New Angels Owner Stan Kroenke Has Already Made Nearly $20 Billion On His Sports Teams
· Yahoo Sports
Major pro sports teams have turned dozens of franchise owners into billionaires many times over in the last quarter-century, but nobody has made as much money from sports ownership as Stan Kroenke.
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The reclusive billionaire—who announced on Tuesday that he is buying a majority stake in the Los Angeles Angels from Arte Moreno, at a valuation of roughly $4 billion, according to a person with knowledge of the deal—made his fortune in real estate and stands as America’s largest private landowner, with some 2.7 million acres of ranches. But it is his sports team investments from the last three decades that now make up the majority of his estimated $27.6 billion net worth. Even before the Angels deal is complete, Kroenke’s stakes in the NFL’s Los Angeles Rams, the NBA’s Denver Nuggets, the NHL’s Colorado Avalanche, MLS’s Colorado Rapids, the Premier League’s Arsenal FC and the Women’s Super League’s Arsenal WFC are worth around $22 billion net of debt, according to Forbes estimates.
Better yet, the 79-year-old Kroenke acquired those half-dozen teams for around $2.4 billion (or about $3.8 billion adjusted for inflation). By comparison, the Rams, who have posted an 18.9% compound annual growth rate since 2010 to outpace the NFL average by five percentage points and easily beat the S&P 500 index’s 12.7% annualized return over the same period, were worth $10.5 billion on their own last year, according to Forbes estimates, making them the third-most-valuable sports team in the world.
forbesThe man who has earned the nickname “Silent Stan” may not ever crow about it, but when his MLB purchase closes, Kroenke will also be unmatched among sports owners in terms of breadth, becoming the first person ever to control teams in each of North America’s five major men’s professional leagues.
Kroenke’s portfolio has benefited from the run-up in team prices across the U.S. sports landscape—MLB valuations have more than doubled on average over the past decade, and each of the other four major North American leagues have seen their average valuations rise at least threefold, driven by surging media rights fees, the modernization of stadiums and investors’ insatiable appetite for an asset that remains fundamentally scarce. (Even after the recent additions of expansion teams in MLS, there are just 154 franchises across the five major American men’s leagues.)
forbesBut Kroenke’s clubs have done their part, too. The Rams, for instance, have gone from No. 28 in the NFL in revenue the year before his purchase, when they were still based in St. Louis, to No. 3 in the league in Los Angeles, generating an estimated $764 million in 2024. That translated to operating income of $244 million that season, tying them for third among the world’s most profitable sports teams in Forbes’ 2026 ranking.
The clubs’ on-field performance has been even more impressive. The Rams won Super Bowl LVI in 2022 at their new home of SoFi Stadium, the Avalanche won the Stanley Cup the same year, and the Nuggets took home the NBA title in 2023. Meanwhile, in May, Arsenal won the Premier League for the first time in 22 years, and its women’s club won the inaugural FIFA Women’s Champions Cup in February.
That track record hasn’t always been enough to win over fans. Arsenal supporters continued to grumble about Kroenke’s ownership long after he acquired a majority stake in the club in 2011, launching a “Kroenke Out” protest in 2021 after the team flirted with European soccer’s doomed Super League proposal, and he remains reviled in St. Louis after moving the Rams to California in 2016. But after 11 straight losing seasons on Moreno’s watch, and a total of one playoff series in the past 16 years, the Angels faithful chose to celebrate the news of Kroenke’s purchase agreement this week.
forbes“He is competitive, he demands excellence, and he’s not a person who needs the adulation of the fans,” says Marc Ganis, president of consulting firm Sportscorp, who has known Kroenke for more than 30 years. “He doesn’t get too high or too low based on what the sports talk radio guys are saying today or may say tomorrow.”
In some respects, an MLB deal represents a return to Kroenke’s roots. His full name is Enos Stanley Kroenke—after St. Louis Cardinals Hall of Famers Enos Slaughter and Stan Musial, who led the team to a World Series title the year before Kroenke’s birth—and he grew up listening to Cardinals games on the radio with his father and grandfather in the tiny town of Mora, Missouri.
Kroenke went on to earn an undergraduate degree and an M.B.A. from the University of Missouri and made his first fortune in real estate after marrying Walmart heir Ann Walton (who separately has a $14.1 billion net worth, according to Forbes estimates). Kroenke made a habit of developing large plots of land into active shopping centers, often anchored by a Walmart, and today he owns around 60 million square feet of commercial real estate, in addition to the ranchland he owns in states including Texas, New Mexico, Nevada and Wyoming.
That real estate savvy would serve Kroenke well in his second act as a sports owner. He now controls the Rams’ SoFi Stadium, Arsenal’s Emirates Stadium and Ball Arena, the home of the Nuggets, the Avalanche and the National Lacrosse League’s Colorado Mammoth (also owned by Kroenke).
forbes“Stan’s first love is real estate development. He’s very meticulous when it comes to real estate, very hands-on, and he’s done extraordinarily well with it,” says Sportscorp’s Ganis. “Wherever you see Stan getting involved in sports, you should always think that there’s a real estate component.”
After a failed bid to bring an NFL expansion team to his home state in 1993, Kroenke bought 30% of the then-Los Angeles Rams in 1995 to facilitate their move to St. Louis, and he added another 10% two years later, paying a reported $80 million in total for his 40% stake.
In 1999, around the time it was being acquired by Liberty Media, Ascent Entertainment Group was looking to unload its sports assets: the Nuggets, the Avalanche and their new arena, then called the Pepsi Center. A $400 million deal with another Walton—Ann’s sister, Nancy Walton Laurie, and her husband, Bill Laurie—fell through because of a shareholder lawsuit, and the city of Denver rejected billionaire telecom investor Donald Sturm’s subsequent $461 million bid because he wouldn’t commit to keeping the teams there. Kroenke swooped in with a $450 million agreement in 2000.
That year, Forbes valued the Nuggets at $175 million and the Avalanche at $198 million; those values had climbed to $4.6 billion and $1.95 billion, respectively, by 2025, ranking the teams No. 17 in the NBA and No. 18 in the NHL.
In 2003, Kroenke acquired Major League Soccer’s Colorado Rapids for an undisclosed price at a time when the league’s viability was still in doubt—today, the Rapids are worth $450 million, No. 28 in MLS. He also launched Altitude Sports & Entertainment in 2004 as a regional sports network to broadcast his teams’ games in the Denver area.
forbesWhen Rams majority owner Georgia Frontiere died in 2008 and her children put the team up for sale, Kroenke had first dibs, with an option to match any external bids, and he wound up buying the rest of the club in 2010, spending $450 million to value the franchise at $750 million.
In the years that followed, as he played hardball with the city, St. Louis put together a proposal to renovate the Rams’ outdated Edward Jones Dome, but Kroenke ultimately opted out of the lease to build a gleaming $5 billion football palace and surrounding development called Hollywood Park on roughly 300 acres of land he had acquired in Inglewood, California. The Rams then headed west for the 2016 season, reportedly paying a $645 million relocation fee that was split among other NFL teams.
The city of St. Louis sued Kroenke and the NFL, alleging that he had violated the league’s relocation guidelines, and in 2021, the parties settled for $790 million, with Kroenke reportedly footing $571 million of that bill.
forbesMuch to Missourians’ chagrin, the move has been a resounding success for the Rams’ business, catapulting their team value from an estimated $1.45 billion in their last year in St. Louis in 2015 to $10.5 billion in 2025, No. 2 in the NFL. Meanwhile, the franchise has become a perennial contender, reaching the Super Bowl twice in the past eight years and drawing the nod from oddsmakers as the favorite to hoist the Lombardi Trophy this season.
Now, with his son Josh acting as governor of the Nuggets and Avalanche and taking the reins as heir apparent to his Kroenke Sports & Entertainment empire, Kroenke is laying the groundwork to develop 55 acres surrounding Ball Arena in Denver with residential buildings, a hotel and a concert venue. It wouldn’t be surprising if part of his plan with the Angels is to modernize the team’s 60-year-old stadium and reimagine the surrounding area as well.
Fans in Anaheim certainly wouldn’t mind a similar playbook if it brings them a taste of the Rams’ recent success.
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This article was originally published on Forbes.com