LONDON – Legendary football player Pele once described the iconic WembleyStadium in London as the “cathedral of football”. Owned by the EnglishFootball Association (FA), Wembley Stadium has been hosting footballers andtheir ardent fans for the last 95 years.
However if the extraordinary bid by a Pakistani-American businessman to buyWembley for about £800 million is successful, it would transfer thenational stadium into foreign ownership for the first time in its history –something British football fans are finding very difficult to stomach.
Shahid Khan, the billionaire who has made the audacious bid, is keen tobring the American football NFL to the UK – a thought that is worrying manytraditional football fans.
Khan, with his handle-bar moustache, is already well-known in the UKsporting world as the man who bought Fulham Football Club (FFC) from theEgyptian business magnate Mohamed Al Fayed for about £150million in 2013.He also owns the Jacksonville Jaguars, an NFL franchise, which has playedone regular season game in London each year since he bought FFC.
Owning Fulham is one thing but owning Wembley is a different ball game.British fans fear that their national teams would be thrown out of thestadium that is the considered the “home of English football”. “Englandwould be going on the road as turfed-out vagrants rather than touringartists”, says Ed Malyon, Sports Editor of the Independent.
“The England team would still stage the majority of their home games atWembley, but a large portion of their annual schedule, particularly duringthe autumn (when a lot of football matches are played), would be movedelsewhere” explains Malyon. The fear is that the NFL would take over thestadium.