The tentacles of SD are everywhere in the sportswear market - he even has/had shares in JD Sports.
I was looking earlier to try and refresh my memory on the myriad of bullshit legal actions waged by Ashley but gave up because google is just returning dozens of articles about today’s news. However I do recall something about Elite being involved with JD Sports, which is why we distributed with them, to the chagrin of Ashley. In fact, one of the cases I think he brought was to force Elite to supply wholesale into SD - and that’s where we started to see SD popping up with shirt sales and slightly discounted pricing over various different merchandise. It would not surprise me one iota if SD wanted to undercut us all, but failed mostly because of the depth of feeling towards his brand, and so reported us all to CMA over the pricing tactics referred to by CMA (which, I would not be at all surprised if SD employ themselves by the way)
Back to your question though, it doesn’t look like Ashley owns Elite per companies house information. Elite were fighting with us against SD initially when Ashley brought the action over us allegedly not offering SD the right to match the Elite deal. However, I do think that like us, Elite have backed down and reached some sort of settlement to make Ashley go away and stop interfering with their business - hence why they then started to wholesale stock to SD, etc. Whether that actually worked or not, I dont know, because the monies we were due from Elite then got caught up in SD court cases.
Apologies, I’m working form memory - its very complex so i may have got various parts wrong.