The Rams Owner Who’s Hosting the Super Bowl—and in a War With Other NFL Owners

The fallout from the team’s relocation, and the subsequent litigation, remains the subject of acrimony among owners—who believe Kroenke has tried to renege on his agreements with them, people familiar with the matter said. 

The stadium that Kroenke built here, SoFi Stadium, is the crowning achievement in the career of a notoriously private real estate tycoon, who married into the

Walmart

fortune and eventually became one of the most controversial sports owners in the world. 

Frustration with Kroenke might be the one thing that unifies fans across his sporting empire, including jilted Rams supporters in St. Louis and Arsenal die-hards in the English Premier League. His family also own the NBA’s Denver Nuggets, the NHL’s Colorado Avalanche, and the Colorado Rapids of Major League Soccer. Together, they add up to an unrivaled collection of sports assets. 

Kroenke, through a spokeswoman, declined to be interviewed for this article. 

Few episodes have been more dramatic than the Rams’ exit from St. Louis, which like other team moves came with the threat of potential litigation. Before ownership approved the relocation, one of the deciding factors was Kroenke’s agreement to indemnify his cohorts from potential costs. 

That agreement proved to be relevant. St. Louis, St. Louis County and the St. Louis Regional Convention and Sports Complex Authority sued the NFL and its 32 teams in 2017 over the Rams’ departure, alleging they violated the league’s own relocation rules when the team bolted to Los Angeles. 

As the league suffered repeated legal setbacks in the case, the situation grew contentious. Bills mounted for the league and teams. Some owners were fined by the court for refusing to turn over financial records. And as the threat of a January 2022 trial loomed—just weeks before his new stadium was set to host the Super Bowl—the league and other owners wound up in a dispute with Kroenke. 

Tensions erupted when owners learned, at a meeting in October, that Kroenke held a different view of the indemnification agreement and thought that the rest of ownership would have to share in the cost of the case, the people said. Kroenke believed the matter simply had to do with the way the agreement was written and which costs he had agreed to cover, one of the people said. Others saw it as an attempt by him to dump the growing bill on his colleagues. 

Then, in November, Kroenke’s representatives sent a letter to the other owners and league officials claiming he could settle his part of the litigation individually for between $500 million and $750 million, while the league and the 31 other teams would still be on the hook. 

Owners were outraged because it would leave them still fighting over a matter they believed was Kroenke’s responsibility. They also believed it was a strategic error that cost them hundreds of millions, people familiar with the matter said, because when the content of the letter became public, they thought it raised the cost of a future settlement for all of them.

Sure enough, the next week, all of the parties agreed to settle the case with the St. Louis authorities. The price tag: $790 million, or just above the number floated in the letter. 

That didn’t settle the internal discord, however. The sides remain at odds over Kroenke’s share of the bill, the people said.  Fewer owners are expected to attend this year’s Super Bowl because of the lingering distaste over this issue, one of the people said.

“It is the most contentious dispute in more than a decade,” a person familiar with the matter said. 

Kroenke isn’t much more popular across the Atlantic, where he criticized as the aloof, largely absent owner of Arsenal since he took a controlling stake in the club in 2011. 

For most of his tenure, the main group of people at his throat were Arsenal fans. They viewed him as too slow to replace the club’s long-term manager Arsène Wenger after years of underachievement. Then, once Kroenke made the change in 2018, they accused him of botching the succession. Arsenal hasn’t qualified for the Champions League, the tournament reserved for European soccer’s elite, since the 2016-17 season.

Then last year, Kroenke also managed to lose allies among a majority of Premier League club owners. They resented him for participating in the failed effort by 12 European clubs to create a Super League—a controversial money-spinning project that would have taken the rebel teams out of the Champions League and created something closer to an NFL of soccer.

Arsenal was one of the Premier League’s six clubs to sign up for the promise of more guaranteed income, regardless of on-field performance. The 14 uninvited teams viewed it as a reckless, greedy move that threatened the very integrity of their league. The whole project fell apart in 48 hours.

Kroenke had been “interested from an early stage,” according to one Super League insider, and fell in line with the league’s other American owners who were truly driving the project—including

Joel Glazer,

of

Manchester United

and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and John W. Henry, of Liverpool and the Boston Red Sox. 

Only after the Super League collapsed, amid furious uproar from the fans, did Kroenke or his family say anything about it in public.

“It was never our intention to cause such distress,” he said in a message signed by the Arsenal board rather than Kroenke personally. “However, when the invitation to join the Super League came, while knowing there were no guarantees, we didn’t want to be left behind to ensure we protected Arsenal and its future.”

The Super League fiasco was one reason why Arsenal supporters found themselves again calling for Kroenke’s ouster. In their campaign, which featured regular protests inside and outside the stadium, they found an unlikely ally. He was a lifelong Arsenal fan from Sweden who had made a little money with a venture called Spotify. Not only did

Daniel Ek,

the company’s co-founder and CEO, despise the Kroenke ownership—he proposed to end it by bidding around $2.4 billion for the club.

Kroenke wasn’t interested in selling.

Write to Andrew Beaton at andrew.beaton@wsj.com and Joshua Robinson at Joshua.Robinson@wsj.com