JJ Watt: NFL star and Burnley investor on life at Turf Moor

From Stan Kroenke to the Glazers, Todd Boehly to Shahid Khan, and Ryan Reynolds to Tom Brady, North American entrepreneurs and celebrities have been buying varying stakes in British football for some time now.

But what tempted Watt to sink some of the fortune he made from a stellar gridiron career into Burnley?

“There’s plenty of people with advice on what you’re supposed to do and how you’re supposed to do it, but I knew I would want to do something, especially towards the end of my career, to keep the competitive juices flowing,” he said.

“So team ownership came into play there. I became really interested in English football back in 2011, and it started to become really appealing to me.

“I started poking around different teams, having conversations, and the path eventually led me here to Burnley.”

Burnley are one of a growing number of EFL and Premier League clubs with Stateside owners, having been taken over by businessman Alan Pace in 2020.

“You look at an American football [NFL] club – right now they’re all valued at billions and billions of dollars,” Watt added.

“You take my amount of money and put it into that and congratulations, you have one seat at a game, not at the board table, not at anything.

“You come over here and the valuations are different and there’s more opportunity.

“I saw an opportunity to get involved at a level I wanted to be involved at, be in the board meetings, learn and grow, while also injecting something, bringing something to the club in terms of global notoriety, eyeballs to the game etc.”