JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — The Jacksonville Jaguars will keep going back to London’s Wembley Stadium.
The team and the NFL have agreed on a three-year contract that will allow the Jaguars to play an annual home game at the stadium through the 2024 season.
The NFL had already announced the Jaguars would play in the only NFL game at Wembley Stadium in 2022.
“It’s hard to believe it will have been three years since our last game at Wembley,” Jaguars owner Shad Khan said in a statement. “But that changes this autumn, and we look forward to coming back to our London home. We have built a great fan base already in the UK and I look forward to that increasing as we reaffirm our commitment to playing one home game per season in the UK for the long term, as was always the ambition when we first played in 2013.”
The Jaguars have played a home game in London’s Wembley Stadium from 2013 to ’19 and had planned to play two home games there in 2020 to increase their local revenue, but those games were canceled because of the pandemic. That was the final year of the team’s contract to play annually at Wembley. The Jaguars played at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium last season, beating Miami 23-20 to snap a 20-game losing streak.
The three-year deal was approved at the NFL owners meetings at The Breakers resort in Palm Beach, Florida.
The Jaguars have repeatedly stressed how critical playing in London is for their long-term stability in Jacksonville. The deal Khan struck with the NFL for those annual games from 2013 to ’20 granted the team extended territorial rights in the United Kingdom as well as receiving the ticket revenue from the game at the 90,000-seat stadium.
Team president Mark Lamping said the revenues the Jaguars received from that game accounted for 11% of the franchise’s local revenue in 2019 (down from 12% in 2016 and 15% in 2014).
Source : ESPN
