Decathlon will open its first London store for 15 years and the sports retailer said it had slashed prices on over 4,000 products this year.

Decathlon will open the doors to its Croydon store this evening, with Olympic bronze medallist Steve Parry cutting the ribbon alongside the shop’s store manager Manel Ramoul and UK chief executive Thibaut Peeters. The store is located at Trafalgar Way Retail Park.

The French sporting goods specialist has 16 stores in the UK, in locations including Canada Water in London, Bolton, Coventry and Braehead in Scotland. It has recently opened smaller 20,000 sq ft stores in the UK and has also opened smaller format shops in France and Spain under its budget fascia Koodza.

The retailer said that in a bid to fulfil its goal of “making sport accessible to all”, it had dropped the prices on more than 4,000 products this year.

French-owned Decathlon Group is one of the largest sporting goods retailers in the world, operating around 800 stores across 20 countries. It generated sales of €7.4bn (£5.75bn) in 2013.