Sports Direct ad ban over RRP claims. The retailer calls the ASA out of touch

The Sports Direct ad ban announced on 2 September 2026 is about one number on one product page. Britain’s Advertising Standards Authority banned an online advert for a Puma Women’s Zipped Baselayer Top. The advert ran on the Sports Direct website on 10 February 2026. It said “from £17.00 RRP £45.00” and carried the line “UP TO 50% OFF”. The consumer group Which? complained, and the regulator agreed with it.

Which? complained about a Puma top priced from 17 pounds

RRP means recommended retail price. It is the price the maker suggests a shop should charge. Shops use it to show how big a discount is. Which? argued that the saving here was not real, because almost nobody was selling the top for 45 pounds. The ASA looked at the evidence and found the same product on sale for 17 pounds at another Frasers Group shop and for 23 pounds elsewhere.

The ASA wanted proof the top really sold at 45 pounds

Sports Direct had confirmation from the maker that 45 pounds was the recommended price. The regulator said that is not enough. Under the CAP Code, the rulebook for UK adverts, a shop has to show that the product was actually sold at the higher price, in enough places, for the saving to mean anything. Sports Direct could not show that, so the advert broke the rules and cannot appear again in that form.

Frasers Group calls the ASA test fundamentally flawed

The owner of Sports Direct did not accept the decision quietly. In a statement the company said Sports Direct “regard this ruling as fundamentally wrong and will be contesting it fully” (Retail Gazette). Frasers also called the regulator “out of touch” and said the way the ASA tests recommended prices does not match how shoppers have read them for decades.

Emma Sleep High Court case is the retailer’s main argument

Frasers points to the Emma Sleep case in the High Court, where the judge rejected what the company describes as overly rigid tests for reference prices and accepted that a trader’s honest belief in an RRP matters. That case is now the backbone of its appeal. The dispute is therefore no longer only about one baselayer top. It is about what evidence a shop must hold before it prints a crossed-out price.

For marketers the lesson is practical and cheap to act on. If your adverts show a saving against a higher price, keep the proof that the higher price was real: dates, places and how many units sold there. Regulators on both sides of the Atlantic are asking harder questions about how prices are set and shown, from the FTC case over Amazon’s ad auctions to the ad tech ruling against Google. So it is worth checking your discount claims before someone else does.