Newsletter · · Ashutosh Agarwal

Nike Loses Mbappé and the Fallen Brand Comeback Question - Brands: Luxury, Sneakers & Apparel - Week of September 20, 2026

The Brands: Luxury, Sneakers & Apparel weekly for the week of September 20, 2026 (podcasts published September 14 to 20, 2026): a synthesis of the week's consumer and brand podcasts on Nike losing Mbappé to On and sliding out of the S&P 100, Lululemon's dire quarter and its new Nike-bred CEO, the fashion comeback playbook, On and Hoka on the other side of the trade, Dick's and Foot Locker caught in the wholesale crossfire, LVMH falling out of Europe's top 10, and the K-shaped consumer debate.

Brands: Luxury, Sneakers & Apparel

Week of September 20, 2026: Nike Loses Mbappé and the Fallen Brand Comeback Question

This was Nike's week, and not in a good way. The French soccer superstar Kylian Mbappé, who had worn the swoosh since he was nine years old, walked out the door and signed with On, the Swiss running-shoe upstart. Around the same news cycle, word spread that Nike is being dropped from the S&P 100 stock index, with rumors it could lose its spot in the Dow Jones next. And a run of investing podcasts kept circling the same uncomfortable question: when a great consumer brand loses its shine, can it ever really get it back?

That question hung over almost everything this week: Nike, Lululemon, even LVMH, the owner of Louis Vuitton. One show devoted a whole episode to "three failures and three comebacks" in fashion. So this issue leads with the fallen giants, then works through what the podcasts said about luxury, the shape of the consumer, and where the money might actually be going instead.

1. Nike: the swoosh keeps slipping

Start with the headline. On Squawk on the Street (Sept 18), the hosts walked through Mbappé leaving Nike for On, which is pushing hard into soccer and also just hired the France legend Thierry Henry as its "director of football." The twist: a CNBC source said On didn't poach him: "Nike let him go." One host, a soccer parent, put the sting in plain terms: when he takes his 6- and 8-year-old boys to buy cleats, the first question is always "what cleats is Mbappé wearing?" Mbappé is young and global in a way that Nike's older stars (LeBron, Ronaldo) are not.

The same show noted two more bruises landing in one week: Nike added Alexander Arnault, son of LVMH boss Bernard Arnault, to its board (a move that drew criticism), and there are now real rumors Nike could be booted from the Dow because its share price has fallen so far. For scale, one host pointed out that only about 17 companies in the entire S&P 500 are down 50% or more from their 52-week high, and Nike is one of them (alongside Lululemon and The Trade Desk). Nike was a $177 stock five years ago.

How did it get here? Two podcasts laid out the fall in detail, with numbers.

On Christopher Lochhead's Follow Your Different (Sept 16), the hosts tallied the damage: Nike was worth more than $260 billion in November 2021 and is worth about $57 billion today, a 78% drop, and more than $200 billion of value gone. The stock sits at a 12-year low, and Nike is being removed from the S&P 100 after nearly 18 years, with tech companies taking its place. Their villain is the strategy that former CEO John Donahoe (who came from the software company ServiceNow) ran with McKinsey's help: Nike scrapped its sport "categories" (running, basketball, soccer) and reorganized around "men, women, and kids." Twenty-year category experts were pushed out. Nike cut hundreds of retail partners to sell directly to shoppers instead, taking direct sales from under 30% of the business to 44%, and moved roughly 10% of sales that used to go to brand advertising into digital ads aimed at people who already buy Nike. The host's verdict on selling direct and dropping stores: "You don't get rid of your distributors... Foot Locker matters. They have a retail footprint. They have sales reps. They carry inventory." The tell that it backfired: Nike quietly brought the categories back at the end of 2023, and this year direct sales fell 6% while wholesale (selling through other stores) grew 6%. He called it one of the worst CEO handoffs in modern history.

The Art of the Brand (Sept 14), with branding consultant Philip Millar, made the same point about shelf space in a memorable line: "Nike lost 80% of its value by speaking to nobody." When Nike pulled out of sports retailers during COVID to push its own stores, it handed shelf space to clearer, sharper brands like On and Hoka. "You don't give up shelf space," Millar said. "It's like capturing territory in a war." He also drew a line between Nike's 2018 Colin Kaepernick campaign (on-brand, built around an athlete, and it worked) and 2023's decision to use the influencer Dylan Mulvaney to promote leggings and sports bras (off-brand, "not an athlete"). Either way, the everyday customer who just needed to replace a pair of Air Force Ones drifted off.

The retail read-through showed up on Schwab Network's Cash Tag segment (Sept 18) with Likefolio's Landon Swan. Nike overproduced its Air Force, Jordan and Dunk sneakers and is now slashing prices to clear them, and when Nike discounts, everyone who sells Nike has to discount too. Swan's blunt line on Nike: it's "got a bit of a clock" and needs to turn things around quickly.

Is any of this a buy? Two Irish hosts on Stock Club (Sept 17) made the most complete bull-ish case, and even they hedged. They noted Nike shares are at their lowest since 2014, down about 50% in a year and about 80% from the August 2021 peak. On valuation, they put the stock at roughly 17 times earnings (versus 35–40 times back in 2021), with about a 4.5% dividend yield, earnings around $2.10 a share and a price near $36. The bull points: the new CEO Elliot Hill (in the job since late 2024, who started as a Nike intern in 1988) is undoing the direct-to-consumer overreach, putting product back into big stores, restoring the sport categories, and running throwback "Rip the Script" ad campaigns: Nike even sponsored about a quarter of the World Cup teams. The bear point they couldn't shake: "the trend is your friend, and it ain't turned around yet," and buying now feels like "catching a falling knife." Asked how they'd split a hypothetical $10,000 between Nike and the Korean e-commerce company Coupang, both put 70% into Coupang and only 30% into Nike. That is a lukewarm bull case at best.

They also flagged the piece that makes a turnaround hard: China. It was once Nike's fastest-growing and highest-margin market, about 20% of total sales at the peak, and has now seen eight straight quarters of falling revenue, hit by a weaker Chinese shopper and "guochao," the trend of Chinese consumers favoring homegrown brands. Group profit margins have roughly halved, from about 14–15% down to 8%.

2. Lululemon: on its knees, with a new boss from Nike

If Nike is the big fallen brand, Lululemon is the one investors keep debating whether to catch.

The Canadian Investor (Sept 14) recapped an ugly quarter: comparable sales (a measure of growth at existing stores) fell 10%, and the company cut its full-year forecast for the second time in a row, from up 3–4%, to flat, to down 5–7%. It let go of its chief product officer about two years ago after products stopped resonating. One notable nugget: the investor Michael Burry (of "The Big Short" fame) owns the stock and is "fairly bullish." The hosts' caution: even if it turns, a real recovery could take three to five years.

The Curve (Sept 15) called the latest result "absolutely dire": the stock fell about 17% on the day, is down more than 40% this year to an eight-year low, and now trades near $100, roughly a fifth of its old peak around $500. A new CEO, Heidi O'Neill, a long-time Nike executive, is taking over. The hosts landed on one telling number to explain the slide: Lululemon spends only about 3% of its revenue on marketing, versus roughly 10–12% for Nike and Adidas, and once sales fall, it can't afford to spend more, which becomes a "death spiral." They also framed O'Neill's job as a "glass cliff": a woman brought in to rescue a company only after a string of male CEOs let it catch fire.

The bull case came from Money Life with Chuck Jaffe (Sept 14), where investor Vijay Merolia argued this looks more like a leadership-and-marketing stumble than a broken business: Lululemon is still profitable, still growing revenue (just slower than the economy), and still everywhere, "go to any dog park... everybody's wearing Lululemon." He sees a possible buyout target, with the caveat that "$100 stretchy pants" are a tough sell to a squeezed shopper. On Motley Fool Hidden Gems (Sept 18), the two views collided: one host owns Lululemon and calls himself "a proud owner of a round-trip stock," betting on its history of bouncing back; the other, Lou Whiteman, was blunt: "Lululemon caught lightning in a bottle... they got people to overpay for yoga pants. They might do that again, but I'm not betting on it."

3. Can a fallen brand actually come back? The comeback playbook

The most useful frame of the week came from The Canadian Investor (Sept 14), whose whole episode asked why fashion stocks are so hard, and studied who recovered and who didn't.

  • The cautionary tale, Express. The work-and-going-out clothing chain had more than $2 billion in revenue and $140 million in profit in 2011, with healthy 13% operating margins. Then fast-fashion rivals H&M and Zara ate its lunch; margins fell to under 1.5% by 2017–18, and it went bankrupt in 2024. Shareholders were wiped out even though the brand still exists.
  • The comebacks, but slow ones. Abercrombie & Fitch hit $4.5 billion in revenue back in 2013, then took twelve years to top that again (February 2025). Victoria's Secret is up 339% over three years after pivoting away from, and then back toward, its roots, with weight-loss drugs (GLP-1s) cited as a possible tailwind. And Crocs, the wildest one, went from $109 million in sales in 2005 to $847 million in 2007, nearly collapsed in 2008–09 (its auditor doubted it could survive), then recovered under CEO Andrew Rees from 2017 by simplifying back to its classic clog and cutting costs.

The lesson the hosts drew, and applied straight to Lululemon and Nike: comebacks are possible, but they take years, they usually require getting back to what made the brand special, and plenty of brands never make it.

4. The other side of the trade: On and Hoka

Every story about Nike losing is, in part, a story about On and Hoka winning.

On Reuters World News (Sept 19), reporter Danielle Kaye called the Mbappé signing "a major win for On," but added the honest caveat: "turning star power into sales is a different challenge." Soccer is brutal to break into: Under Armour, New Balance and even Skechers have all tried and "struggled to chip away at the dominance held by Nike, Adidas and Puma." On Squawk on the Street (Sept 18), the analysts at Jefferies (who are skeptical of On) compared it to Steph Curry signing with Under Armour, proof that one global superstar can't, on his own, lift a whole franchise. On holds an investor day next week, and CNBC plans to interview the CEO.

Where the pros are actually leaning: on Schwab Network (Sept 18), Likefolio ranked On as its number-one pick in the whole sneaker/sporting-goods group, precisely because it keeps pushing quality and making bold moves. Its logic: quality, not price, is winning consumers right now, and that's what On and Hoka have that Nike lost. The counterweight from Motley Fool Hidden Gems (Sept 18): On is still only about 2% of the US shoe market, and both On and Hoka just lowered their own forecasts, so the challengers aren't immune to the slowdown either.

5. Wholesale in the crossfire: Dick's and Foot Locker

The retailer caught in the middle of the sneaker wars had a genuinely bad week. On Schwab Network (Sept 18), Likefolio's Landon Swan detailed Dick's Sporting Goods dropping about 33% almost overnight, driven by its acquisition of Foot Locker. The math: Foot Locker's comparable sales came in at -3.6% against an expected +1%, and that "crushed margins from 13 down to 8": a five-percentage-point collapse, which Swan noted is enormous (you usually talk about margin moves in tiny fractions, not full points). Foot Locker shareholders, meanwhile, did fine: they "held at 13 and got bought out at 24."

The interesting bull tell: Dick's is too dependent on Nike, so the moment to watch is whether Dick's turns "brand agnostic": shifting shelf space away from a struggling Nike toward On and Hoka. If it does, Swan argued, that's a positive sign for Dick's (and another blow to Nike). He calls the sell-off "a little bit overdone... very early in this deal," notes board members have been buying, and ranks Dick's his number-two pick in the group behind On.

6. Luxury loses its shine: LVMH falls out of Europe's top 10

Luxury was quieter this week but carried the same "fallen giant" theme. On the BBC's World Business Report (Sept 15), fashion-industry veteran Maria Malone explained that LVMH, the owner of Louis Vuitton, Dior, Fendi and Moët, was Europe's most valuable company a year ago and has now dropped out of Europe's top 10 by market value. Her reasons: the post-COVID luxury boom has cooled, global conflict has cut the travel that drives a lot of luxury shopping, China has slowed sharply, and shoppers are trading down to "quiet luxury": craftsmanship and heritage over loud logos. Even champagne is soft: younger people are drinking less, choosing prosecco, cocktails or alcohol-free "mocktails."

The investor take came from Chit Chat Stocks (Sept 18), where the hosts, who had earlier tagged LVMH a "falling knife," noted a Bloomberg report that it was set to fall out of the top 10 European companies. They cited a valuation of about 19 times trailing earnings, 17 times forward earnings, and an EV/EBITDA (a common takeover-style value measure) around 9.3, with first-half 2026 revenue up just 2%. One host now thinks "forward returns can be solid here" if you trust management, though he worries about the Arnault family succession ("we don't want it to turn into the TV show," a nod to Succession). The other keeps LVMH in his "too hard pile" because clothing and physical stores are unpredictable, and said he'd rather own Hermès at 30–35 times earnings than LVMH at 15–19 times: you pay up for the brand whose results you can actually predict. They also flagged Tiffany being squeezed by cheap lab-grown diamonds.

A neat parallel came from the Stock Club (Sept 17) hosts, who used Gucci (owned by Kering) to explain what kills a luxury brand: "I've never seen more Gucci products in the wild" (t-shirts, flip-flops, hats) "but it's certainly not Gucci five-grand suits." Flood the market with cheap logo goods and you destroy the scarcity that makes luxury luxurious. It's the same disease that hit Nike, just at the top end.

The flip side, resale is booming. The BBC's World Business Report (Sept 15) noted shoppers increasingly buy "pre-loved" vintage instead of new, and treat luxury handbags and watches as things that hold value and get passed down to children. Good for the resale platforms; a structural headwind for the brands trying to sell you a new one.

7. Is the shopper okay? The K-shaped debate

Underneath all of this is a question about the consumer, and Motley Fool Hidden Gems (Sept 18) hosted a genuinely useful two-sided debate.

The worrying data: homebuilder Lennar's new orders fell 9% with prices down 30% from a year ago; Nike's sales fell last year; Hoka and On both cut guidance; and General Motors' sales dropped 6.8% early in 2026, with big SUVs like the Escalade (-18%), Suburban (-18%) and Tahoe (-8%) all falling. The catch, as Lou Whiteman pointed out, is that these are exactly the premium, "top of the K" products that were supposed to be recession-proof: the shoppers who buy Escalades and $150 sneakers.

The reassuring data, same host: US retail sales rose 1.2% in August, the biggest jump in five years, and Bank of America card data shows household spending up 4.5% from a year ago. His framing is worth keeping: the consumer isn't one person, it's "the aggregate of 130 million-plus households," so "two things can be true": premium brands can struggle while the overall economy hums along. A third host floated an "E-shaped economy," where even comfortable upper-middle-class households start pulling back as they eye job risk from AI. The backdrop nobody loved: the Federal Reserve raised interest rates this week, which makes big financed purchases (homes, cars) more expensive.

For the wider affordability picture, the BBC's World Business Report (Sept 15) had former PIMCO chief Mohamed El-Erian noting US government debt has hit $40 trillion (double a decade ago), interest payments are running 15% above last year, and the typical first-time homebuyer is now 39 years old, all reasons the everyday shopper feels stretched.

What to watch next

  • Nike's fiscal first-quarter results (around Oct 1) and its fall investor day. The single number that matters is gross margin: the real test of whether Elliot Hill's turnaround is working. Also watch the direct-vs-wholesale mix (this year direct sales fell 6% while wholesale grew 6%).
  • On's investor day next week, with the CEO on CNBC: the economics of the Mbappé and Thierry Henry soccer push, and whether splashy star signings actually convert (the Steph-Curry-at-Under-Armour risk).
  • Dick's Sporting Goods: whether it starts shifting shelf space away from Nike toward On and Hoka, and how the Foot Locker integration comps and margins recover.
  • Lululemon under new CEO Heidi O'Neill: her first strategic signals, and whether the company can afford to spend its way back into relevance.
  • LVMH: whether a stock at roughly 17 times forward earnings can re-rate, and what Alexander Arnault's new seat on Nike's board says about how the luxury and sportswear worlds are converging.