Stan Kroenke agreed to buy the Los Angeles Angels and their regional sports network for $4 billion. The deal values a baseball team that hasn't won a playoff game since 2009 at roughly the GDP of Moldova. Kroenke Sports and Entertainment is worth $26 billion, which means he's spending fifteen percent of his empire on the right to employ Mike Trout until Trout's knees finally give out.
The Angels play in Anaheim. They haven't played in Los Angeles since never. The Lakers pulled this same geographical grift decades ago and everyone just accepted it. Now Kroenke gets to own a team named after a city sixty miles away while his sports network pretends people in LA care about a franchise that exists primarily to waste generational talent.
Retail traders saw this headline and immediately started searching for Angels stock. There isn't any. The Angels are privately held, which means you can't lose money on them unless you buy a ticket. But that won't stop someone from buying shares of Disney because they think it's connected. It's not. Disney sold the team in 2003.
Kroenke already owns the Rams, the Nuggets, the Avalanche, and Arsenal. He moved the Rams from St. Louis to LA, built a $5 billion stadium with other people's money, and won a Super Bowl. Now he's buying a baseball team that's mathematically eliminated from the playoffs by June every year. Diversification.
The $4 billion includes the regional sports network, which is a polite way of saying "the channel nobody can find on their cable package that airs games nobody watches." Regional sports networks are dying faster than the Angels' postseason hopes, but sure, let's call that an asset.
Kroenke just paid Moldova prices for the privilege of disappointing Orange County.
Photo by Wade Austin Ellis on Unsplash
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