Arte Moreno selling Angels to Rams owner: Stan Kroenke takes over team with MLB’s longest playoff drought

The Los Angeles Angels are being sold. Embattled and often maligned owner Arte Moreno, who presided over the franchise’s decade-plus doldrums, has agreed to sell the club to Stan Kroenke. Kroenke’s company, Kroenke Sports & Entertainment, announced the sale on Tuesday. 

The deal is worth an MLB record $4 billion, surpassing the $3.9 billion Padres sale, according to the Athletic.

Kroenke, 79, also owns the Los Angeles Rams of the NFL, the Denver Nuggets of the NBA, the Colorado Avalanche of the NHL, the Colorado Rapids of MLS, and Arsenal of the Premier League through his holding company.

“The Angels are a storied franchise anchored in a great market,” Kroenke said in a statement. “We look forward to an exciting future with the Angels organization.”

Moreno, 80, had owned the team since 2003, when he purchased the Angels from the Walt Disney Company for $180 million. The transaction made Moreno the first Mexican-American owner of a major franchise in U.S. sports history.

Moreno purchased the team months after the Angels won the World Series for the first time in franchise history. They remained broadly successful for the early years of Moreno’s tenure, as they made the postseason in five of six years starting in 2004. A somewhat middling stretch of years was made more promising by the arrival of Mike Trout, a future Hall of Famer and three-time MVP, in 2011-12. The Angels, helmed by Trout at his peak powers, returned to the playoffs in 2014. However, they haven’t been back since, and the Angels haven’t won a postseason game or series since 2009. The drought is made all the more noteworthy because it coincided with Trout’s legendary peak and the first six seasons of Shohei Ohtani’s MLB career. 

While Moreno during the first extended part of his tenure generally spent in keeping with the club’s contending aspirations, a dubious touch on the free agent market — the Josh Hamilton, Albert Pujols, Anthony Rendon, Justin Upton, and Gary Matthews Jr. contracts stand as some of the worst ever from the club standpoint — and frequent turnover in positions of power undermined all of it. At the time of the sale, the Angels are on their seventh manager since 2018, and current interim general manager John Mozeliak is the sixth head of baseball operations under Moreno. One of Kroenke’s first major decisions as owner will be whether to attempt to retain Mozeliak as the permanent lead exec or conduct a search for an external candidate. 

At the time of the sale, the Angels were in fourth place in the American League West with a record of 53-85, which means they had clinched their ninth straight losing season. 

On another level, and insofar as the ongoing Collective Bargaining negotiations are concerned, the removal of Moreno from the ranks of ownership may make the overall group slightly less hawkish moving forward. This, however, assumes Kroenke won’t adopt a similar stance, and it’s fair to assume the other MLB owners would not have voted to approve the sale if the new franchise steward weren’t generally on board with the league’s agenda. 

Kroenke’s successes

The Angels’ serialized struggles under Moreno are in contrast with the other major franchises within the Kroenke portfolio. The Rams won Super Bowl LVI in February of 2022, and the Nuggets were NBA champions for the 2022-23 season. As well, Arsenal won the English Premier League for the 2025-26 campaign, and the Avalanche were NHL champions for the 2021-22 season. That’s an exceptional level of success across four major sports leagues, all within the current decade. 

With the Angels, Kroenke enters a potentially robust market. While the Angels have seen an understandable downturn in attendance in recent years, given the long run of losing seasons, they’re not far removed from a stretch that saw them top three million fans in 17 straight seasons coming out of their 2002 championship campaign and going into the COVID-compromised 2020 season. As well, Kroenke’s long reign atop the Rams — and his decision to relocate the franchise from St. Louis after the 2015 season — speaks to his extensive experience running a successful major franchise in the Los Angeles market. 

Given the current state of the Angels and the weight of their grim recent history, though, reviving them and positioning them as World Series contenders may be Kroenke’s biggest challenge yet. 

A mostly blank slate

On the upside, there’s immediate space for Kroenke and whoever winds up leading baseball operations under him to shape the roster as they see fit. Per Cot’s Contracts/Baseball Prospectus, the Angels right now rank 17th with a CBT payroll of less than $200 million for this year. That means the new owner isn’t assuming much in terms of salary obligations in the here and now. As well, the Angels are light on long-term commitments. Trout is owed almost $150 million through the 2030 season, but at the same time, this season he’s arrested his pattern of decline and re-established himself as a high-worth performer. That’s in addition to his obvious value as a franchise legend. Yusei Kikuchi is under contract for $21.2 million in 2027, and Robert Stephenson has a $2.5 million option that seems likely to vest. 

Otherwise, they still owe Rendon significant cash under the terms of his reworked contract, but he’s no longer in the game. Even manager Kurt Suzuki is on a one-year contract. Otherwise, the Angels just have obvious tender decisions with Zach Neto and Reid Detmers, who are arbitration-eligible this coming offseason. In other words, there aren’t many payroll or “roster logjam” impediments for Kroenke and baseball ops as they take over the struggling franchise. Given the significant work necessary to get the Angels back to relevance in the standings, that’s a positive.