“I thought someone was winding me up,” said David Holmes, the team’s chairman.

But Mr. Rich was serious. He was a frozen-food mogul from Buffalo, the chairman of Rich Products Corporation, ranked 488th on the Forbes list of the world’s richest people, with an estimated wealth of $2 billion. A former athlete, he had tried out for the 1964 Olympic hockey team. And he knew a thing or two about sports marketing, since he already owned three minor league baseball teams, including the Buffalo Bisons, the Mets’ top minor league affiliate.

Image Bob Rich Credit... Barton Silverman/The New York Times

Mr. Rich felt a Rust Belt kinship with Bedlington, situated in what had been a center of England’s coal-mining industry. The mines were long closed. Trains no longer stopped at the local station. This was now a bedroom community of about 15,000, with many people commuting to work in nearby Newcastle.

“There were a lot of similarities to Buffalo,” Mr. Rich, 70, said in a telephone interview. “They had lost their mining and we had lost our steel milling.”

That affinity led to one of the more improbable alliances in the world of international sports.

Mr. Rich’s company now has its name across the jerseys of Bedlington’s soccer team. It will soon install a scoreboard, the only one in the 22-team first division of the Northern League. And it will probably resod Welfare Park, where the field is in such fragile shape after a harsh fall and early winter that the Terriers could not play for 54 consecutive days between November and January.