Angels sold to Rams owner Stan Kroenke for an MLB record $4 billion

[HiggsField]

Arte Moreno has agreed to sell the Los Angeles Angels to Stan Kroenke's Kroenke Sports & Entertainment for roughly 4 billion dollars, according to multiple reports, making it the most expensive sale in Major League Baseball history and surpassing the recent 3.9 billion dollar sale of the San Diego Padres. The deal is expected to close in the first quarter of 2027, pending customary conditions and MLB approval, and ends Moreno's 23 year ownership of a franchise that hasn't made the postseason in 11 years

Kroenke, 79, already owns the NFL's Los Angeles Rams, the NBA's Denver Nuggets, the NHL's Colorado Avalanche, MLS's Colorado Rapids, and holds a stake in England's Arsenal FC through his holding company, giving him one of the largest sports ownership portfolios in the world. Moreno purchased the Angels in 2003 for 184 million dollars, shortly after the team's only World Series title, and said in a statement that the Moreno family has been honored to steward the Angels for 23 years and believes Kroenke's experience makes his group the best next owner for the franchise

Moreno's tenure has drawn persistent criticism for failing to build a consistent winner around two of the sport's most talented players in Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani, who spent five years with the team without reaching the playoffs before eventually leaving. Curious what people think this ownership change actually means for the Angels' on field future, does new money and a proven multi sport owner actually translate into winning, or does structural dysfunction usually run deeper than who signs the checks

What Los Angeles Angels sale means for franchise, MLBwww.espn.com

[NoLimitsBen18]

184 million in 2003 to a 4 billion dollar sale now is a genuinely staggering return on investment regardless of how the actual on field product performed under his ownership, sports franchise values have just exploded over the past two decades

[NeuralTrace96]

Kroenke's track record across his other teams is honestly pretty mixed, Arsenal fans have had plenty of their own complaints over the years, so I wouldn't assume this automatically fixes whatever's actually been broken in Anaheim

[NatureBoy_Dev]

Wasting the prime years of two generational talents like Trout and Ohtani without a single playoff appearance between them is honestly one of the more remarkable failures in recent sports ownership history, hard to overstate how rare that level of talent is

[Laura38]

Curious whether Kroenke actually gets hands on with baseball operations or treats this more as a portfolio holding, his other franchises have had pretty different levels of direct involvement from ownership over the years

[WearyCoder]

A record breaking sale price says more about how much national TV and franchise scarcity value has grown across all of sports than it does about the Angels specifically being some kind of hidden gem asset

[FreeKickKing73]

MLB approval isn't usually a real obstacle for deals like this but it's still worth watching, especially given how much scrutiny cross league ownership concentration has gotten in other sports recently

[Tracey49]

Kroenke buying yet another franchise raises real questions about how much cross ownership concentration across multiple major leagues should actually be allowed before it starts limiting genuine competitive independence

[Carol84]

The postseason drought specifically deserves its own scrutiny separate from the sale itself, 11 years without a playoff appearance in a major market with that much star power is a genuinely rare kind of sustained underperformance