Jacksonville Jaguars owner Shad Khan is close to purchasing Wembley Stadium in London, but he has bigger plans than just bringing a Jaguars’ game to England once a year. Khan told BBC Sport he wants to put a Super Bowl and World Cup finals in England.
Jaguars owner Shad Khan wants to put a Super Bowl in London. Don’t count on it.
There’s a couple major challenges that make a Super Bowl in London unlikely.
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“Our role would be to provide a world-class venue,” Khan told BBC Sport. ”[The Football Association] will have a pool of money of about £600m that can be invested into the core mission of the FA, which is English football and their ultimate goal of winning a World Cup.
”Wembley is a great stadium and you want to get it configured to hold Super Bowl and World Cup finals.”
Putting a Super Bowl in London would be ambitious. Here’s just a couple of the major challenges:
- The Super Bowl kicked off at 6:30 p.m. ET last year. That would be 11:30 p.m. ET in London, which isn’t ideal. The game could kickoff closer to 6:30 p.m. in London and start earlier in the United States, but it’s hard to imagine the NFL would like the idea of pulling the biggest television event of the year out of primetime.
- That’s a whole lot of money going overseas. The Minneapolis Super Bowl Host Committee estimated a couple years ago that the February 2018 event would bring about $350-400 million to the local economy. The New York Times said those numbers were a bit exaggerated, but that’s still going to leave a lot of cities unhappy with a huge windfall getting exported to a place outside the country that doesn’t even have a full-time NFL team.
Khan wants to get the most out of his investment and maybe the World Cup is a stronger possibility. But don’t count on a Super Bowl going to London any time soon.
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