by 0.8% in the three months to 3 August, that was a big improvement from the 6.4% decline in the previous quarter. As well as its eponymous global sports clothing chain, JD Sports Fashion owns the US chains Finish Line and Shoe Palace, Sprinter in Europe and the UK outdoor kit retailers Blacks, Go Outdoors and Millets. Régis Schultz, its chief executive, said the improvement in the UK partly related to easier comparatives a year earlier, when the UK’s weather was even worse than this summer. However, he said sales of replica England kit during the Euro football championship were also much better than expected, with sales of home and away shirts selling equally, which was quite unusual. “We sold more than we were expecting,” Schultz said. Despite the UK being JD Sports’ worst-performing region and the only one where underlying sales fell back, he told the Guardian: “We feel good about the UK.” He added that the group was gaining market share in a difficult market, especially on clothing, where “the weather didn’t help at all”. Schultz said JD Sports was planning on a high level of discounting in the clothing market up until Christmas, as retailers try to clear stocks after a poor summer and a shift away from non-essentials during the cost of living crisis. Alice Price, an apparel analyst at the market research firm GlobalData, said JD was “facing greater threat from Sports Direct, which in recent months has elevated its brand proposition by onboarding a host of desirable brands such as Alo Yoga and On”. This had allowed Sports Direct to “benefit from the resilience of premium sportswear”. Schultz said that in the longer term, the shift towards more casual footwear would continue to drive sales while JD Sports continued to open stores and make acquisitions to extend its reach overseas. By the end of this year, the retailer’s home UK market is expected to be overtaken by that in the rest of Europe to fall into third place behind the US. Schultz credited sales of Adidas’s Samba footwear – now the group’s bestselling womenswear shoe in the US – for helping a strong performance on the other side of the Atlantic, where sales at established stores rose by nearly 6%.