The money was the story this week. PureGym agreed to pay £235 million for a Swiss low-cost chain, World Gym signed its second Bangkok lease on the way to thirty Thai clubs, and Smart Fit bought into a 149-unit Brazilian franchise network — all of it while the LSEG/Ipsos consumer sentiment index fell to its lowest reading since October 2011. That combination is the whole week in one sentence: institutional capital is buying cheap, at scale, in a consumer environment that feels terrible and is spending anyway. Underneath it, two quieter items deserve your attention more than any of the headlines — U.S. shopping-center rents went up again, and Ireland’s football association admitted it cannot verify its own vetting records.
Here’s the week, with sources, and what I’d do about each one.
- The week in five lines: PureGym agreed to pay £235 million for Switzerland’s NonStop Gym — 47 clubs, more than 100,000 members, a 47 per cent EBITDA margin — at 7.8 times earnings.
- World Gym signed its second Bangkok lease on the way to 30 Thai clubs, while Gulf operator GymNation is targeting 30 of its own at about US$29.75 a month.
- Smart Fit agreed to take up to 20 per cent of Buddha Spa, a 149-location Brazilian network that is 96 per cent franchised.
- LSEG/Ipsos consumer sentiment fell to 45.2, its lowest since October 2011, while Bank of America reported card spending per household up 6.2 per cent year over year.
- Colliers put U.S. retail vacancy at 4.3 per cent with shopping-center rents up again, and the Football Association of Ireland admitted it cannot verify its own Garda vetting records.
1. PureGym paid £235 million for 47 cheap gyms in Switzerland
On October 15, PureGym agreed to acquire NonStop Gym, a Swiss low-cost operator, for £235 million — about $311.4 million or €277.8 million — with completion expected November 2. NonStop brings 47 gyms and more than 100,000 members, concentrated in French-speaking Switzerland, where PureGym is weakest; PureGym’s existing 49 Swiss clubs are mostly German-speaking, and the combined network is expected to pass 100 locations by year end. The price works out to 7.8 times NonStop’s run-rate adjusted EBITDA of £30 million, or roughly £5 million a location. For the twelve months to June 2026, NonStop reported £53 million of revenue and £25 million of adjusted EBITDA — a margin near 47 per cent. PureGym funded it with £206 million from an October bond issuance plus £29 million of cash, taking senior secured net leverage from 4.1 to 4.5 times, the top of its own target range. CEO Alex Wood said the deal creates “a truly national operator” in Switzerland. Source: Health Club Management, October 15, 2026.
Oliver’s take: Sit with that margin for a second. Forty-seven per cent EBITDA on a 24-hour box with almost no staff on the floor. That is not a fitness business, it is a real estate and billing business wearing gym shorts, and the market just paid 7.8 times earnings for it. Now ask yourself what your school earns and what anybody would pay you for it. I’ll tell you what bothers me: most owners reading this have never calculated either number. You cannot compete with a 47 per cent margin and you should not try — a school is a labor business because the labor is the product. But you had better know your own arithmetic before somebody with a bond issuance opens a box eight minutes from your front door.
2. Two low-cost chains are racing into Thailand
On October 16, World Gym — Taiwan’s largest fitness operator — announced it had signed a lease for its second Bangkok club, a 3,000-square-metre site at Singha Estate’s S-OASIS development scheduled to open in the first quarter of 2027. The company called it “the initial phase of an aggressive plan to open 30 fitness centers in the kingdom in five years.” Its first Thai club, World Gym Samrong, launched presales in late September and reported more than 1,000 presale members inside two weeks. Source: PR Newswire via Thailand Business News, October 16, 2026. Two weeks earlier, Gulf operator GymNation announced its own first expansion outside the Middle East: a 40,000-square-foot flagship inside Big C Supercenter Ratchadamri in Bangkok, targeted for early 2027, with 30 Thai gyms planned within three years. Memberships are priced at 999 Thai baht a month, roughly US$29.75, including access to more than 400 classes monthly. GymNation already runs more than 50 locations across the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, targets more than 100 across the GCC within three years, and secured a US$100 million private credit facility from funds associated with HPS Investment Partners in May 2026. Source: Health Club Management, October 1, 2026.
Oliver’s take: Thirty dollars a month, four hundred classes, open at three in the morning. If you teach in Bangkok, Dubai, Riyadh or Manama, that is your new neighbor and it arrived with a hundred million dollars of credit behind it. Here’s reality: nobody buys a martial arts program because it is the cheapest hour available, and the owner who answers a thirty-dollar box by going to thirty-nine dollars has just told every parent in town that what he teaches is worth about the same as a treadmill. It isn’t. Average student value belongs at $250 to $300 a month, and the way you get there is to be worth it — not to be the last school standing at the bottom.
3. Smart Fit bought into a 149-unit, 96 per cent franchised Brazilian network
Also on October 16, Latin American fitness group Smart Fit agreed to invest up to R$32 million — about US$6.3 million — in Buddha Wellness Group Brasil, the company behind the Buddha Spa chain, for up to 20 per cent of its total and voting share capital, with a call option on a further 10 percentage points that could take the holding to 30 per cent. Buddha Spa, founded in 2001, runs 149 locations across 12 Brazilian states, 96 per cent of them franchises; co-founder and CEO Gustavo Albanesi said the company is opening two to three franchises a month. Health Club Management described the investment as a route into Brazil’s spa market without building a network from scratch. Albanesi also described using AI to certify therapists by having it assess standardised treatment protocols over video and flag deviations. Source: Health Club Management, October 16, 2026.
Oliver’s take: Two things here, and the second one is the one nobody will notice. First: a fitness operator buying a minority stake in a franchised service network is the same play that brought outside money into jiu-jitsu, and we have written before about reading the filings instead of the press release — 20 per cent with an option to 30 is not an acquisition, it is a toe in the water. Second, and more interesting to me: a 149-unit chain is using video review to audit whether its instructors are actually delivering the curriculum. I have argued for forty years that the attendance card is the crystal ball and that recorded rooms belong in every school teaching children. Somebody just turned both of those into a quality-control system. That idea is going to show up in our industry, and the schools that adopt it on purpose will beat the ones who have it imposed on them.
4. Consumer sentiment hit a fifteen-year low — and spending went up anyway
The LSEG/Ipsos Primary Consumer Sentiment Index fell 5.3 points in October to 45.2, its lowest reading since October 2011 and below the May 2020 pandemic low of 45.4. The monthly drop was the second largest on record, behind only April 2020, and the index is 7.7 points lower than a year ago. Fieldwork ran September 25 to October 1. Source: LSEG Lipper Alpha Insight, October 16, 2026. Actual spending tells a different story. Bank of America Institute’s October Consumer Checkpoint reported aggregated credit and debit card spending per household up 6.2 per cent year over year in September, or 5.1 per cent excluding gasoline — the third strongest rate of the past four years — with growth recovering among lower- and middle-income households and most discretionary categories growing. The same report noted rising buy-now-pay-later use, with nearly one in five BNPL households carrying a repayment above $500. Source: Bank of America Institute, October 2026.
Oliver’s take: This is the most important pair of numbers in the week and almost nobody will read them together. Feelings at a fifteen-year low. Card spending up six per cent. People are frightened and buying anyway — some of it on instalments. I have watched this industry panic through 1987, 2001, 2008 and 2020, and the pattern never changes: the owners who cut tuition in the first scared month spend the next three years trying to climb back, and the ones who held their price and raised their value came out the other side with a bigger school. Do not manage your school off a sentiment index. Manage it off your own attendance cards and your own bank deposits, which are the only two data sets that describe your town.
5. Where the pullback is actually showing: sporting goods and hobby retail
Census Bureau figures for September showed sales at sporting goods, hobby, musical instrument and book stores down 0.5 per cent from August, a decline that followed steady growth through most of the year, while gas station sales rose sharply on higher prices. Neil Saunders, managing director at GlobalData, said that when money gets tighter shoppers give up the non-essential gear those stores sell. Morning Consult economist Sofia Baig said gas is a small share of most budgets but unavoidable, so it takes a bigger bite, and that the pressure falls hardest on low-income consumers — while companies increasingly build products for higher-income buyers they expect to keep spending. Source: Marketplace, October 16, 2026.
Oliver’s take: Read what fell: the gear, not the instruction. A parent under pressure skips the new glove and the second uniform; she does not pull her eight-year-old out of the one activity where an adult knows his name and he is three months from a belt. That is the whole argument for programs over products. If a meaningful slice of your revenue comes from pro-shop merchandise, this is the quarter that line gets thinner — and if your answer to a soft month has historically been a gear promotion, pick a different lever.
6. Your landlord had a good quarter
Colliers data for the third quarter put the U.S. national retail vacancy rate at 4.3 per cent, down 10 basis points, with shopping centers at 5.4 per cent and malls at 8.2 per cent. Average asking rents reached $26.20 per square foot, up 0.7 per cent from the second quarter. Net absorption was 10.5 million square feet, the highest quarterly total since 2023, with shopping centers accounting for 3 million of it. There is 58.1 million square feet under construction and 7.6 million delivered, with Colliers noting that elevated construction and financing costs continue to constrain new development. The loosest major markets were Los Angeles at 5.9 per cent, Houston 5.4, Dallas-Fort Worth 5.1, Chicago 5.0 and Detroit 4.8. Source: Chain Store Age, October 15, 2026.
Oliver’s take: Low vacancy and rising rents mean one thing at your renewal: the landlord has leverage and knows it. Here is the part owners get wrong — they negotiate rent as a dollar figure when it is really a percentage. Rent above roughly 15 per cent of gross is a school with a structural problem no marketing campaign fixes. Pull your lease out tonight and calculate it. If the number is ugly, you have two honest moves: raise average student value, or share the box with a compatible tenant, which is a model more academies are using on purpose now. What you do not do is sign another five years at a rent your current student count cannot carry and hope for a good January.
7. Ireland’s football association cannot verify its own vetting records
The Football Association of Ireland issued a statement on the night of Friday, October 9 and wrote to clubs and coaches about “inconsistencies” in how Garda vetting information had been recorded and validated on its FAI Connect system, following a review by its safeguarding department. A source told The Irish Times that up to 60 League of Ireland coaches had not yet been approved by the vetting system; the FAI did not confirm that figure. The association told clubs not to field under-18 players on teams whose coaches have not been Garda vetted, said it is verifying and reconciling its compliance records as part of a comprehensive review, and has created a head of safeguarding role. CEO David Courell told the Oireachtas sports committee the organisation is moving from a child-welfare focus to combined adult and child safeguarding. Last month the FAI’s director of football, John Martin, told the same committee there were 1,400 referees “licensed and Garda vetted.” Source: The Irish Times, October 10, 2026.
Oliver’s take: Notice what did not fail here. The policy didn’t fail. Ireland requires vetting; the FAI requires vetting; everyone agreed vetting was required. What failed was a spreadsheet. That is the version of this problem that will land on you, and it is worse than a missing rule because you will believe you are compliant right up to the morning somebody asks for the file. On the kids’ market my position has never moved an inch: you cannot be too conservative. So the test is not “do we check people?” The test is: can you produce, in ten minutes, a dated record for every single adult who has been alone-adjacent to a child in your building this year? If the answer is a pause, you have the FAI’s problem at a smaller scale, and you are the one who gets named locally.
8. Kukkiwon signed a deal to push taekwondo into school sport worldwide
On October 16, Kukkiwon — the World Taekwondo Headquarters — signed a memorandum of understanding with the International School Sport Federation at its Gangnam-gu headquarters in Seoul. Kukkiwon President Yoon Woong-seok and ISF President Zeljko Tanaskovic agreed four joint projects: developing taekwondo education programmes inside global school sport, expanding training for local physical education teachers and instructors, linking ISF international events with the World Taekwondo Hanmadang, and promoting taekwondo education and cultural exchange for young people. No numbers, participating countries or timelines were announced. Source: SBS News, October 16, 2026.
Oliver’s take: “Expanding training for local physical education teachers.” Read that line again as a school owner rather than as a taekwondo practitioner, because it cuts both ways. In the good version, your art gets introduced to children inside the school day and some of them come looking for a dojang — that is the free distribution channel every one of us has been trying to build with flyers and demo assemblies for fifty years. In the other version, the PE teacher who now holds a certificate runs the after-school club himself, in the gym the district already owns, for nothing. Which version you get is decided locally, by whoever has a relationship with the principal. I keep saying it: build your community standing before you need it. This is what “before you need it” looks like.
9. The “26 per cent drop in Google Business Profile traffic” number going around is three florists
A press release issued October 13 reported a 26 per cent decline in total Google Business Profile interactions, with website clicks down 30 per cent, phone calls down 21 per cent and driving-direction requests down 15 per cent — roughly 3,134 fewer customer interactions — and attributed the change to AI reshaping local search. The analysis, by Sarasota digital marketing strategist Arthur “Art” Conforti of Bloometrix, compared May through September 2026 against the same months in 2025 for three established U.S. florists in Texas, Wisconsin and Maryland, with prior-year totals reconstructed from Google’s reported percentage changes. The author states the sample is small and that it does not establish causation. Source: ABNewswire, October 13, 2026.
Oliver’s take: I am including this one because you are going to see it quoted at you by somebody selling an AI search package, and I want you to have the sample size in hand when they do. Three flower shops is not a study. It is an anecdote with a percentage sign on it. That said — do not throw the concern out with the data. Open your own Google profile insights tonight and compare the last five months to the same five months last year. If your calls and direction requests are down, that is a real number about a real school, and it is worth a hundred press releases. This is the Bozo Explosion with a dashboard: the finding might be right, the evidence is garbage, and your own numbers settle it for free.
What I’d do about it this week
- Calculate rent as a percentage of gross, tonight. Not the dollar figure — the percentage. Vacancy is tight and rents rose again last quarter, so your next renewal is a seller’s market. Know the number before the landlord tells you his.
- Run the ten-minute file test. Pick three adults who work or volunteer in your building and try to produce a dated background-check record for each in ten minutes. The FAI’s failure was record-keeping, not policy, and so will yours be.
- Write down your average student value and your EBITDA. One page. If the market will pay 7.8 times earnings for a gym with no instructors, you ought to know what your own school earns per student and in total. Most owners do not, and it is the single cheapest hour of work on this list.
- Pull your own Google profile numbers and compare year over year. Five months against the same five months last year: calls, clicks, directions. Then you own the fact instead of renting somebody’s press release.
- Make one call to a school principal this week with nothing to sell. Governing bodies are now building programmes to certify PE teachers in our arts. The owner with the relationship gets the referral; the owner without one gets the competitor. Build it before you need it.
Editor’s note: what we left out
Several stories circulating this week missed our window or our sourcing bar. The Aspen Institute’s State of Play Portland report, which found family income to be the single largest predictor of youth sports participation, was released October 7 — outside the window, and worth its own piece. Xponential Fitness shares fell about 5 per cent on October 16, but on sector-wide consumer-discretionary selling rather than any company announcement, so there was nothing to report beyond a stock move. A Dubai-based martial arts and education network, GMNSM, raised $2 million to expand into Saudi Arabia and Europe, but that was announced September 23. The Brazilian bill to regulate jiu-jitsu instruction as a profession, PL 10125/2018, cleared a Chamber of Deputies committee back in May. Local reports of individual school openings and closings were dropped where we could not open the source and verify the facts ourselves. And we left out every competition result, signing and promotion story, as always. No fight news belongs in a business column.
Stephen Oliver, MBA, 10th Degree Black Belt, is the founder of Mile High Karate and Martial Arts Wealth Mastery. Disclosure: Martial Arts Professional is published by Stephen Oliver, who also operates Martial Arts Wealth Mastery, a paid coaching program for martial arts school owners.
