Angels Sold to Stan Kroenke for Record $4 Billion, Ending Moreno Era
Arte Moreno has agreed to sell the Los Angeles Angels to Stan Kroenke in a deal reported to be worth $4 billion, a record price for a Major League Baseball franchise.
Kroenke Sports and Entertainment announced the agreement on Tuesday. The sale is expected to be completed in the first quarter of 2027, and surpasses the $3.9 billion paid for the San Diego Padres earlier this year.
The End of a 23-Year Tenure
Moreno, 80, bought the Angels from the Walt Disney Company in 2003 for around $180 million, a year after the franchise won its only World Series. He became the first Latino majority owner in Major League Baseball.
His early years brought success. Moreno signed Vladimir Guerrero and Bartolo Colon, lowered beer prices at the stadium and pushed the club towards a more national profile. The Angels won the American League West five times in six seasons between 2004 and 2009 and drew crowds of three million every year from 2003 to 2019.
In 2011 the club agreed a 20-year television deal with Fox Sports worth $3 billion, which funded the signings of Albert Pujols, Josh Hamilton and C.J. Wilson.
The decline that followed has been prolonged. The Angels have reached the postseason once since 2010, a sweep in 2014, and have not had a winning season since 2015. This year marks an eleventh consecutive losing campaign.
The organisation drafted Mike Trout in 2009 and promoted him to the majors in 2011, then added Shohei Ohtani, yet never reached the playoffs with both on the roster. Ohtani left for the Dodgers after the 2023 season and has since won two World Series titles. The club is on its seventh manager since 2018, and interim general manager John Mozeliak is the sixth person to lead its baseball operations under Moreno.
Moreno first put the team up for sale in August 2022 before withdrawing it from the market roughly nine months later, citing unfinished business. Many in the industry expected him to wait until the current collective bargaining negotiations concluded, on the basis that a salary cap might lift the franchise's value.
Fans gathered outside Angel Stadium on Tuesday ahead of a game against the Yankees to mark the news.
Kroenke Adds to a Large Portfolio
Kroenke, 79, already controls one of the broadest ownership groups in professional sport. Through Kroenke Sports and Entertainment he owns the Los Angeles Rams, the Denver Nuggets, the Colorado Avalanche, the Colorado Rapids and the Colorado Mammoth, and he holds a controlling stake in Arsenal.
He moved the Rams from St Louis back to Los Angeles in 2016 and built SoFi Stadium in Inglewood as the centrepiece of a 300-acre development, a site that will feature at the 2028 Olympics. The Rams reached the Super Bowl in their third season back in the city.
In a statement, Kroenke described the Angels as a storied franchise in a strong market and said the group was looking ahead to the club's future.
The Task Ahead
Whoever takes charge of baseball operations inherits a roster some distance from contention. There is young talent in Zach Neto and Nolan Schanuel among the hitters and Reid Detmers and Walbert Ureña in the rotation, while Trout is enjoying his most productive season since 2022.
One of Kroenke's earliest decisions will be whether to retain Mozeliak on a permanent basis or conduct a wider search.
The sale price also sits well above the valuations published by Forbes earlier in the year, as did the Padres deal, at a time when owners are pressing for a salary cap during collective bargaining talks.
