MIKE ASHLEY

I built this from a ski shop. With ten thousand pounds. Nobody helped me. I'm not complaining — that's just the context.

Retail is arithmetic. You buy it for X and sell it for more than X. The companies that fail have forgotten the arithmetic.

I am not trying to win a popularity contest. I am trying to run a business. Those are different objectives.

Every brand we've bought, people said it was dead. They said Sports Direct was dead once. They were wrong then too.

Football is an emotional business. You can't run it like retail. I learned that at Newcastle — painfully, slowly, and expensively.