The Football Association agreed a secret deal to give Shahid Khan and the Jacksonville Jaguars a preferential option to buy Wembley in 2015, should the governing body ever decide to sell the stadium.

The Sunday Telegraph understands the option was agreed when the Jaguars did the deal to play one NFL regular season game per year at Wembley up until 2020, and was going to be worth around £10 million to the FA, but the heads of terms were never finally signed.

The FA claimed last week the prospect of Khan and the Jaguars buying Wembley was first raised between Martin Glenn, FA chief executive, and the American billionaire at the Super Bowl in Houston, Texas in February 2017. In fact, detailed discussions had taken place two years before that.

The plan was to use some of the money from selling the £10m option to build one of the FA’s Parklife hubs with 3G pitches on a site around Wembley where the Jaguars would also have a temporary training base when they were in London.

The deal was agreed in principle by Khan himself and the Jaguars president Mark Lamping, but soon after that the FA went on a major restructuring process which saw the separate Wembley board phased out and key figures such as Wembley managing director Roger Maslin left the organisation.

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One of the major problems in agreeing the head of terms deal with the Jaguars was coming up with a value for Wembley. Ordinarily it would be calculated as a multiple of the stadium’s profits, currently around £20m a year, but there were other complicating factors to do with its unique history and the difficulty any owner would have acquiring a similar area of land in London to build a comparable stadium.

The option for the Jaguars would have meant that they would be given the first chance to negotiate a purchase of Wembley. In the reorganisation of the FA, Wembley was placed under the control of a new operations division and made the responsibility of Julie Harrington, who had previously overseen St George’s Park, its football centre in Staffordshire. She has since left the FA and is now the chief executive of British Cycling.

The FA main board, especially Martin Clarke, the chief executive, and chairman Greg Clarke, have long regarded the future of maintaining and running the stadium as a problem. They are likely to face fierce opposition from the FA council over the plans to sell to Khan for around £600m and a deal is by no means guaranteed, even with the FA retaining the Club Wembley business valued at £350m.

Shahid Khan wants to buy Wembley credit: GETTY IMAGES

The FA say that there were discussions with the Jaguars on an option to buy Wembley in 2015 but that no agreement was reached.

Ideally the FA would like a rival bidder to Khan in order to drive up the price, although none has yet materialised in the days since the American billionaire’s interest was made known. There are few venue operators with the expertise to make a major stadium like Wembley profitable on the terms the FA would demand. The American company AEG, which has made a success of the O2 venue, formerly the Dome, would be among the few.

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The FA is spending a considerable amount modernising hospitality areas and other parts of the stadium used by supporters and media over the summer. The work has been delayed because the stadium has been in almost constant use over the season with Tottenham Hotspur’s tenancy.

There is around £140m debt secured against the stadium which the FA has a plan to pay off by 2024 and although that may have to be paid back to the banks in the case of a sale, the organisation says it would not affect the overall amount to go into a grassroots project. The FA is six years into paying back a £50m, 25-year sale-and-leaseback agreement on St George’s Park.