Stan Kroenke was sitting in the back of a conference room full of other NFL owners this month when he quietly pulled out an iPad to watch another kind of football.
He was in Orlando and apparently listening to Roger Goodell, the owner of the Los Angeles Rams. But at the time, he was far more concerned about developments 4,000 miles away, impacting Arsenal, the famous north London soccer club that had been in his portfolio for almost two decades.
Surrounded by some top lieutenants, Kroenke watched in amazement as Bournemouth mathematically eliminated powerhouse Manchester City from contention. After a wait of 22 years, Arsenal became champions again.
For Arsenal fans, it was a much-needed moment of excitement – despite having once organized a protest against Kroenke outside their own stadium. And for Kroenke, it was the latest title of the greatest global performance by any owner in sports.
“It was extremely emotional,” Kroenke said in a rare interview. “I don’t think we can do these things without emotion, without deep belief.”
Over the past five years, that belief has helped the 70-year-old Kroenke win nearly all of the sport’s richest and most popular leagues. His Rams, Denver Nuggets (NBA) and Colorado Avalanche (NHL) had all won championships before Arsenal joined the group. Arsenal’s women’s team and Kroenke’s pro lacrosse team, the Colorado Mammoth, also recently won major trophies.
And Kroenke probably won’t be. If Arsenal beats Paris Saint-Germain in Saturday’s Champions League final, the club will not just remain top of England. It would be crowned champion of all of Europe – a scenario few could have imagined in the late 2010s when Arsenal supporters chanted “We care, do you?” campaign behind the slogan “Kroenke Out”.
“We know what the relationship was with the ownership at that time,” says Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta. “To me, this is one of our greatest victories.”
Kroenke, whose tenure has brought success as well as controversy, does his best to stay out of the spotlight. Yet those who work around him say this should not be confused with indifference. Instead, he says, he is planning for the long term in an industry that demands instant gratification by giving broad authority to people he personally selects, from savvy executives to previously untested head coaches such as Arteta or the Rams’ Sean McVay.
Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones says, “He’s very consistent: He’ll have really significant ambitions, a significant picture of where he wants to go.” “And boy, when he does it, it’s real.”
The success also marks an extraordinary turnaround for an investor who was better known for the rare feat of angering constituencies on both sides of the Atlantic.
In the NFL, he upset fans in his home state of Missouri by moving the Rams to Los Angeles in 2016 following a controversial relocation process within the league. Subsequent litigation with St. Louis officials over the move resulted in a $790 million settlement, leaving other NFL owners at loggerheads over who would foot the bill. Kroenke ultimately agreed to pay more than $500 million of this. He spent 10 times more to build the state-of-the-art SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles.
“It cost him dearly within the NFL. He took it tough,” says Jones. “Out of all of them came one of the NFL’s truly shining stars.”
In Europe, he was criticized for moving too slowly to take over from Arsenal’s long-time manager Arsene Wenger in 2018 and was accused of profiteering from the team without making meaningful investments. Later, in 2021, he faced the wrath of supporters who lambasted him for taking part in the failed European Super League project – a cash grab that would have seen the game’s elite clubs create a separate competition.
And during all this, Kroenke said nothing publicly. Critics dubbed him “Silent Stan”.
“If you let those things hinder you when you think you’re doing what’s right for your organization and your view of the world,” Kroenke says, “it’s never going to get you very far.”
Before he became an international sports mogul, he was Enos Stanley Kroenke of rural Missouri, whose birth certificate bore sports heritage—his namesakes were St. Louis Cardinals legends Enos Slaughter and Stan Musial. Kroenke made a fortune in real estate before entering sports and married Walmart heiress Ann Walton. He started with a minority stake in the St. Louis Rams in 1995.
Besides, he was also acquiring vast lands. It seems the only thing he can be as passionate about as sports is animal husbandry. After buying 937,000 acres in New Mexico last year, or 1.2% of America’s fifth-largest state, he brought his holdings nationwide to 2.7 million acres – the equivalent of about two million football fields. He is believed to be the largest private landowner in the US.
“He’s the most long-term thinker I’ve ever been associated with,” says Kevin Demoff, president of team operations for his sister company Kroenke Sports & Entertainment. “It comes from his real estate background. You invest in something, you build it and give it time.”
His patient approach underpinned every decision he took during his three decades in the game. With the Rams, Kroenke had the conviction to stick with general manager Les Snead through a lean season, before landing one of the boldest hires ever seen in the game. When they hired McVay in 2017, he became the youngest head coach in modern NFL history.
Shortly after his final interview, conducted over dinner at Spago in Beverly Hills, Kroenke knew he had hit the jackpot. In McVay’s first season, the Rams’ offense went from worst to first. Since then, they have reached two Super Bowls and won the Lombardi Trophy in Sofi four years ago.
“He’s not afraid to step outside the box if he believes in it,” McVay says. “Great leadership requires courage, and we certainly have a lot of it.”
It took even more to manage Arsenal’s most turbulent period in a generation. When Kroenke pushed Wenger out the door in 2018, ending his 22-year reign at the club, he was also moving two decades of deep roots and institutional knowledge. So Kroenke’s next appointment, Unai Emery, was doomed almost from the start. He lasted only 18 months.
The easier thing then would have been to play it safe and appoint a big name from the glittering line-up of unemployed managers. Instead, Kroenke and his son Josh chose something else entirely: Arteta was a 37-year-old former Arsenal midfielder who was working as an assistant coach at Manchester City.
“It usually takes four years to turn a team around. And we didn’t have that time. So we had to re-invent the way we were going to do it,” says Arteta, now 44.
During that time, Kroenke not only finished three consecutive times outside the Premier League top four under Arteta. He spent over $1.25 billion on new talent for the team. The result was a perennial contender led by a man whose 6.5 years in charge makes him the longest-tenured manager in England’s top division.
“It’s very, very, very rare in our industry,” Arteta says.
Kroenke believes that having a broader portfolio of teams helps the entire network, as they face “the same problems and the same opportunities across leagues,” even in completely different sports. Most of them begin and end with culture. That’s why Kroenke has encouraged interconnectedness between them, with similar executives spanning multiple franchises, including Josh Kroenke.
McVay has taken full advantage of those connections, too. He says that learning from other sports has made him a better coach and even considers Arteta a good friend.
“It’s a definite edge,” McVay says. “There’s no question.”
With a chance to add to his trophy case on Saturday, Kroenke won’t have to sweat this result on a handheld device. He is already in Budapest, which is hosting the final.
Whatever the case, Kroenkes has learned that the thrill of success can be fleeting.
“We always say you’re only as good as your last game or your last game,” Josh Kroenke says. “If you’re not getting to the top of the championship, you immediately go back to the drawing board and try to figure out how to get there again.”
Write to Andrew Beaton andrew.beton@wsj.com And on Joshua Robinson joshua.robinson@wsj.com
