Toggle Menu

The Rams’ Stan Kroenke Represents the Worst of the NFL

This year’s Super Bowl pits two odious teams against one another.

Dave Zirin

January 23, 2019

Stan Kroenke before an NFL football game in 2017.(AP Photo / Tim Ireland)

Whom to root for at the Super Bowl is usually an easy decision. It is [insert your favorite team here] or whoever is playing against the New England Patriots. Whether it’s our jealousy, their smugness, or the malodorous worst-of-Massachusetts vibe their fan base exudes, there are few pleasures more delicious in sports than seeing them lose a heartbreaker, like last year’s defeat at the hands of the Philadelphia Eagles. There is also no pain more acute than when they can pull one of these damn games out like the proverbial rabbit out of a hat. That has happened several times over their last two decades of dominance, most acutely when they somehow—and I’m still not sure how—came back from a 28-3 deficit in 2017 to beat the Atlanta Falcons.

Yet this year it is tougher than most to find a team to cheer for, because the Patriots are playing the Los Angeles Rams, owned by multibillionaire Stan Kroenke. Also the owner of the Arsenal football club, much to their fans’ chagrin, Kroenke made his money the old fashioned way: by marrying it. His wife is Ann Walton Kroenke, the niece of Walmart founder Sam Walton.

But it’s not the Walmart fortune that makes the Walton-Kroenkes so impossible to cheer. The Rams, as recently as three years ago, were located in Kroenke’s home state of Missouri. But there was no sentimentality on Kroenke’s part to keep the team in St. Louis. Instead, he is in that select group of pro-sports owners—the worst of the worst—who moved their team because they weren’t getting enough corporate welfare from their cash-strapped cities. (Five hundred million in city money was not enough for the multibillionaire. Kroenke said in response to that offer that he “couldn’t sit there and be a victim.”)

The Rams, originally founded in Cleveland, were based in Los Angeles from 1946–94, but from 1995–2015, they found a loving home in St. Louis, going to two Super Bowls and winning one. The divorce from St. Louis and move to glitzier, flashier LA was anything but pretty. Kroenke stuck St. Louis with a $129 million tax bill for what was still owed on the old stadium, and will need to be paid out of the public coffers until 2021. Then the city of St. Louis sued the National Football League and all 32 owners over the relocation. They argued that Kroenke always planned to move the team to Los Angeles and did not engage in good-faith dealings with the city. As they wrote in the lawsuit, “In the years leading up to the Rams’ relocation request, Rams officials decided to move the team and confidentially determined that they would be interested in exploiting any opportunity to do so.”

Current Issue

View our current issue

Subscribe today and Save up to $129.

And as the local St. Louis press reminds us, that is only one of four lawsuits filed against Kroenke and the NFL. At the start of the 2018 season, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch outlined the other three legal cases:

• One lawsuit involves future ownership of the Rams’ former practice facility in Earth City, known for years as Rams Park.

• A second involves fans who bought tickets and team merchandise in the final years of the Rams’ time in St. Louis.

• A third is a class-action suit on behalf of thousands of PSL (personal seat license) holders from the team’s 21-season stay in St. Louis.

Now they are located in LA, and in 2020, will be opening the doors on a dream project as big as Los Angeles: a $4.3 billion stadium/mega-complex intended to be a kind of Shangri-La for the NFL fan. The deal was originally set to involve no public money whatsoever. Yet as the Los Angeles Times reported, the truth is “not that simple.” When it comes to stadium deals, it rarely is. In looking at the fine print of the deal, it was determined that tax breaks could reach $100 million.

This $100 million giveback is happening at the same time as teachers in Los Angeles have gone on strike to win the very basics for funding public education.

“We’ve been fighting for more support staff—more counselors, more social workers—and 100 million dollars for us would mean an additional support staff person for every school in the city,” said Gillian Russom, high-school teacher and member of the UTLA board of directors. “Corporate-tax breaks are the reason why so many schools are underfunded here, so it’s also a slap in the face to have such a big tax exemption right now when we are trying to reduce the number of corporate givebacks in order to help our schools.”

Thank you for reading The Nation!

We hope you enjoyed the story you just read, just one of the many incisive, deeply-reported articles we publish daily. Now more than ever, we need fearless journalism that shifts the needle on important issues, uncovers malfeasance and corruption, and uplifts voices and perspectives that often go unheard in mainstream media.

Throughout this critical election year and a time of media austerity and renewed campus activism and rising labor organizing, independent journalism that gets to the heart of the matter is more critical than ever before. Donate right now and help us hold the powerful accountable, shine a light on issues that would otherwise be swept under the rug, and build a more just and equitable future.

For nearly 160 years, The Nation has stood for truth, justice, and moral clarity. As a reader-supported publication, we are not beholden to the whims of advertisers or a corporate owner. But it does take financial resources to report on stories that may take weeks or months to properly investigate, thoroughly edit and fact-check articles, and get our stories into the hands of readers.

Donate today and stand with us for a better future. Thank you for being a supporter of independent journalism.

Thank you for your generosity.

Kroenke is so loathsome that it raises a difficult question about whom to root for in this year’s big game. It’s like the Dick Cheney–John Edwards vice-presidential debates of 2004: one crusty foe up against an opponent new and shiny, yet both repellent beneath the surface. This might be the year to root for some entertaining commercials, or, heaven forfend, doing something else. I’ll end up watching the game, because if nothing else, whoever loses, the schadenfreude will be delicious.

Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Ann Walton Kroenke was the daughter of Sam Walton. She is the daughter of Bud Walton, the brother of Walmart founder Sam Walton. It also stated that the Rams were founded in Los Angeles and that Kroenke was from St. Louis. The Rams were founded in Cleveland and Kroenke was born in Columbia. Missouri. The errors have been corrected.

Dave ZirinTwitterDave Zirin is the sports editor at The Nation. He is the author of 11 books on the politics of sports. He is also the coproducer and writer of the new documentary Behind the Shield: The Power and Politics of the NFL.


Latest from the nation