Stan Kroenke has agreed to buy the Los Angeles Angels from Arte Moreno for $4 billion, a record for an MLB franchise sale, topping the $3.9 billion the Padres fetched earlier this year, according to CNBC, ESPN and CBS Sports. The obvious read is that this is just another billionaire trophy purchase in a market where every major franchise price now has a “b” in it. That reading skips the part that actually explains the number: the Angels are one of the least competitive teams in the sport, and the price has almost nothing to do with what happens on the field.
The multiple doesn’t match the team
Moreno bought the Angels from Disney in 2003 for roughly $180 million. Twenty-three years later, Kroenke is paying about 22 times that, a compounded annual growth rate north of 14%, per Fangraphs’ reconstruction of the deal math. Over that same span, the Angels have made the playoffs once since 2014 and currently hold MLB’s longest active postseason drought, a distinction CBS Sports and Yahoo Sports have both been tracking for years as the team burned two MVP-level careers (Mike Trout, then Shohei Ohtani) without ever building a contender around them.
Forbes had the Angels valued at $2.75 to $2.8 billion before the sale leaked. A $4 billion price implies the market’s actual number for MLB franchises has been running roughly 25% ahead of Forbes’ published estimates, which says less about the Angels specifically and more about how far behind sticker-price valuations can lag when a sale actually happens. The Wage Bill saw the same gap play out differently with the Lakers sale, where the reported price was real but the financing behind it was heavily leveraged. Here, neither side has disclosed financing terms at all: no debt figures, no cash-versus-loan breakdown, nothing. That’s its own kind of signal. A $4 billion transaction with zero reported leverage details either means it’s genuinely being done in cash by one of the wealthier owners in sports, or it means the structure hasn’t been made public yet. Until MLB approves the sale, expected in the first quarter of 2027, it’s reasonable to note the gap rather than guess at it.
Where the value actually sits
The number that does most of the explaining is a media deal signed over a decade ago. In 2012, Moreno struck a 20-year, $3 billion rights agreement with what was then Fox Sports West, a deal Multichannel News covered at the time as one of the richest regional sports contracts ever signed. That contract still has roughly six years left to run, and it has spent the last several years looking unusually valuable by comparison: Diamond Sports Group’s bankruptcy and the broader collapse of the regional sports network model have hammered local TV revenue for a chunk of the league, while the Angels’ older, differently structured deal kept paying out on its original terms.
In other words, a chunk of that $4 billion is Kroenke buying a locked-in cash flow that has become scarcer across the sport, not a bet on the roster Perry Minasian has to build next. It’s the same lesson The Wage Bill has flagged in cricket, where the RCB and Big Bash sales showed buyers paying up for a league’s structural position even when the on-field product doesn’t change, and in football, where Barcelona’s “palancas” showed a club leaning on financial engineering rather than results to fund its ambitions. Media contracts and structural assets travel with a franchise regardless of what the win column says.
Kroenke is completing a set
This is also not a first purchase for Kroenke. Through Kroenke Sports & Entertainment, he already owns the Rams (NFL), Nuggets (NBA), Avalanche (NHL) and Rapids (MLS), plus Arsenal in the Premier League. Add the Angels and he holds a controlling or majority stake in a team across every major US league except the WNBA, alongside one of the biggest clubs in English football.
MLB, like the other US leagues, restricts an owner from holding stakes in multiple teams within its own league, but has no rule against an owner running franchises across different leagues entirely. That gap is why cross-league ownership groups, Kroenke’s among the largest, have become common rather than exceptional: the same front-office, sponsorship and media-negotiation infrastructure can be spread across a portfolio of teams that never actually compete against each other. It’s a different model from the single-club debt loads The Wage Bill covered in Manchester United’s balance sheet, but it points at the same underlying trend: ownership in modern sport increasingly looks like portfolio management, not fandom with a checkbook.
Why this matters
A $4 billion price tag for a team with the league’s worst active playoff drought is a useful reminder that franchise valuations are decoupling further from competitive performance. What’s being priced is media rights vintage, scarcity of the asset class, and an owner’s ability to run it as one piece of a larger cross-league operation, not the roster’s odds of a pennant. Expect more sales to be read this way as regional sports money keeps fragmenting and as owners like Kroenke keep proving that the biggest checks in the sport aren’t being written for contenders.
The Wage Bill