Arsenal owner Kroenke takes total US franchise spend this summer to £23bn
Nearly £23bn of US sports franchises were sold across the summer after Arsenal owner Stan Kroenke purchased the Los Angeles Angels.
The surprise purchase – a MLB record at £2.97bn – ended a summer of spending across North America which included basketball, NFL and women’s football.
Kroenke’s sporting portfolio now puts the Angels alongside Premier League champions Arsenal, the LA Rams NFL franchise, the NBA’s Denver Nuggets and a trio of Colorado-based teams – Avalanche, Rapids and Mammoth – across ice hockey, Major League Soccer and lacrosse.
But the $4bn purchase was dwarfed by last month’s £9.27bn sale of the LA Lakers by Chelsea co-owner Mark Walter to former Disney chief Bob Iger and Josh Kushner, the man involved in Fifa’s canned stake sale fiasco.
The Lakers sale was accompanied this summer by the sale of the Super Bowl winning Seattle Seahawks, which was sold to a group led by billionaire Vinod Khosla for over £7bn.
Kroenke caps off busy US summer
The Minnesota Timberwolves basketball franchise was sold too, for £3.34bn, while the women’s soccer expansion franchise from Atlanta was sold for a record £122m.
In all, £22.8bn – or $30bn – was spent this summer, which could rise to nearly £24bn if a minority stake in NFL’s Atlanta Falcons and an investment into the Vegas As is approved by relative bodies.
And last month the MLB chiefs approved the sale of the San Diego Padres to private equity billionaire José Feliciano and his wife, investor and entrepreneur Kwanza Jones, for a cool £2.9bn.
Kroenke began the year by becoming the United States’ largest land owner, when the purchase of almost 1m acres of New Mexico took his total holding to 2.7m acres – which includes the Hollywood Park development in Inglewood, California, which contains the $5.5bn SoFi Stadium, the most expensive sports arena ever built.
The Los Angeles Angels play the New York Yankees this evening.