The sight of Kismet, one of the world’s largest yachts, making its way down the River Thames at the beginning of last week was the giveaway.
Shahid Khan, the owner of Fulham Football Club and the Jacksonville Jaguars, was in town ahead of Fulham hosting Arsenal in the Premier League on Saturday night, followed by the Jaguars playing the Los Angeles Rams at Wembley Stadium on Sunday as part of their annual NFL International Series trip to London.
Khan’s yacht, which stands at 122 metres (400ft) and is equipped with a spa area, cinema room and swimming pool, was moored a stone’s throw away from Tower Bridge.
Shahid Khan’s yacht on the River Thames on Saturday morning (Dan Sheldon/The Athletic)
On Tuesday night, Richard Masters, the Premier League’s chief executive, attended an event on board Kismet, at which Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, was also present.
With clubs able to request certain dates they want to play at home before the Premier League compiles its fixtures for an upcoming season, Fulham asked to play at Craven Cottage on the same weekend the Jaguars were due to be at Wembley.
Their request was granted, creating a unique occasion in London: four teams owned by two American billionaires played in two different sports — that just happen to be the two most popular leagues in the world — around 10 miles apart in the same city on back-to-back days.
Arsenal and the Rams are owned by Kroenke Sports & Entertainment (KSE) — a holding company headed up by Stan Kroenke, although it was Josh, his son and co-chair at Arsenal, who was in London to represent the family at both fixtures. Stan, 78, remained in America ahead of attending an important NBA meeting, as KSE also own the Denver Nuggets as well as NHL’s Colorado Avalanche and MLS’s Colorado Rapids.
At Craven Cottage on Saturday, Josh Kroenke walked into the directors’ box with Richard Garlick, Arsenal’s newly-promoted chief executive, around 10 minutes before the 5.30pm (BST) kick-off.
Khan, 75, did not appear until shortly after and took a seat on the other side of the aisle as Josh, with the pair exchanging a handshake before the match got underway.
But if you thought there was going to be an NFL-style crossover clash in west London on Saturday night, you would have left disappointed.
Josh Kroenke at Craven Cottage (Justin Setterfield/Getty Images)
The only moment that would be familiar to NFL fans is when Anthony Taylor, the match referee, overturned a penalty decision having reviewed the footage, before switching on his microphone and announcing to the crowd why he was no longer awarding Arsenal a spot kick.
Fast forward to Sunday, however, and as you stepped foot on Wembley Way, you could be forgiven for not knowing which two NFL teams were playing at the nearby national stadium. A sea of NFL replica jerseys greeted you, from the Kansas City Chiefs to the Cleveland Browns, and all the other 30 franchises in between, the Rams and Jaguars among them.
At Craven Cottage, there were no cheerleaders, no pre-match shows or national anthems and nobody firing T-shirts into the crowd during a commercial break. Nor were casual supporters in attendance wearing another club’s football shirt.
A half-time show dubbed ‘duelling pianos’ took centre stage at Wembley, whereas at Fulham, what happened on the pitch was firmly the main event.
The only Premier League feel to the NFL match came when the Rams’ Konata Mumpfield scored the opening touchdown and mimicked Cristiano Ronaldo’s ‘Siu’ celebration, much to Wembley’s delight. Davante Adams, Mumpfield’s team-mate, followed suit with a ‘Siu’ of his own after scoring later in the game.
Davante Adams performs a celebration made famous by Ronaldo (Dan Istitene/Getty Images)
The Rams did not land in London until Saturday, but Josh Kroenke and Kevin Demoff, the NFL club’s president and KSE’s president of team and media operations, were at Arsenal’s training base, London Colney, on Friday to watch manager Mikel Arteta’s side prepare for the Fulham match.
“(The year) 2012 was the first time the Rams played in London,” Demoff recalls in an interview with The Athletic on Friday. “We stayed at The Grove (hotel, which the England men’s national team used to use frequently) and trained here at Colney and nobody really knew anybody. I was thinking how familiar it now is coming out here and knowing everybody.”
Left to right: Rob Turner, Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, Bacary Sagna and Tim Barnes together in October 2012, when the then St Louis Rams trained at Arsenal (Stuart MacFarlane/Arsenal FC via Getty Images)
From that first trip, Demoff explained how members of the Rams’ training staff noticed Arsenal’s players were wearing tracking devices during training.
“Nobody had ever done that in the NFL,” Demoff adds. “We didn’t set out to be, ‘Oh, how do you train?’ We observed, watched, brought it to the U.S. (in 2013) and it made our players better.”
This is just one example of how two of KSE’s teams, even though they compete different in sports, are able to benefit from being under the same ownership umbrella — and last weekend provided another chance for those conversations to take place in an organic setting.
“We’ve been training at the Rams’ training ground twice now in the last three years (during Arsenal’s summer tours to the United States),” explained Garlick on Friday. “Mikel’s picked things up, ideas that maybe Sean (McVay) has, and just little things like that.”
Arsenal’s chief executive recalled one of Arsenal’s trips to Los Angeles for pre-season, when McVay, the Rams’ head coach, showed Arteta “some cameras” at the training facility and joked how the Spaniard was there “for about three hours” looking at them.
“When that came back, it was kind of like, ‘This is the sort of thing that we need to do’,” Garlick said, noting that the different teams under the KSE umbrella are also now looking at where they can “help each other” when it comes to commercial deals.
Mikel Arteta and Sean McVay in July 2024 (Stuart MacFarlane/Arsenal FC via Getty Images)
KSE, for example, attended the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity in June as “one entity”, in Demoff’s words, as opposed to the Rams and Arsenal being there as separate organisations. KSE also established Kroenke Signature Properties (KSP) in January, a dedicated department geared towards selling partnerships across the entire portfolio of clubs.
Demoff said: “There’s power when your brand shows up at Emirates Stadium, there’s power when your brand shows up at SoFi Stadium (the Rams’ home ground), especially given the global events that are coming to Los Angeles via the (2026 men’s) World Cup, the Super Bowl (2027) and the (2028 summer) Olympics.”
“It’s the ability to spread that reach,” Garlick added. “We had a partnership in London that wanted to look to get into the U.S., and we put them in touch straight away. We can leverage those different areas we’ve got across the globe and that’s a win-win for everybody.”
When it comes to ownership involvement at both Arsenal and the Rams, Garlick and Demoff had similar answers. In short, the executive teams are entrusted by Stan and Josh Kroenke to get on with the job.
“I could be speaking to Josh or Kevin lots of times during the week, or it might only be every two or three days,” Garlick explained. “There’s no kind of, ‘Oh we must speak for an hour every day’. It’s very, very fluid.”
“They are there if you need them,” Demoff said. “But they are also very trusting of the people they put in place, and as long as the teams perform at a high level, they are willing to stay that way.”
Although it was unique for Arsenal and the Rams to be playing in London on the same weekend, it was anything but that for Fulham and the Jaguars.
Khan’s Jaguars have been playing an annual match at Wembley — English football’s national stadium, which the businessman once tried to buy — since October 2013. Such is its commonality, it has become somewhat of a trade mission for Jacksonville as a city.
Mark Lamping, the Jaguars’ president and a non-executive director at Fulham, detailed how “close to 100 people” travelled to London from the Florida city’s Chamber of Commerce.
Wembley has become a home from home for the Jaguars (Alex Pantling/Getty Images)
“It is the most important weekend (in the calendar) as it relates to the integration of both teams,” Lamping tells The Athletic. “One of the objectives of Shad’s commitment to London with the Jaguars was that it would benefit the city of Jacksonville, as well as benefit the Jaguars.”
Khan hosted another event on board Kismet on Friday night for Fulham and the Jaguars, with commercial partners also invited. Around 200 Jaguars staffers were at the Arsenal match the following day, according to Fulham chief executive Alistair Mackintosh, with a similar number from Fulham at Wembley on Sunday.
Just as with Arsenal and the Rams, any shared learnings between Fulham and the Jaguars tend to be organic as opposed to forced.
“You have two opportunities to learn and share,” said Lamping. “(But) I don’t think there’s a lot of direct sharing that says, ‘OK, well Fulham does it this way, so now the Jaguars are going to do it that way’, or vice versa, but there are some fundamental areas where the application is pretty obvious.”
One of those areas concerns the business operations of both clubs.
You don’t have to look far to see the impact being associated with a Florida-based NFL franchise is having on Fulham from a commercial standpoint. They have previously been sponsored by Visit Florida and last year announced a deal with FIS, a Jacksonville-based technology company.
There are benefits to be had from a sporting perspective, too. Mackintosh gave an example of a Fulham player travelling to Jacksonville for their rehabilitation from an injury, noting the quality of the facilities and warmer climate compared with the UK.
An area where the Jaguars can learn from Fulham, Lamping said, is the building and early success of the new Riverside Stand at Craven Cottage, which opened in May after a six-year construction, with Khan now in the process of renovating the Jaguars’ EverBank Stadium.
Although there is plenty of scope to further integrate Khan’s sporting clubs, Mackintosh emphasised the importance of Fulham having an owner who “really understands the different between UK and U.S. sport”. What may work at an NFL game in Jacksonville or at Wembley, for example, may not necessarily translate to a Premier League fixture.
Khan, Mackintosh said, has a high level of engagement in terms of Fulham, “particularly on the business side”, and believes the ownership are “more engaged than any relationship” he is aware of between a club and its American owners.
“They are very, very engaged,” said Mackintosh, describing Khan as the “best-dressed genius you’ve ever met”.
(Alex Pantling/Getty Images)
Although the week began with Kismet turning into a tourist attraction on the Thames, it ended with Josh Kroenke and Garlick celebrating the Rams’ convincing 35-7 win over the Jaguars in McVay’s office inside the NFL franchise’s Wembley dressing room.
After Arsenal’s 1-0 defeat of Fulham, it meant a clean sweep for KSE over Khan’s Fulham and Jaguars over one unique weekend in London.