Arsenal owner Stan Kroenke has seen a significant jump in his net worth after one of the teams he owns broke into the top three of the most valuable sports teams in world sport.
Kroenke, 77, who has owned Arsenal through his Kroenke Sports & Entertainment firm since 2011 after initially arriving via a minority stake purchase, has amassed a personal fortune of some $16.9bn (£13.3bn), a rise of $3.3bn (£2.6bn) in just 12 months according to Forbes magazine.
After marrying an heiress to the Wal-Mart fortune in 1974, wife Ann Walton, Kroenke became a real estate mogul before pivoting into sports, media, and entertainment via KSE in 1999, becoming owner of the NBA’s Denver Nuggets and the NHL’s Colorado Avalanche a year later.
Since then he has acquired a vast portfolio of sporting assets and their associated real estate, with teams such as the Los Angeles Rams (NFL) and Colorado Rapids added to the list. It is the Rams that have made Kroenke’s fortune even greater this past year.
In 2010, Kroenke exercised an option to purchase the remainder of the shares in the St Louis Rams, as they were known then, having already picked up 30%. Six years later, Kroenke became deeply unpopular in St Louis after moving the Rams from Missouri to California after a deal was reached to construct a brand-new stadium in Inglewood, Los Angeles.
Forbes released its 50 most valuable sporting teams on the planet list earlier in December, with the Rams displacing the baseball powerhouse that is the New York Yankees from the top three to take third spot, with the Rams now valued at $7.6bn (£6bn). For context, Arsenal are valued at £2.1bn according to Forbes’ world football list earlier this year, but only Real Madrid, Barcelona, Manchester United, Liverpool, Manchester City and Paris Saint-Germain make the top 50 list where all sports teams are considered. Arsenal placed 10th on the world football list.
The valuation of the Rams was up a huge 10% year on year, an extra £600m, with most NFL teams seeing double-digit rises. The list is, as has long been the case, dominated by teams from the North American major sporting leagues such as the NFL, NBA and MLB. Dallas Cowboys top the list at $10.1bn, followed by the Golden State Warriors ($8.8bn), the Rams, the New York Yankees ($7.55bn) and the New York Knicks ($7.5bn).
The chief reason for this, despite the fact that the Premier League’s biggest clubs boast the largest global reach when it comes to fandom, is the huge media deals that are in place across the major US leagues, particularly the NFL. Each NFL team will receive roughly $380m per year on average across the life of the league’s national media rights package, which altogether is set to pay at least $125.5 billion through 2033, while the NBA’s latest deal is set to reach a staggering $76bn over 11 years.
Those numbers, allied with the fact that there is far greater cost certainty due to the existence in most leagues of salary caps, and the lack of promotion and relegation, making it a closed competition, means that the valuations have climbed to remarkably high levels, so much so that the NFL and NBA have had little option but to kick open the door to sales of minority stakes in teams to private equity firms, something that was previously not allowed as per league rules, with family offices on their own now not able to complete such a purchase at the high prices.
For Kroenke, whose Denver Nuggets, valued at $3.9bn, did not make the list even though they were NBA champions in 2023, the value of his sporting assets looks set to climb higher still, and that includes at Arsenal.