A Foot Locker store inside the Oxford Valley Mall in Middletown Township, Bucks County, PA.

By Chris Spiker From Daily Voice

Several Foot Locker stores are closing a few months after Dick's Sporting Goods purchased the sneaker chain in a $2.5 billion deal.

Dick's announced the closures in its third-quarter earnings report on Tuesday, Nov. 25. The Pittsburgh-based sporting goods giant completed its purchase of Foot Locker in September.

The restructuring aims to prevent Foot Locker from weighing down Dick's profits.

"At Foot Locker, we've assembled a world-class management team and are taking decisive actions to 'clean out the garage' by clearing unproductive inventory, closing underperforming stores and laying the foundation for a fresh start in 2026," said Dick's CEO Ed Stack.

Dick's hasn't said which Foot Lockers will close. As of Saturday, Nov. 1, Foot Locker operated about 2,589 stores in 20 countries, including brands that Dick's also acquired, like Champs Sports and atmos.

The acquisition gave Dick's long-desired access to international markets, since the athletic apparel chain only has stores in the US.

"We've taken pretty aggressive markdowns to clean out old merchandise," Stack told CNBC. "We're impairing some store assets. We'll close some stores... everything we're doing is there to protect 2026 and just kind of do this one time."

A Dick's Sporting Goods store at Pennsylvania's King of Prussia Mall.

A Dick's Sporting Goods store at Pennsylvania's King of Prussia Mall.

Wikimedia Commons - Dough4872

Dick's and Foot Locker leaders have begun testing changes at 11 Foot Locker stores in North America, including cutting products by more than 20% and shrinking its large "footwear wall" to highlight key shoes.

"If you'd walked into a Foot Locker store before and you looked at the footwear wall... it was nothing but a run-on sentence," said Stack. "It was just a whole bunch of shoes thrown up on the wall, and we took all of that down, we re-merchandised it, focused on shoes we really wanted to sell. It's early on, but we're pretty enthusiastic about what we've done."

Foot Locker was founded in California in 1974, while Dick's opened its first store in Binghamton, New York, in 1948.