Tony Khan
speaker
120 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Tony Khan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I don't know if I ever will now.
But yeah, I had done a lot of the work already before I switched. But no, I'm really glad to do it. And I was much happier and I was happy with the degree.
Not long after I got out of college, my father was trying to buy a football team. So I graduated in 2007. And months later, I was following the St. Louis Rams because my dad was trying to buy the St. Louis Rams. And the thing I was spending most of my time on at that point was studying sports statistics. And then my father spent a couple more years working to get in the NFL. And then
Less than two years later, he announced that he would be buying Jacksonville Jaguars, which was over 13 years ago. And I'm here in Jacksonville, Florida now. And that's when I moved from Illinois to Florida. And I've been here ever since. And we launched AEW here in Florida, but I still live there.
and go back to Illinois anytime I can. Yeah, it was not long after college where I started working on sports statistics. I had a job in biofuels as a day job, but really the thing I went back and worked on every night was studying NFL statistics and applying them.
I started working there in 2012. As soon as my father bought the team, there was not a sports analytics department there. And I'd been studying it for several years. And I began bringing in some of the top vendors. Now this is standard practice for all 32 teams. And there's a huge...
amount of work that's done on all 32 teams with machine learning and football research looking at all the plays researching all the personnel scouting game data and that's a huge part of nfl preparation now preparation for the draft for free agency for the upcoming games against your opponents it's a huge part of football and people have been building up staffs in recent years
The Jaguars were one of the first teams to really build that. And now we have a great infrastructure. And what's really great is we have a young group of executives that's really applying it. We have a very young coach and a young general manager, and they're very data-driven guys.
And it's a stark contrast to when I came into the organization in 2012, as far as the uptake and the interest in the football research and all of it. analytics and applying the data into making personnel decisions and studying the game.
A lot. The Jaguars, I went in in 2012. And around that time, my father had announced the purchase in January 2012, but he'd been working on it for a couple years after the Rams purchased. It was stopped in 2010. So I'd spent about four years studying football stats pretty much every day. And I put together what was the football technology group that still existed at the Jaguars.
I still am an employee of the Jaguars. And... still work in that research group and really enjoy it. We just got done with the draft and it's the most data-driven group of decision-makers we've ever had. Somewhere in that time, my father also bought the football club in the Premier League. I had never worked in Premier League or around English football at all. That was happening around that time.
away from me and then here at the jaguars here in jacksonville i was do hiring a lot of vendors the best vendor i hired actually was a pair of guys out of boston that ran a small business where it was two guys and they had another person so it's really two founders plus one employee so three people total there's still with us to this day
And the two founders put together some really exciting technology and some very, very cool analytics research. And I found that their tools, the reports that they gave us were just fantastic. And I asked them if they were interested in working together and building a bigger relationship. And they said they would really be interested if I would invest in their business and help them grow it.
And I was interested in that too. So I did. And that was in 2014. And within a year, I bought the business outright and became the 100% owner of True Media Networks. We're the largest and best sports analytics engineering firm in the world. The CEO, Rafe Anderson, and the president and head of technology, Jeff Stern. They are absolutely fantastic people.
I've been working with them for now forever. about 13 years since my first year here at the Jaguars. And I've been the chairman of the company for over 10 years now and really love working with them. And we built a great business where we service 25 out of the 30 major league baseball clubs, ESPN, New York Times, and any football clubs in the NFL and in Europe.
And in doing that, I learned a lot about growing a business. As we were growing that business, I was following what was happening with Fulham very closely. The team had some very tough times in 2014. 14, 15. And I started to take more interest and wanted to get more involved. And the team was relegated. The first year, my father bought it from the Premier League.
The second year, they finished 17th in the English Football Championship, which is the second division of English football, which was very scary. And you can be very interested in sports analytics. And as I've seen, whether it was at the Jaguars or those first couple of years at Fulham, you can have really good analytics, people making good suggestions or good
Really in any business, there can be somebody smart in a business that's making good suggestions, but it has to be applied by the people making the decisions because you can get really good research and recommendations, but if they're not being applied, then... It's useless. Yeah, really. They're interesting. They can be interesting after the fact.
But if that information isn't being applied to the product or to the team or whatever it is, then it's not that helpful. So in the summer of 2016, I took over managing the transfers. And we totally changed the team. It was a new team and the results got much better. Years later, we'd gotten much more successful. We had gotten back up to the Premier League.
We've had some success, but then had not gotten relegated. We had gotten back up and gotten relegated again.
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