The Sarah Palin of American football is blazing a trail across London in her Jimmy Choo shoes and loving every minute of it. Rita Benson LeBlanc is not merely the youngest, sassiest and sexiest owner of a National Football League (NFL) franchise — the New Orleans Saints — she is also one of the most highly respected of a new breed of American entrepreneur, a young woman making her way in the high-testosterone, high-octane world of elite sport and shattering stereotypes along the way.

“Occasionally, I get patronised during meetings,” the 31-year-old says in her lovely Southern drawl, her bright eyes glinting with amusement and not a little menace. “I will have a guy say: ‘Do you want me to explain that to you’ as if I haven’t the first idea what is being talked about. But I don’t get too angry, I just file it away in the memory banks to use at a later date.”

Once nicknamed Miss 101 because of her tendency to ask 100-plus questions (and emphatically not in reference to the torture chamber in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four), LeBlanc’s steely character belies her girl-next-door appearance. She talks in honest-to-goodness sentences, curling her tongue around every word, but every now and again the hard business edge is thrust in one’s direction like a switchblade. “You underestimate the NFL at your peril,” she says in response to my observation that American football will never make it in Europe. “Give us time to make ourselves understood as a sport and you will see the barriers coming down.”

I met LeBlanc in the lift going up to our interview and, not realising who she was, engaged in some not very subtle (but very charming) flirting. In the 30 seconds it took to get to the seventh floor, she had found out exactly who I was, gently introduced herself, eulogised about the Saints and given me the brush-off. It happened at such speed that it felt like I had been in a head-on collision with an offensive guard. I could not work out whether I was concussed or merely crestfallen.

LeBlanc is convinced that the NFL game in London tomorrow will be a boon not only for her team, but also for the community back home in the state of Louisiana about which she feels so passionate. “Of course there was initial resistance from fans to play a home match in London, but things changed when we explained our rationale,” she said. “We work closely with Governor Bobby Jindal and he knows that we have to work hard to change perceptions, because everywhere we travel we meet people who ask: ‘When will you get rid of the water in New Orleans?’

“We have not had any water for years, but that is the picture that keeps appearing on television screens. So part of this trip is about football but the other part is about telling the world that New Orleans is open for business.”

LeBlanc’s rise was not entirely a consequence of talent but was engineered by her maternal grandfather, Tom Benson, who bought the Saints in 1985 when the franchise was in danger of being moved to Florida. The family business extends far beyond American football and takes in ranches, automobiles and banking. But LeBlanc bristles at my suggestion that she has been handed everything on a silver platter.

“I worked very hard as an intern in my early 20s across every department of the business, so I don’t think I had too many special favours,” she said. “I knew from a young age watching my grandfather that I wanted to be involved in the family business and I think I bring some fresh qualities to the table. Whether they are feminine qualities or personal, I don’t know.”

The only softening of the granite exterior came when I asked if LeBlanc was in a relationship, a question she at first ducked with some blather about time management. When I asked again, she blushed slightly and nodded with a shy smile. Is it a football player? “Oh, no!” she replied. “That would represent a serious conflict of interest.” Not even love, it seems, is exempt from the dictates of business in the fast-moving world of this feisty, mega-rich, somewhat contradictory woman.

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