The Fulham and Jacksonville Jaguars owner, Shahid Khan, has said the withdrawal of his £600m offer to buy Wembley stadium had nothing to do with the allegations being made against Fulham by Craig Kline, the club’s former assistant director of football. Kline went public when he left the club last year with allegations, including racism, made in tweets which he deleted, and he timed his renewed intervention this year to coincide with key Football Association votes on whether to sell Wembley to Khan.

Kline, a US university friend of Shahid Khan’s son Tony, has now made a series of allegations against Fulham and named individuals at the club in an employment tribunal claim that he lodged on Wednesday. He claims wrongful dismissal in the circumstances of his departure from the club, victimisation and that a financial settlement he agreed with a duty of confidentiality is not enforceable against him. Kline left Fulham after a troubled few years at the club in which he repeatedly found himself in conflict with colleagues, then made a series of complaints internally and was periodically suspended.

Days before the FA council held its meeting on 11 October in which vocal opposition was expressed to the Wembley sale, leading to Khan withdrawing his offer, the FA had said it was reviewing the allegations made by Kline after he had met a senior FA investigator. When Kline went public again on 8 October in a tweet, he made it clear he believed his allegations should raise questions over the sale of Wembley to Khan, saying he had “key evidence of systemic corruption relevant to the Wembley vote”. In subsequent tweets Kline alleged “fraud, child endangerment and exploitation” in football, and he has again claimed to have witnessed instances of alleged racism while at Fulham.

Khan himself dismissed the allegations, saying via a spokesperson, Jim Woodcock: “This is nothing more than the same ongoing nonsense and bogus claims made by a former employee who left the club in 2017. Nothing here merits a further response.”

Asked whether Kline’s allegations had been a factor in Khan withdrawing the offer for Wembley on Wednesday, Woodcock said they were not and repeated that Khan believes the claims are bogus. Woodcock pointed to Khan’s statement regarding Wembley, in which the Fulham owner said he could consider making a new offer if a clear FA majority approved it, as proof that Kline’s intervention has been irrelevant.

Kline was appointed by Khan to work at Fulham in October 2014 after the club had been relegated from the Premier League. He had developed a statistics-based method of assessing players for recruitment but his approach brought him into conflict with other members of the football and recruitment staff. He began to complain internally, alleging racism and other improper practices, and raised formal grievances which led to him being intermittently suspended before agreeing a financial settlement to leave last year. Kline claims his allegations were never properly investigated by Fulham; the club’s position is that they were.

Within the FA executive and at the Football Foundation, the organisation responsible for investing Premier League, FA and government contributions to grassroots facilities - £64m in total this year - there was great disappointment at the collapse of the proposed sale. The Football Foundation explained that matched funding from local and education authorities could have doubled the £600m Wembley proceeds, for a total £1.2bn which would have made a huge difference.

It said grassroots players were having to “put up with a stock of community football facilities that is in a shameful state. This would have been a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make considerable inroads into probably the most pressing issue facing football in this country.”

The Premier League defended its contribution to the Foundation, of £24m this year, and of £100m in total to grassroots facilities and community projects, which amounts to 3.6% of the top 20 clubs’ annual £2.8bn income from the 2016-19 TV deals. That proportion remains less than the 5% of income the Premier League originally pledged in a landmark 1999 Football Task Force report. The outgoing executive chairman, Richard Scudamore, has begun discussing the contributions which will be made from the league’s next round of TV deals beginning next season, from 2019-22. Those involved in grassroots football, where facilities are declining further caused by government budget cuts to local authorities, are hoping the Premier League responds to pressure and increases its investment.