Why James Trafford has Burnley investor JJ Watt sweating over 'joke' NFL return bet
Burnley investor JJ Watt could be forced into making a reluctant return to the NFL if James Trafford is able to continue his remarkable run of clean sheets.
The club’s minority shareholder, who retired in 2022, recently took to social media to reveal his private Instagram messages with Burnley’s number one.
In them, the pair agreed Watt would make a sensational return to American Football with Trafford’s favoured team – the Cincinnati Bengals – if the 22-year-old is able to go the rest of the season without conceding another goal.
Since then, the Clarets have gone five games without conceding, causing Watt to sweat a little.
“He will be the number one for England at some point. He’s a dog,” he told the Pat McAfee Show.
“We were just joking around. He’s a big Bengals fan so we were messing around and – this is before the Bengals played the [Pittsburgh] Steelers, so he was trying to rile me up a little bit – he said: ‘how about you come out of retirement and play for the Bengals?’
“I said: ‘if you don’t allow a goal for the rest of the season, then I’ll do it, it’s a deal’. We’ve played five games since then and we’ve allowed zero goals and he saved two penalties in 10 minutes in our last home game [against Sunderland], so he’s taken it very seriously.
“After three games, I messaged him and said: ‘hey, you’re taking this a little bit too seriously’ and he messaged back saying: ‘how do you eat a whale? One bite at a time. I want this pretty bad man’, so it’s heating up a little bit. But we’ve still got 18 games left…”
Following Wednesday night’s 5-0 thrashing of Plymouth Argyle, Trafford has now kept six straight clean sheets in the Championship and has 18 for the season. Burnley have 19 in total, with Vaclav Hladky keeping a shutout during the 5-0 rout of Cardiff City back in August.
Watt tweeted after the Plymouth game: “Another clean sheet from Traffs… do I need to start looking at real estate in Cincinnati?”