"In 2011, I heard rumours about the owner of American wrestling company WWE, Vince McMahon, trying to buy Newcastle United," says Morten Hansen. "Is this true? I also heard that he had plans of moving one or two home fixtures to the States, and he wanted to showcase professional wrestling matches as half-time shows. Has there ever been other instances of owners who wanted to move home fixtures for a specific team to another place, or owners who wanted who wanted to promote his other companies in half-time?"
The Knowledge
More Knowledge is available in all (well, some) good bookshops
Buy More Knowledge from Guardian Books It's hard to tell where the rumour linking Vince McMahon, the chairman of WWE described by the Mirror as "a bona fide, 110% certifiable maniac", with Newcastle came from, but it didn't take long to spread all over Twitter and start to creep in to the football news consciousness. The Newcastle Chronicle duly put the question to the club, but the official response was to brand the story "nonsense" and refuse to comment further. So the whole thing died almost as quickly as it had sprung in to life. And really, it's difficult to see how a rumour linking Sensible Mike Ashley's club with the man in charge of this sort of pantomime can ever have gained any traction.
Despite Harry Redknapp's insistence that same year, that English football was bound for a world tour, it hasn't really happened; owners take their teams away for pre-season warm-ups (Liverpool played Roma at the home of the Boston Red Sox, also owned by John W Henry, while Steve Kean took a miserable Blackburn Rovers squad to India at the behest of Venky's) but have yet to insist that their February meeting with Stoke City be transplanted from a wet and windy Britannia Stadium to foreign shores.
Half-time is a different matter, though, as anyone who was at Fulham's home match against West Bromwich Albion in September can tell you. Shahid Khan, who bought Fulham from Mohamed Al Fayed in the summer, is also the owner of the NFL outfit the Jacksonville Jaguars. Keen to promote the Jaguars' visit to Wembley in October, Khan arranged for the Jaguars' cheerleaders, The Roar of the Jaguars, to perform with local competition winners at the interval. If you watch the official video, you can also spot the Jaguars jerseys on sale in the Fulham shop. The Knowledge's favourite bit, however, was the two clubs' mascots jigging about to the music – now that's a crossover market we can buy in to.
