The longest active playoff drought in Major League Baseball now comes with a new owner attached. Arte Moreno’s 23-year run in charge of the Los Angeles Angels is over, and the man taking his place already owns an NFL team playing 30 miles up the freeway.

Kroenke Sports & Entertainment announced Tuesday that Rams owner Stan Kroenke has entered a definitive agreement to acquire a controlling interest in the Angels from the Moreno family. The deal is expected to close in the first quarter of 2027, pending closing conditions and approval from Major League Baseball.

“The Angels are a storied franchise anchored in a great market,” Kroenke said in KSE’s official statement, shared by Alden Gonzalez of ESPN on X.

Moreno, for his part, framed the sale as a handoff rather than a defeat.

“The Moreno Family has been honored to steward the Angels for 23 years,” Moreno said in the same release.

Although neither side disclosed financial terms in the official announcement, that hasn’t stopped the number from becoming the story. As per Jon Heyman of the New York Post, the sale would be around $4 billion, surpassing the $3.9 billion paid for the San Diego Padres earlier this year. Forbes valued the Angels at $2.8 billion as recently as March, and industry expectations were already pointing toward a price well above that mark given the appeal of owning a team in one of the sport’s largest markets.

Los Angeles Times columnist Bill Shaikin, who first reported the sale, was direct about where the number was headed.

“The Angels sold for a major league record price,” Shaikin wrote.

The timing isn’t a coincidence, either. 2026 has turned into one of the busiest years in recent memory for major North American sports ownership changes, with the Padres, the Lakers, the Portland Trail Blazers and the Seattle Seahawks all changing hands before the Angels joined the list.

The Longest Drought in Baseball

Whatever the final price ends up being, Kroenke is buying into a genuine on-field crisis.

The Angels haven’t made the playoffs since 2014 and haven’t won a postseason game or series since 2009, a drought that spans the entirety of Mike Trout’s Hall of Fame-caliber prime and every season Shohei Ohtani spent in Anaheim before leaving for the Dodgers, where he’s already won two World Series titles.

This year, the team has entered the sale at 53-85, on pace for an 11th consecutive losing season.

That gap between individual talent and team results became the defining feature of Moreno’s later years in charge. Trout and Ohtani sharing a roster for six seasons without a single playoff appearance is close to unprecedented for two players of that skill and ability.

The roster futility was compounded by instability at the top. The Angels have gone through seven managers since 2018 and six heads of baseball operations under Moreno, with John Mozeliak currently running the department on an interim basis. Add in a string of costly free-agent contracts in Josh Hamilton, Albert Pujols, Anthony Rendon, Justin Upton and Gary Matthews Jr., among them, and the picture is one of a big-market team that rarely spent its way into sustained contention.

Now one of Kroenke’s first real decisions as owner will be whether to keep Mozeliak in place permanently or search for an outside executive to run baseball operations. This is a call that will say a lot about how quickly he intends to reshape the franchise.

What Kroenke Inherits

Kroenke isn’t new to running winning organizations.

His Rams made the playoffs in 2025 and won the Super Bowl in February 2022. The Nuggets and Avalanche both reached the postseason in 2025-26, and MLS’s Colorado Rapids made it in 2024.

The Angels’ 2014 appearance is the oldest postseason trip of any franchise in his portfolio by a wide margin, and closing that gap is now his problem to solve.

Kroenke’s holding company already includes the Rams, the Nuggets, the Avalanche, the Rapids, the Colorado Mammoth of the National Lacrosse League and Arsenal of the Premier League.

Adding the Angels extends that footprint into one of the sport’s flagship West Coast markets and hands Kroenke a rebuilding project that money alone hasn’t solved for more than a decade.