LONDON — At the tail end of last year, two Wall Street investors were searching for a soccer club to buy. Not one at the top end of the market, where blue-chip Premier League teams are valued at more than $1 billion, but something a little smaller, a little less flashy, in one of English soccer’s lower tiers.

Their requirements were simple. They were not looking for a club to transform into a championship contender. Instead, they advised their brokers, they wanted a team, effectively, as a vacation activity: one they could go and watch on a Saturday while their wives went shopping, before heading off to the theater.

Crucially, they said, they would need one sufficiently well connected to allow them to be back in New York on Sunday night: ideally, one a “stone’s throw from Heathrow.” They wanted to buy into soccer, to take charge of a club, to see if they could make a success of it, but only, really, if they could do it in London.

Theirs was not an isolated example. A prospective Premier League owner, also from the United States, advised a consultant helping him acquire a club that he would need somewhere to land his private jet nearby, the sort of requirement much more easily met in the capital than elsewhere.