Football is at a crossroads on both sides of the Atlantic. The National Football League and the English Premier
League are undeniably incredible businesses, and they sit alone atop
their respective sports. The EPL has attracted a
massive global audience, measured in the billions, while the NFL has created
the most valuable teams of any league in the world. So what if you took the
best of each business with the ambition of
creating a new sort of, well, unified football verse? Meet Shahid Khan. He's the owner of the Jacksonville Jaguars and Fulham Football Club, and he stands in the unique position to solve for both sides of the equation. The thing about the sports owner, the highs are the greatest highs, and the lows are the greatest lows. Shad Khan is trying to unite two dueling football empires, along with their influence and audience, pouring tons of money
into both his Jaguars and Fulham FC to expand their international
reach in parallel.

Bottom line, I mean, they're challenges. So financial challenges, and obviously, it's a competitive challenge, it's a learning curve. Is Shahid Khan the one to crack the code and bring these two disparate football empires together for even greater gain? This is Power Players. Well, it's an overcast Monday evening here in London. We're here at Craven Cottage. That's where Fulham plays its home matches. It's also a big day for Shahid Khan. Shad is here for Fulham FC to host their just down the road rival, Chelsea. While Chelsea may be more of an international name, Fulham is actually London's oldest team, and Shad has been steadily rebuilding it from the ground up. This is ridiculous. I think innovation at its finest. In the years since acquiring the team, Shad has been working to upgrade its home pitch, mixing modern sports business with centuries of tradition. I was probably here seven, eight years ago.

I mean, it's hard to even imagine what was there before. At the same time, Fulham takes the pitch, his other football team, the Jacksonville Jaguars, are in the middle of back-to-back London games, a first for an NFL team. And while the players have made the trip to London, so too have some of those most invested in their performance on the field, his actual investors. And we're rooted in Jacksonville and yet, you know, we're committed and invested in London, just like you are. What's the score gonna be? Score's gonna be one-nil. Oh! That's, wow. You watch. [Commentator] Here to Palmer. Trying for two! Calamity, might even be a no goal, doesn't matter. Fulham would end up losing that night to Chelsea two-nil. Lucky for Shahid, though, game day prognosticating isn't his focus. The future of success of the franchise rests on his ability

to leverage an expanding
development around Craven Cottage and generate revenue
not just on match days, but 365 days a year. So tell me where we're sitting right now. This is the literal cottage, right? Craven Cottage, yes. So the history, a lot of the mythology, Anne Boleyn's hunting grounds. The cottage has been built
into the stadium since 1894. It's located along the winding Thames, next to a site filled
riverfront with Fulham Palace, the Putney Bridge, and some of the most attractive
real estate in the city. Situate me in London here, so we're obviously on the Thames. [Shahid] That's where
the boat race starts. [Jason] The famous boat race.
[Shadi] Yeah. [Commentator] We are underway, the 2024 lightweight men's boat race. And as we approach that new
grand stand at Craven Cottage, Cambridge certainly with the lead.

[Jason] The Riverside Stand is the name for the renovated grandstand that's been under construction since 2019. Set to finally open at the end of 2024, it's designed to both add seating capacity to Fulham's matches as well
as add a larger walkable and premium ecosystem
around Craven Cottage. And yes, there is a pool. This will be the outdoor rooftop pool. Very, very unique in London. Obviously heated. Now, this isn't the first
time Shad has built a pool into a stadium. But the play here isn't just to improve the game day experience, but to turn Fulham FC into the anchor for a financial ecosystem that
Shad is working to nourish. What is this meant to do for you from a business perspective? Well, I think what it
does is generate revenue on non-match days. You see all these houses all around us and average house price,
probably four million pounds. There is really no place for them to go.

The closest grocery store or restaurant would be a mile. [Jason]: Wow. [Shahid]: Okay? So for them to get to it, and here we are. So it serves the community. And with everything we're doing here, this also is a destination. If you come to London, you want to come here. [Jason]: Right. [Shahid]: It should be, you know, one of the 10 things you should do in London. The idea is to redesign the neighborhood and work to better connect Craven Cottage to it, building a hotel, high-end restaurants, a health center, and yes, even a rooftop pool to attract both residents and tourists. But no small amount of risk, building something of this scale. Of course there's risk. [Jason]: Yeah. [Shahid]: Risk in everything. One good thing is you didn't have to worry about the property. [Jason]: Right. [Shahid]: And it's unique.

to have seven acres on the North Bank of the Thames, sitting between parks and one of the richest areas of London. [Jason] Right.
[Shahid] And then, when you build it, yes, of course, that's a risk. But I think that it's rewarding. Real estate and development
has become a key element and attraction to sports ownership. While results on the pitch, court, or field may vary, owning
high-performing commercial and residential properties
around a sports venue can add massive predictable
value to a franchise. It reminds me of some of the things we see back
in the United States. Even, you know, the
Atlanta Braves in Atlanta. Bringing the amenities
around a stadium seems to be something that people
are thinking more about. Exactly, except do you
have people living there [Shahid] 365, okay?
[Jason] Right, right. Or living there 24/7. When you do that, then you add a huge
amount of connectivity.

Probably what I was thinking would be like Real Madrid's stadium. 
[Jason] Oh yeah.
[Shahid] Okay? The simple fact is that, you know, London has a huge amount
of vibrancy even today. 
[Jason] Yeah.
[Shahid] You look around, you see all the cranes and
everything that's going on, and it's truly a multicultural city, has been for hundreds of years, and will be so moving in the future. So I mean, I'm really
kind of bullish on London. It is amazing to look at,
especially to experience this, and you look at some of the old pictures that you have around the grounds, 'cause this, it's a really old club. 
[Shahid] Yes.
[Jason] You've been playing [Jason] on this spot for a long time.
[Shahid] Yeah, 1879. So it's the oldest club in London. Yeah, it's one of those
things where you'd love

to be able to show somebody in 1879 what this would become, [Jason], right?
[Shahid] Yeah. Shahid Khan bought Fulham FC from Egyptian businessman Mohamed Al-Fayed in 2013 for $300 million. Once I got here, it was like, okay, we're gonna have some overhead in English football, you know, how does it make sense? English football is different. So we wanted someone, a club that was family, and really had the values that were consistent with the NFL. What are the immediate lessons that you learned or that you observed? Well, I think the immediate lessons obviously is there are a huge amount of differences. In the NFL, you're always gonna share revenue among all 32 teams no matter what happens. When the Jaguars finished the NFL season with a 1-15 record in 2020, they still got the same TV revenue share as everyone else and then also got to draft the best college quarterback.

In the Premier League, however, there's the ever-present threat of relegation. If you don't perform, you get sent down, carrying massive repercussions for valuation and the ability to generate revenue. For Fulham, with just five wins and 20 losses in the 2020-21 season, they were relegated from the Premiership and into the Championship league. That reduced their ability to earn money in attendance, sponsorship deals, and broadcast revenue. Fulham would then win the Championship division and get promoted back into the Premier League the next year, creating a way more volatile asset for its ownership. Relegation obviously is huge. How it affects you, affects the fan base, affects the revenue. That's a big difference. You have to be prepared for it. In a lot of ways, it feels like the opposite of how you describe the NFL where you get in and you're like, Okay, I can perform poorly on the field.

but I still get all this national money. I'm still gonna be around. Here, it is, you're on a knife's edge. It feels like all the time. And you have experienced that. Yeah, absolutely. We've been relegated, promoted three times. [Jason] Yeah. [Shahid] You know, in 10 plus years. But it's a very small club, but the richest and most educated fan base, English fan base. So how do you leverage that, great geography and great real estate. Then you know, you can leverage some of the sponsor money, and that would be an upside for the Jaguars and Fulham. The NFL has gone global. This past year, we played games in front of amazing crowds in London and Germany, and we will be coming to more markets on a global basis soon. You may have caught some boos in there, maybe directed at NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, or maybe from fans upset about losing more home games.

to international markets. But back in London, there's a lot of energy from the 85,000 plus fans who came out to Wembley Stadium, including the mayor of London. So this is the national soccer stadium. Uh huh. This is famous all around the world. And what these guys do is they sell so many tickets, they break records for the most tickets sold. And are you gonna break a record today? Yes, we're gonna break a record today. Every time he comes, he breaks a record. It's remarkable. Jaguars are in the midst of a road trip to London to play back-to-back games overseas. The atmosphere Shad has cultivated is the definition of global ambition. And to begin to fathom how Shad's pulled that off, you have to consider his own origin story. I was born in Pakistan and I played cricket, which is like, you know, the game there and then came to Illinois at 16.

Obviously, you have to assimilate, and obviously, football. The first game I saw was the Bears. [Commentator] This is Gale Sayers getting away from one tackle, turning it on, and going all the way for a touchdown. I adopted the NFL as my sport. When I finished school, how do you get a job? You go door to door to door looking for a job. The art of cold calling, I mean it's kind of a lost art now. That was very helpful, obviously, in the journey in the NFL. As you track your career, there is this theme of, you know, call it cold calling, some might call it just pure moxie, of being able to sort of seize an opportunity, even when something presents itself that is not great. Well, I think as a business person, it was the art of survival. For me, it was like, Why would somebody wanna hire me? I've gotta add value.

Shahid Khan certainly found his value pretty quickly. In a few years, he'd built out the auto parts giant Flex-N-Gate to a multi-billion dollar international business and soon found himself ready to tackle his next leap of faith into sports team ownership. St. Louis Rams had come up for sale. You do the work, two years of work, I believe. So you're driving toward this, and then Kroenke swoops in and snatches it right out from under you. So I mean, it was, obviously, surprising, disappointing, but things turned out great for me. [Shahid] Right. [Jason] Okay? It's like football, you know, that you're disappointed. You're kind of knocked down, and you kind of get up and dust yourself and say, Okay, next play. And the crazy part is, I had met Wayne Weaver with the Jacksonville Jaguars way earlier. I'll never forget I was in

Stuttgart selling auto parts.
When I heard from Wayne, you know, in '11, okay. You know, I think we're serious now, and I think we wanna get together. He bought the team from
owner Wayne Weaver in 2011 for $770 million. That's a lot of money. But notably, the Jaguars
today are now valued at more than $4 billion. This ticket, you know, to the Jaguars is gonna
be the hottest ticket in the business. Probably the decade before, for whatever reason, those
fans had kind of been lost. So how do you sell tickets?
How do you sell sponsorships? Because you gotta have the money, the local revenue, to be competitive, to spend, to invest in the stadium, obviously do this full
salary cap and so on. So was it daunting? I mean, what did it feel like in the early days in terms of, you know, as you said, now you've got it.

was this an experience that
you had had at other points in your business career? What was the feel then? Well, I've had that before because how I grew the
auto parts business. Most of the companies
were distressed companies. [Jason] Right.
[Shahid] The first thing I looked at was, we weren't selling tickets, our sponsorships. We can't sell 'em, and the question was why? And it was like, Hey, we
don't win football games. That's why. My mindset was that, okay, we have to separate these. We're not selling wins. What we're selling is a
great game day experience. Shahid upgraded the Jaguars facilities and made renovations to the team's stadium, as well as constructed the
Daily's Place Amphitheater, practiced facilities, and cultivated real estate
developments around the stadium. It's a familiar playbook to
what he's doing now in Fulham.

Jacksonville, Florida is not the same as London. His next move was to begin to grow his fan base outside the Sunshine State. And one of the most dramatic things you do to sort of bring it to where we're sitting now is you're on the forefront of saying, you know, we're gonna take this game overseas. You know, if we're gonna play games, I think we would rather play someplace where it's really fertile ground and we have a chance to really grow the fan base. Yes, playing overseas, we would get a financial and really getting the league to support us. [Commentator] And good morning from across the pond, Wembley Stadium is the venue. The Falcons and the Jags get set to get together Duval chants in the crowd. You have a smaller resident fan base. [Shahid] Yep. [Jason] So there's more upside for you, I mean, I just wanna make sure I understand this.

more upside for you to come here, to aggressively come here, than maybe the New York Giants or
the Chicago Bears, right? Is that fair? Yeah, absolutely. Because
they have history. [Jason] Yeah.
[Shahid] Okay? Northeast Florida, two out of three people
there already have allegiance to other teams. We gotta go where really they
have no allegiance to a team and it's gonna take a multi-year effort. And we've had full-time, year-round people in London representing
the Jacksonville Jaguars. What does that evolution look like? Does that look like a more
international NFL in terms of teams all over the world? Does it look like an American-based what we have now where you have not just London, but you have Germany and you have France and you have Mexico. 'Cause you've been a
chief architect of this. Yeah, I mean, I'm
focused really on London. For us, you've gotta have a sharp focus.

so you can produce results. Rooting himself in London,
laid the foundation to connect the dots
across the football verse. Now, Shad isn't just aiming to
grow the value of both teams and respective football leagues at large, but to truly world build, to create an international
football community that will raise all ships. When you also think
about the growth of both football and American football, you have been critical
in the cross-pollination, and we've talked about that a little bit. [Jason] What happens next for that?
[Shahid] Well, I think what happens next is, you know, this is a virtuous circle, okay? So I think what happens next is, you know, both entities do better, and then the cross-pollination gets them to the next level. If both leagues can truly cross-pollinate, the results could be of
exponential financial magnitude. Roger Goodell set a target of
$25 billion in annual revenue.

for the NFL by 2027. And by 2022, the league
already reached $20 billion of that stated goal. And international
expansion is a key factor for continued growth. Conversely, the Premier
League's revenue hit $7 billion in 2022, with similar goals for expansion and economic growth in the US market. And yet, a significant gap
remains for the Premier League to leverage the same
financial gains as the NFL. And a large part of that has to do with the differences in
ownership group philosophies. Talking to NFL owners, there's nothing that they haven't tried to sell. [Shahid]. Absolutely.
[Jason]. Training Camp one, and they've, you know, really
set an interesting example. It feels like NFL owners are more commercially minded, [Jason] is that fair to say?
[Shahid]. Absolutely. Yes, it is. It is because there is, I
would say, a false sense

of pride that, okay, this is football, money shouldn't be involved. Well, football players
want to get paid too. [Jason] Right.
[Shahid] You've gotta have a business that's sustainable. The only way it's sustainable,
it's gotta make money. NFL owners are also . . . [Shahid] Your partners.
[Jason] Right. Yeah. Day in and day out. So NFL, you're trying
to grow the pie, okay? And we know everyone's gonna
get a piece of the pie. English football, it's different. In the NFL, everyone shares success. The EPL was created in the '90s out of economic envy of the NFL. But while the NFL has created
a club of owners, as it were, with a shared vision for mutual success, the EPL doesn't yet share
that same collective vision. Obviously knowing NFL and some of the other
American owners who are in the sport now, you
can talk to them about it.

because our interests are aligned. Very much like the NFL, you want the Premier League to grow and everyone to benefit. You know, relegation
and promotion is sacred, but still the teams that are there all need to be competitive. One of the big dilemmas
that remain for Shad and the rest of his internationally
minded EPL owners is how do you expand and seize
new economic opportunities while still preserving the
traditions foundational to the sport? Fulham FC played three
games in the US in 2023 and the World Cup coming to the US in 2026 could provide
another massive opportunity for Shad to expand his base. [Reporter] England's six biggest sides want to join with three from Spain and another three from Italy to create their own breakaway
football super league. What is the motivation? Well, you know what the
motivation is, it's greed. You're a disgrace. You
don't care about the fans.

You're a joke, and I'm devastated. Change comes incrementally, and Shad's stadium development at Craven Cottage is maybe the best example of what innovation within the Premier League can look like, creating a community around sports by bridging both the new and the old, and his cross-pollination of clubs is already coming back home to Jacksonville. Another move to develop the shipyard property downtown and bring in luxury hotels, condominiums, and an office complex. The city is now prepared to sell Jaguar's owner Shad Khan even more park land for development in the project. I want Jacksonville to live up to its potential, and it's huge. We haven't scratched the surface. Interesting to think about, you know, how you think of this facility versus the facility back in Jacksonville. Are there shared experiences? Are there shared learnings that you're able to kind of implement back and forth? Well, I mean, this is part of the neighborhood going back.

you know, 150 plus years.
Yeah. Over there, what we're doing is, [Shahid], there is no neighborhood.
[Jason] Right. So over there, we're
building a neighborhood, you know, from the highest stand, like the Four Seasons residence, hotel, all the way to more
modestly priced apartments. In that case, keep me honest here, my sense is that, you know,
downtown Jacksonville has been, for lack of a better term,
sort of somewhat neglected, like the growth has happened
in the suburbs and outward [Jason] versus in the core, right?
[Shahid] Absolutely correct. Absolutely. As a matter of
fact, the core has deteriorated. [Jason] Yeah.
[Shahid] And you need to reinvigorate that. [Jason] Yeah.
[Shahid] And what we're doing is developing a new core. And central to that core is a new stadium.

It's being called the stadium of the future. If the project that the Jacksonville Jaguars unveiled today is actually completed, then it will completely transform this part of downtown Jacksonville. Shahid recently announced an intended deal with the city of Jacksonville to build a quote, Stadium of the future, end quote, that will cost an estimated $1.4 billion and comes with a 30-year lease to keep the Jags in North Florida. You look at photographs of Jacksonville 100 years ago, I mean, St. Johns River was clogged with ships. So getting recreational use and boating is a lot about going from, you know, I want to go here, go someplace else, relax, [Shahid] have lunch, have a drink. [Jason] Right. Enjoy the day. You open up that whole experience. [Shahid] has developed a uniquely self-sustaining circular approach, constantly taking something he learns in one place

and applying it to the other. This, as one business, in many ways, where are you in that journey, and what's next in terms
of taking it forward? How you relate to the
community is very important. I hate to say it, but we
make a huge difference in the community. And people know that. And in a way, expectations
are maybe too much, that any problem the city would have, whether it's homelessness or
whatever, they look to us, that, what are you doing to help? [Jason] Interesting.
[Shahid] And same thing in a lot of different
ways, different scale, you know, in English football, that you wanna make a
difference in the community. You go back to 1879,
the community grows up. There are parks around us. People want a place to go, whether to relax or an amenity. And being able to develop
that, it's gonna, yeah,

put money in the squad, but more importantly, serve the community.

Shahid Khan Wants to Marry the NFL and EPL | Power Players

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