What happened
Founded in 1979, Go Sport was for four decades a familiar French sports retailer: equipment, trainers and team kits in most mid-sized towns. Like Camaïeu, it ended up in the portfolio of Hermione People & Brands, a holding group that collected struggling French chains; and like Camaïeu, it arrived there without an owner able to pay for its turnaround.
When the group went into receivership, HPB first proposed a continuation plan — then gave it up. In April 2023 the commercial court chose the only credible offer: rival Intersport would convert 50 of Go Sport's 72 stores to its own banner, preserving about 90% of the jobs. The remaining 22 stores closed. The brand itself went into total liquidation and disappeared from the high street.
The pattern across the HPB portfolio — Camaïeu liquidated five months earlier, Go Sport broken up and sold — is the arithmetic of rescue holdings: a group assembled from distressed chains has no earnings to fund any of them, and the state will not fund all of them. Each chain then dies on the same question: is there a buyer for the pieces? For Go Sport there was; for 22 of its stores there was not.
What it cost
The court chose Intersport's offer to convert 50 of the 72 stores, saving about 90% of jobs, but the remaining 22 closed and the brand was liquidated.
Why it happened
A rescue holding buys chains on the cheap and inherits their costs — with no profitable core, there is nowhere for the turnaround money to come from.
When the owner abandons its own continuation plan, the court's only question becomes who will take the pieces — the brand has already been conceded.
A competitor buyer saves the jobs but not the brand: Intersport wanted the stores and the staff, not the name on the sign.
The lesson
Buying distressed chains is not a strategy unless one of them makes money — a portfolio of turnarounds with no funding source is a queue for the court, processed one chain at a time.
FOLLOW THE EVIDENCE