Sunday, October 13th, 2024, will be the third time in franchise history that the Chicago Bears have played a game in London. The Bears have a 1-1 record across the pond, beating the Tampa Bay Buccaneers at Wembley Stadium in 2011 and losing to the Oakland Raiders at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in 2019. Will the favored Bears win their third straight game, or will Shahid Kahn’s connections to Chicago pay dividends for his Jacksonville Jaguars?
Home Team Chicago Bears
The endzones at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, or should we call it Soldier Field East, will be painted navy blue, white, and burnt orange for the Chicago Bears’ third “home” game in a row. The 3-2 Bears have won at home in back-to-back weeks and aim to keep the streak going against the 1-4 Jaguars. According to Vegas Insider, the Chicago Bears are favored to win by one point, and the point total has been set at 44.5, the 8th highest point total for the 14 games being played in week 6.
The Chicago Bears may be the home team on paper and in colors on the pitch, but the real home team is the Jacksonville Jaguars, who have played a game in London every year since 2013, except the 2020 COVID-19 season. In 2023, the Jaguars played two games in a row in London. The first game was at Wembley Stadium against the Atlanta Falcons, and the second was at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium against the Buffalo Bills. Both games ended as victories for the Jacksonville Jaguars.
The Jaguars will stay in London for a game next week at Wembley Stadium versus the New England Patriots. The Jaguars will be considered the home team for that matchup, and this will be the second year in a row that the Jags have played back-to-back games in the UK. It has long been rumored that the Jaguars are the leading candidate for an NFL team to be relocated to London as NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell pursues his dream of making the NFL a global organization.
Shahid Kahn Connection
Without delving into String Theory or other quantum and theoretical physics topics, the general sense of them is that everything is connected. Somehow, everything is linked to everything else. That rings true this week with the Chicago Bears playing the Jacksonville Jaguars in London. Jacksonville Jaguars owner Shahid Kahn, often called Shad, has ties to Illinois from when he first moved there from Pakistan when he was 16. Kahn studied industrial engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Kahn’s first exposure to American football came in Illinois, where he saw the Chicago Bears play on TV and the University of Illinois Fighting Illini play in person. He fell in love with our game, which was new to him. Growing up in Pakistan, he became a football fan at a young age – soccer football, not the oblong pigskin football. Kahn attempted to buy a 60% share of the St. Louis Rams in 2010, which was ultimately matched by minority owner Stan Kroenke. Kahn then purchased the Jacksonville Jaguars in 2011 and acquired another football (soccer) team in London in 2013.
Shad Kahn owns the oldest soccer team in London, the Fulham Football Club. So it’s no wonder that the Jacksonville Jaguars are playing more and more games in London now that we know this connection. Kahn is an international businessman who made his fortune in manufacturing bumpers for Toyota and the big three automakers in the United States but has a passion for sports. Shad Kahn and Roger Goodell have likely had many conversations about the possibility of relocating the Jaguars to the UK to be the first international franchise in the NFL.
Final Thoughts
Shahid Kahn also has an apartment in Chicago’s Gold Coast area. Maybe Shad is a closeted Chicago Bears fan, but he won’t be a fan of the Bears on Sunday. The Jaguars are heavily underperforming with the talent on their roster and have had to deal with some injuries to star players, but they are a capable football team that can compete with any franchise in the NFL. The Jags beat the Indianapolis Colts last week, who beat the Chicago Bears in week 3, so the Bears need to be ready for a rumble in the jungle with the Jaguars.
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