Meet The LA Rams’ Billionaire Owner, Sports’ Biggest Mogul And Public Enemy No. 1 In St. Louis

Stan Kroenke’s Rams have more than tripled in value since he moved them back to California, but he has even bigger plans for the team and the town.

Stan Kroenke couldn’t ask for much more. His Los Angeles Rams, now the NFL’s fourth-most-valuable team, are in the Super Bowl for the second time in four years. The game, a championship showdown with the Cincinnati Bengals set for Sunday, will be played at SoFi Stadium, the latest jewel in his ever-expanding sports empire.

But while Kroenke got what he wanted—as the 74-year-old tycoon almost always does—it wasn’t entirely easy. There were big risks—making Sean McVay a 30-year-old head coach in 2017, for one. There were big costs, like the $5 billion price tag for the stadium and its surrounding development. And there was the big headache: relocating the Rams from St. Louis, an arduous process that touched off a four-and-a-half-year legal battle with the city. That saga officially ended in November in a $790 million settlement, but bad feelings persist.

“I wouldn’t walk down on Broadway in St. Louis next to Stan, but Stan may not want to do that himself because there’s still a lot of animosity,” says Marc Ganis, president of the consulting firm Sportscorp, who has known Kroenke since they both had a hand in moving the Rams from Los Angeles to St. Louis in 1995.

Still, the calculating Kroenke is riding high, worth $10.7 billion by Forbes’ count, with a collection of sports properties valued at $10.5 billion—the world’s largest privately owned sports empire. And Sunday’s showcase will be just a preview of what he has in store.

THE RICH AND THE RICHER

The Brown family’s ​football team is worth billions of dollars, but Stan Kroenke’s sports empire blows them away.

Kroenke came to sports naturally: He was named Enos Stanley Kroenke after two St. Louis Cardinals greats, Enos Slaughter and Stan Musial, and he played basketball in high school. His beginnings were humble. Growing up in Mora, Missouri, a speck of a town 100 miles southeast of Kansas City, he swept floors at his father’s lumber business before he started keeping its books. While attending the University of Missouri in Columbia, he worked as a busboy in a dining hall at a neighboring college and, with the help of a $1,500 loan from his father, bought into a local clothing shop. He sold his stake in the early 1970s—for a profit, of course.

On a ski trip to Colorado in 1971, he met Ann Walton, the daughter of Walmart cofounder Bud Walton, and they married three years later. Kroenke reportedly bristles at the perception that he owes his business success to his wife’s inheritance—he accumulated his sports teams independently of his wife, and Forbes tracks their wealth separately, crediting Ann Walton Kroenke with her own $8.7 billion fortune.

Yet there is no denying that he benefited from the relationship. He got first-hand advice from Bud Walton and his legendary brother, Sam, and was introduced to a real estate developer who built shopping centers that often featured Walmarts. Kroenke accepted a job with that company in 1975 and became a partner in 1979, before an acrimonious split in 1985.

Kroenke rarely grants interviews; the Rams declined to make him available to comment for this article.

As the founder of the Kroenke Group and cofounder of THF Realty, Kroenke began accumulating shopping centers across the U.S. He now owns some 60 million square feet of real estate, plus more than 1.5 million acres of ranches. Those holdings, plus his majority stake in StorageMart, represent nearly $3.5 billion of his fortune. But the majority of his wealth now comes from his sports assets.

In his first foray, he led St. Louis’ bid for an NFL expansion team in 1993, but the reserved Kroenke—widely known as “Silent Stan”—failed to win over league executives. (The Philadelphia Inquirer compared him to Droopy Dog; the Sun Sentinel of Fort Lauderdale wrote that he had “as much charisma as an undertaker.”)

He didn’t have to wait long for another shot, buying a stake in the Rams to help owner Georgia Frontiere move the team from Los Angeles to St. Louis in 1995. Frontiere was frustrated with the Rams’ home at Anaheim Stadium, and Los Angeles wasn’t quick to offer a replacement. St. Louis, meanwhile, was already building a domed stadium and offered the Rams incentives to move in.

As Kroenke added more sports properties to his portfolio, the real estate magnate kept a focus on the buildings. In 2000, he bought not only the NBA’s Denver Nuggets and the NHL’s Colorado Avalanche but also their arena. The arrangement allowed him to maximize his revenue from streams like luxury suites and premium seating. Kroenke started buying shares in the English Premier League’s Arsenal in 2007, assumed a majority stake in 2011 and became the sole owner in 2018; in the process, he also picked up the club’s Emirates Stadium, shrugging off jeers from English fans who objected to an American owner.

“Long ago Stan identified two areas of business that had scarcity and need,” says Ganis, the sports consultant. “One is land, and the other is sports.”

In 2010, two years after the death of Frontiere, Kroenke exercised his right to buy up the 60% of the Rams he didn’t own in a deal that valued the team at $750 million. That set the stage for the relocation battle.

A contract quirk allowed the Rams to terminate their stadium lease in 2015 if the facility did not rank among the league’s eight best. As the two sides haggled, Kroenke bought a tract of land in Inglewood, California. Blaming the St. Louis stadium situation—and clearly seeing the economic opportunity of the Los Angeles market, with a population nearly five times the size of the St. Louis metropolitan area—he eventually won the NFL’s approval to move the team back to California in 2016. The same year, he broke ground on a privately financed new stadium and paid the league a $550 million relocation fee.

THE GREAT DIVIDE

While both competitors in Super Bowl LVI ranked in the bottom half of Forbes’ NFL team valuations during the early 2010s, the Rams soared toward the top after moving to Los Angeles.

St. Louis argued in a lawsuit filed in 2017 that the process violated the NFL’s relocation rules and amounted to a breach of contract. The result was the settlement reached in November, in which Kroenke and the NFL agreed to pay the city and its lawyers $790 million.

That might seem like a hard pill to swallow, but there is little doubt that the move has been worth it for Kroenke. The Rams are now worth $4.8 billion, according to Forbes, a 231% increase in just six seasons in Los Angeles. In fact, the team doubled in value in its first year back in California.

The Rams’ palatial new home opened in 2020 and has the Los Angeles Chargers as a tenant, after their 2017 move from San Diego. Construction costs reportedly ballooned past $5 billion, partly because of high-tech features like a 120-yard-long wraparound video board but also because the 298-acre site houses much more than a simple sports venue. SoFi Stadium is surrounded by a 6,000-seat theater, 25 acres of park space, up to 800,000 square feet of retail space, an office district that could reach 5 million square feet, and 314 residences, a number expected to grow to 2,500. The NFL’s new West Coast headquarters is also on the site.

The development cost more than twice as much as the Las Vegas Raiders’ $1.9 billion Allegiant Stadium, which opened the same year, but it was designed with an eye on the revenue available from mega-events. It’s not just this year’s Super Bowl, the first to be played in the Los Angeles area since 1993; there’s also next year’s College Football Playoff championship game and WrestleMania and the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2028 Summer Olympics. If all goes well with the U.S.’s hosting bid, there could be 2026 World Cup soccer games, plus future Super Bowls. And that is on top of the concerts, esports competitions and other events that the facility hopes to host.

As with everything that led to this point, there will be challenges. The Rams have to prove they can keep winning. They must start rebuilding a fan base that occasionally looks outnumbered by the visiting team’s supporters, in a city that already loves the Lakers and the Dodgers. Heck, the stadium is even built on an active fault line.

“It would be naive to think that the next two weeks is some kind of magic potion that changes and sets us up for the next two decades,” Rams chief operating officer Kevin Demoff said on a Zoom call with reporters last week, adding: “Whether you win or you lose, there is never a finishing piece in Los Angeles. The work in Los Angeles has to go on each day.”

25 YEARS OF DEALS

Stan Kroenke has built a $10.5 billion empire of sports properties. Here are some of the most important stops along the way.

1995

Bought a 30% stake in the Rams, helping the team move from Los Angeles to St. Louis.

1997

Increased his Rams stake to 40%.

1999

Formed holding company Kroenke Sports & Entertainment.

2000

Bought the NHL’s Colorado Avalanche and the NBA’s Denver Nuggets, as well as their arena.

2002

Bought the National Lacrosse League’s Colorado Mammoth.

2003

Bought Major League Soccer’s Colorado Rapids.

2004

Launched regional sports network Altitude Sports and Entertainment.

2007

Bought a minority stake in the English Premier League’s Arsenal.

2010

Assumed full control of the Rams.

2016

Moved the Rams back to Los Angeles and began building SoFi Stadium.

2017

Founded the Los Angeles Gladiators, an esports team that competes in the Overwatch League.

2018

Assumed full control of Arsenal.

2019

Founded the Los Angeles Guerrillas, an esports team that competes in the Call of Duty League.

2020

Opened SoFi Stadium.