Stan Kroenke has won a legal fight that will see him able to purchase land currently owned by the public and valued at over $12m for just $1 in 2024.
According to STL Today, “The deal that allowed the Rams to leave St. Louis has now given the team a parting gift — its 27-acre practice facility in Earth City, worth at least $12.7 million.
“An arbitration panel ruled on Wednesday that an option in the Rams training camp lease allows the departed National Football League team to buy the buildings, fields and grounds from the public in 2024 for just $1.
“That property, which also housed team offices, was once appraised by St. Louis County for nearly $19 million. But building values dropped, and it was appraised in 2019 for $12.7 million.”
“I’m disappointed,” said St. Louis Regional Convention and Sports Complex Authority board chairman Jim Shrewsbury. “It’s a significant asset, and it’s worth a significant amount of value.”
This is, sadly, part of Kroenke’s modus operandi – taking from the public to enrich his own pockets.
It’s not just Kroenke who has form in this area, Manchester United’s owners, the Glazers, wrote the playbook on how to extract public money for private profit. There are five American owners in the Premier League now.
“I detest how Stan Kroenke is affecting my life,” says an Amsterdam Tavern regular, identified only as ‘Mike’ in James’s Montague’s excellent ‘The Billionaire’s Club’. “Not only with Arsenal but with the Rams in so many ways.
“I hate the lack of control we have over things in the face of this billionaire. There’s loads of Tottenham fans now. Sure, there were a lot of Americans who played for Spurs. That’s is one reason. But the other if you are a St Louisan…well, you’re not going to pick the one with Kroenke. You’ll pick his mortal enemy.”
Louisan Mike has supported Arsenal for 20 years and was speaking in 2015, three years before Stan Kroenke took full control of Arsenal. But he warned this was coming.
“It is something a lot of Britons are not familiar with. When the Glazers took over [Manchester United], there was a lot of shock that private stock owners were getting enriched. And that is just America. That is going to be the new future for English football; a lot of private enrichment.
“At least the slave-owning emirates and the mob-tied Russian billionaires spend money on their club to get results,” he joked. “The man ripping apart the fabric of America with Wal-Mart is doing nothing for the team.”
That’s just one of the many reasons why when it was ‘announced recently’ that Stan Kroenke would be investing his own money in Arsenal this summer it was so easy to dismiss.