Walking to the match with fans, lifting weights in the gym with the players, and soaking up the wisdom of the movers and shakers in the boardroom.
It’s fair to say JJ Watt is living the full experience since buying into Burnley.
The legendary NFL defensive end became the latest in a string of American personalities, from Wall Street to Hollywood, to take a stake in British football clubs when he and his wife, ex-United States international player Kealia, became minority investors in the Clarets in May 2023.
Since then he has witnessed first-hand the angst of relegation from the Premier League and this season’s resurgence under Scott Parker, with the Turf Moor club in contention for automatic promotion back to the top flight.
In a wide-ranging interview with Radio 5 Live, the 35-year-old explains why he invested – in both the emotional and financial sense of the word – in the Lancashire club, and how he is bringing his experience as an elite sportsman to bear in the Championship title race.
The former Houston Texans star was named Sports Illustrated’s Sportsman of the Year in 2017 as much for his efforts in helping his adopted city recover from the devastation of Hurricane Harvey and other philanthropic work, as for his achievements on the field of play.
Now he is busy trying to translate that knowhow, community ethic and desire to succeed to a proud old club in a small Lancashire former mill town.
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.”
Watt, however, has not restricted himself to boardroom-level involvement – he has also revelled in mixing with the fans… and showing the players who is boss in the gym.
“Another thing that brings you to English football is the history, tradition, passion and supporters,” he said.
“It’s why I’m so drawn to it and why I walked from the hotel to the match [Burnley v Luton Town] the other day, because I wanted to be with the people.
“When I watch these games and go to these matches with these supporters… I told our players last year they truly don’t understand how they affect these people on a day-to-day basis.”
Watt also hopes his vast experience of performing at the top level of his sport can help a Burnley team which is now at the sharp end of a promising campaign.
“One thing I can definitively speak on more knowledgeably than [the board] is what it’s like to be in a locker room, what it’s like to be in a competition, what it’s like to be at this part of the season, fighting for things,” he added.
“The other day I was at the training ground most of the day, having breakfast with the players, in the locker room with the players, in the weight room with the players, just talking to them.”
As a 6ft 5in (1.96m) beast of a player, Watt is a formidable sight in the gym and, when asked about lifting weights with the Clarets players, he laughed: “Sometimes I just like to let them know.
“Credibility comes quickly when you have 400 pounds on the bar.
“I can sit down and have a conversation with a player, whether he’s going through a rough stretch and I can talk to them about that.
“These are 22 or 23-year-old kids going through all this for the first time. I’m fortunate enough to have been through this before, so I can talk to them about how you mentally handle that.”
One chat with a player made headlines in America after Watt told goalkeeper James Trafford he would come out of retirement and play for the England Under-21 international’s NFL favourites the Cincinnati Bengals, if Trafford managed to extend his record-breaking run of 12 Championship clean sheets to the end of the season.
That promise came to nothing as Burnley conceded against Cardiff City earlier this month, but Watt said it had him worried for a while.
“It started to get picked up really big in America once he hit 12, and they put up a graphic that showed Manchester United had hit 14,” Watt said.
“It was on every single show, so my wife came in and said, ‘you’re not serious about this are you?’
“I said, ‘if he does 24 matches in a row, that will truly be one of the greatest performances in the history of sport and I would be ridiculous not to honour my side of it’.
“So I had been training slightly differently for about three weeks leading up to the goal, and I did take a day off after they [Cardiff] scored that goal.”
Watt is under no illusions that Burnley, even if they win promotion, will be in a scrap for survival next season, but that, and the dream of upsetting the odds as Leicester City did by winning the Premier League in 2016, simply fuels the fire.
The reward of promotion and jeopardy of relegation, a mostly foreign concept in American sport, was part of the lure for Watt becoming involved with Burnley.
“When you know there is nothing bad that can happen if you finish last, it kind of dilutes the product,” he said.
“When there is a literal consequence to winning and losing it makes a sport as close to the truest and most pure form that you can have.
“I’ll never forget the stat on our first day [back] in the Premier League, when we played Manchester City and their three defenders cost more than the entire wage bill in the history of our club, since 1882. That doesn’t happen in the NFL.
“Am I naive enough to think we can win the Premier League next year if we go up? No, I understand how all this works.
“Do we all dream of a Leicester-style run one day? Absolutely, but it’s more in the little things, trying to make your club better on a day-by-day basis.”-BBC
