London Calling

There’s a point to all those NFL games in the U.K. this season. The league wants to expand its empire—and one owner in particular seems keen to launch a reverse British Invasion.

- Tim Rohan

IT’S 8:30 A.M. on a Saturday in London when Shad Khan saunters onto the deck of the Kismet, his super yacht, for a morning yoga session. He looks as if he’s just woken up, his hair messy and tussled, his eyes glazed over. Khan had hosted a party at a club the night before that lasted until 1 a.m. “If anybody left sober, hey, it was their bad judgment,” he says.

In the 1970s, Khan developed a new bumper that revolutionized the auto industry, and then he bought Flex-N-Gate, an auto-parts manufacturer, and turned it into a billion-dollar business. His net worth is now $7.1 billion, which makes him, according to Forbes, the 72nd-richest American. He used that wealth to buy two professional sports teams—the Jacksonville Jaguars and Fulham FC, of the English Championship League. His yacht is docked on the Thames River in Canary Wharf, near the East London financial district, because the Jaguars are in town for their annual London game, the fifth consecutive year they’ve played here.

The NFL owners’ club is dominated by white men; Khan, a Pakistan-born Muslim who immigrated to the United States as a teenager to study engineering at Illinois, was the league’s first nonwhite majority owner. Earlier this year Khan won a bid to develop 70 acres of land near the St. John’s River, which would essentially move downtown Jacksonville closer to Ever Bank Field. The project is expected to include hotels and restaurants, office space and stores, apartments and condos. Khan wants the buildings to have “a soul, have character to them,” he says. “You see that in Barcelona or in Paris.” This is all expected to cost him north of $500 million in private funding, and Khan is expected to foot a good chunk of the bill.