Sports groups suffer after England defeat

England's spectacular crash out of Euro 2008 on Wednesday night drove Sports Direct to warn that it was unlikely to meet expectations for profits in the current year.

The boot of Mladen Petric, who scored a late strike to lead Croatia to victory against England, also dented the prospects at Umbro.

Sports Direct recently lifted its stake in the maker of the national football team's shirts to 29.9 per cent which is also the subject of a takeover bid from Nike.

In September Sports Direct said it was confident of seeing limited growth during the current financial year. However, on Thursday it said: "As England have not qualified . . . the company can no longer be confident of achieving that level of financial performance and believes at this stage that pre-exceptional earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation (ebitda) for the current financial year is likely to be below that achieved in the last year."

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Sports Direct was one of the biggest fallers on the FTSE 250 by mid morning on Thursday morning. Its shares were down 16 per cent at 94½p, nearly 70 per cent below the price at which the company floated in February last year. Umbro stock lost 3.87 per cent at 167¾p.