Arsenal owner and property mogul Stan Kroenke has seen his net worth soar in the last four years as the Gunners chase their first Premier League title since 2004
A brilliant season so far for Arsenal owner Stan Kroenke has got even better with news his wealth has ballooned by £11billion. The Gunners are hot favourites to win the Premier League title after a storming start.
Mikel Arteta’s side have built a six-point lead over Manchester City. Eight wins in 10 games have vindicated the club’s £250million summer spending spree, which saw players like Viktor Gyokeres, Noni Madueke and Eberechi Eze arrive at the Emirates.
It seems that outlay has barely put a net in Kroenke’s fortune, which now stands at a whopping £17.7bn, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index and Forbes. That’s a staggering increase of more than £11bn from just four years ago, when his net worth stood at around £6.4bn.
Much of Kroenke’s wealth can be attributed to his property portfolio, which comprises an estimated 60million square feet of commercial real estate. He is also a major landowner with more than 1.6million acres of ranches across the United States and Canada.
In sport, as well as being Arsenal’s majority shareholder since 2011, he owns the NBA’s Denver Nuggets, ice hockey franchise the Colorado Avalanche, and MLS side the Colorado Rapids. Kroenke also owns the Los Angeles Rams, relocating the franchise back to California from St Louis in 2016.
Amid the team’s shortage of silverware since the second half of Arsene Wenger’s reign, Kroenke has previously come under fire from Gunners fans for the side’s lack of success.
That criticism has subsided in recent times, as Arteta has transformed Arsenal into genuine title contenders again with three successive second-place finishes in the Premier League. Given the Gunners’ strength in depth now, this season feels like the club’s best opportunity to clinch the league title for the first time since the Invincibles season of 2003/04.
A rigid defence and set-piece success have been the backbone of Arsenal’s form so far this term. Earlier this week, the Gunners took their winning streak in all competitions into double figures with a 3-0 victory over Slavia Prague.
That fixture also equalled a club record for consecutive clean sheets and saw a Champions League record broken when Max Dowman came off the bench aged 15 years and 308 days to become the competition’s youngest-ever debutant.
Arsenal also equalled the 1969/70 Leeds team, who until Tuesday night had been the only English side in European Cup or Champions League history to win their first four games without conceding a goal. Despite a number of injury concerns in forward areas, the Gunners machine keeps moving forward.
Arteta hailed the mentality of his players to always want more. The team’s eighth clean sheet in a row equalled a club record dating back to 1903, and Arteta said: “That’s a long time ago, so it tells you about the difficulty of achieving it.
"There’s a lot of work there to achieve that. The most pleasing thing is probably not the record, it’s the mindset of the players. They are talking about how we can still do better.”