NFL owner Shad Khan wants the Super Bowl to be held in London, but there is a simple reason why it will likely never happen
- Jacksonville Jaguars owner Shad Khan reportedly wants to bring the Super Bowl to London.
- Khan also owns Fulham F.C. and has recently made a bid to purchase Wembley Stadium from the FA, which would serve as a potential venue should the NFL ever decide to relocate the Super Bowl.
- Still, between the issues with time differences and the advertising dollars at stake, a London Super Bowl feels unlikely to happen any time soon.
Jacksonville Jaguars owner Shad Khan reportedly wants to bring the Super Bowl to London.
Khan, who has reportedly made an offer of close to $1 billion to buy Wembley Stadium in London, believes that the city would be an excellent choice to host the biggest event in American sports.
"Our role would be to provide a world-class venue," Khan told BBC Sport. "Wembley is a great stadium, and you want to get it configured to hold Super Bowl and World Cup finals."
Khan, who also owns Fulham F.C. and whose Jaguars have made regular appearances in England as a part of the NFL International Series, is uniquely suited to help bring the Super Bowl to London. Should his purchase of Wembley go through, there's no doubt that hosting a Super Bowl would be high on his priority list.
But there's a simple reason such a move is unlikely to occur, and it comes down to time and money.
Time zones put local London time five hours ahead of New York, making scheduling the game a challenge on both sides of the equation. If you want to keep the game in primetime in the States - it is hard to imagine American networks agreeing to anything differently at the prices they are paying - kickoff would have to take place at close to 11 p.m. in London. Conversely, starting the game at a reasonable hour in London would mean the game's start would likely be pushed closer to noon on the American east coast, and into the morning in the west.
While football fans would surely tune in for the game regardless of what time kickoff was, the move would mean significant changes for advertisers and the network producing the broadcast. With networks charging as much as $5 million for a 30-second advertisement during the Super Bowl, moving the game to London and thus taking it off of primetime in the United States seems like an unlikely outcome.
The NFL has made no effort to hide their ambitions of becoming a global brand, and Khan's Jaguars have often been mentioned as a team that could relocate to London, and hosting a Super Bowl across the Atlantic would undoubtedly mean big things for the game's worldwide reach. But between the logistics of timing and the money at stake, it still seems like a long-shot that we'll see such a change anytime soon.