Stan Kroenke Buys The LA Angels

Today I want to “catch up” with some comments about stories that have been accumulating on my clipboard.  I’ll start with the sale of the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim to Stan Kroenke for $4B; the deal is set to close in the “first quarter of 2027”.  Kroenke has a full suite of sports enterprises to include:

• LA Rams – NFL
• Arsenal – English Premier League
• Denver Nuggets – NBA
• Colorado Avalanche – NHL
• Colorado Rapids – MLS

In addition, Kroenke owns SoFi Stadium in LA where the next Super Bowl game will be played.

The Angels have been owned by Arte Moreno since 2003 and have not been overly successful in that span of time; the Angels have not been to the playoffs since 2014 and have not won a playoff game since 2009.  Moreover, the team missed the playoffs with Mike Trout on the roster plus Shohei Ohtani for a six-year period.  That record of futility does not apply to the other franchises in Kroenke’s portfolio.

• The Rams won the Super Bowl a few years ago
• Arsenal won the EPL last season
• Nuggets were NBA Champs 2 years ago
• Avalanche won the Stanley Cup in 2022.

I am a little surprised at this franchise sale given the timing; MLB and the players’ union appear to be on a crash course for a new CBA because the current one expires on December 1, 2026.  In fact, I might be able to convince myself that this transaction signals a much more benign interpretation of the impending “labor strife”.  Here is the question I ask myself:

• If the impending labor battle could really cause the loss of a full season of baseball and even signal an apocalyptic collapse of the sport as some have opined, why would someone smart enough to have amassed a net worth of $27.6B buy in now?

I do not doubt that there will be rancor in the negotiations and that there is a real possibility of either a strike or a lockout or both over the winter.  The last time this happened back in 2021, there was a lockout that delayed the start of Spring Training and the MLB regular season – – but all 162 regular season games were contested.  Maybe he senses that both sides have so much to lose by killing off a full season that they will eventually come to their senses and find a settlement that both sides can live with.

Whenever a sport is in the midst of a CBA negotiation, I like to remind everyone here that when you boil the situation down to its essence, the owners and the players are partners in an enterprise that provides entertainment for fans such that the fans spend disposable income and spare time on the entertainment product.  Neither side can possibly generate the kind of total revenue that MLB generates without the other side’s involvement.

Moving on …  I read a report in the LA Times that focused on how the area needs to prepare to host the Olympics in 2028; it is less than two years in the future.  The item in the report that stood out to me is that the city will dedicate one lane of traffic on all the freeways exclusively to “Olympic travel”.  It has been many years since I have been to LA; I used to go there several times a year in my pre-Curmudgeon career.  Traffic on the freeways in LA was horrible then and most surveys of highway systems in US cities today say that LA traffic is still really bad.  So, how will removing one lane of traffic on all the freeways work?

And here is another question:

• How will they enforce this restriction?

Finally, today’s closing remark comes from Stan Kroenke:

“Economics is about creating win-win situations. But in sports, someone loses.

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports………