Shahid Khan: Beyond the American Dream

Shahid Khan is the consummate self-made man. Born in Lahore in 1950, he grew up in an upper-middle-class family, headed by his teacher mother and father who was the boss of a small construction company.  

Khan excelled in school and was accepted into the University of Illinois. He landed in the US Midwest in the depths of winter with a suitcase, $500 dollars and a heart full of dreams. It was here, while studying for an engineering degree, that he fell in love with his future wife, Ann, and her favorite sport, American football. 

During his university years, he lived meagerly, accumulating part time jobs: he worked on a farm for a time, and in a Greek restaurant ─ for a buck twenty an hour ─ yet always had designs on bigger things, eventually getting into the car-bumper-manufacturing game, beginning his career at a small auto parts company called Flex-N-Gate, which he bought in 1980. It was the start of a meteoric rise, as the SME went on to become a major multinational over the next three decades.

Khan-do attitude  
The first major success of the group dates back to 1990, the year in which he became the exclusive supplier of bumpers for Toyota in North America. Nowadays the group has 25,000 staff in 70 sites spread across the world, in the US, India, Argentina, China Mexico, France, Spain, Germany… and as the company grew, so too did the wealth of its owner.   

And in recent years Khan has been making money hand over fist. His estimated fortune of $7.6 billion in 2022 was dwarfed by the $12.1 billion he is now worth a year later. An avowed capitalist, he is not shy about saying that making money is one of the biggest joys of his life.

Being the owner of a leading sports team might make you famous, but it rarely improves your bank balance

But money wasn’t everything to Khan, he also had dreams of prestige and notoriety, and for a wealthy businessman, the best way to achieve this is to invest in sport.

Football, both the oval and round kind
In 2012, he acquired NFL franchise the Jacksonville Jaguars for $760 million. A year later he spent around $200 million to buy London football club Fulham, which he bought from Egyptian billionaire Mohamed Al-Fayed. Neither team is a household name, with the Jags one of the least successful NFL teams and Fulham a yo-yo club, which has been relegated from the Premier League three times in the past decade.  

Being the owner of a leading sports team might make you famous, but it rarely improves your bank balance. For the 2020-21 season, Fulham posted a £93 million ($115 million) loss, for example, while in 2022 the Jaguars were the 30th most valuable NFL franchise (there are 32 in total). Yet if there is a financial silver lining it is that NFL and Premier League teams tend to appreciate in value, so should Khan ever be tempted to sell up, he will, at least, recoup a healthy chunk of his outlay. And besides, owning a team in the two most popular sporting leagues in the world, allows you to rub shoulders with the celebrity ─ rather than the country club ─ crowd.

In US sports, a billionaire-businessman owning a major sporting franchise is the norm. What makes Khan different is he is not American-born. Of the 32 NFL teams, only three belong to non-Americans (Buffalo Bills owner Kim Pegula is South Korean, and Minnesota Viking’s owner Zygmunt Wilf is German). In the Premier League, by contrast, billionaires come from the four corners of the world and local-born owners are an endangered species. In fact, in 2021 there were just five of them.

In 2019, alongside his son, Tony, Khan launched All Elite Wrestling (AWE), a professional wrestling entertainment company and a rival to WWE, which brands itself as a more authentic version of the sport.
In a nice piece of symmetry, AEW’s United Kingdom debut will be held in London, on August 27th at Wembley Stadium, the same venue where his Jacksonville Jaguars play a game each October.