By Jose E. Navarro, MBA | Orange County | September 18, 2026
ANAHEIM — A California State Auditor report released last year found that the city of Anaheim does not know the physical condition of Angel Stadium, the ballpark it has owned since 1966. No formal inspection had been done since a 1996-98 renovation until 2023, even though the lease gave the city the right to review capital spending starting that same year. The auditor’s conclusion: the aging stadium could need hundreds of millions of dollars in repairs, and nobody at City Hall can currently say how much. That is the asset now changing hands as Rams owner Stan Kroenke, worth an estimated $24.3 billion, finalizes a roughly $4 billion purchase of the Angels from longtime owner Arte Moreno, a deal expected to close in early 2027.
The uncertainty is not just physical, it is financial. Under the current lease, Angels ownership pays into a capital reserve fund for stadium upkeep, and if it spends more than the fund holds, it can credit the overage against future obligations. As of January 2025, ownership’s own accounting showed it had spent $35.6 million more than the fund contained, and the auditor found Anaheim had simply stopped reviewing those expenditures in real time, leaving the city and the outgoing owner on a potential collision course over who owes what. None of that has been resolved. It will now be inherited, unresolved, by whichever entity ends up holding the stadium keys after the sale closes.
Kroenke arrives with leverage Anaheim does not have. He financed and built SoFi Stadium in Inglewood for roughly $5.5 billion of his own and partners’ capital, and reports (later partially walked back by his own spokesperson) suggested plans for a $2.5 billion new Angels ballpark are already being discussed. Anaheim, for its part, has already moved to sweeten the pot before any deal is signed: the California Legislature passed, and Governor Newsom signed, the “Home Run for Anaheim Act,” which waives the state’s affordable-housing priority requirement for any Angel Stadium redevelopment on one condition — that the team drop the “Los Angeles” from its name and revert to the Anaheim Angels. That is a real concession, granted in advance, in exchange for a name.
Long Beach has been here before, and the city’s interest is not hypothetical nostalgia. When Gene Autry was shopping for a home for the expansion Angels in the early 1960s, Long Beach offered him a site on one condition: the team would be called the Long Beach Angels. Autry said no and took Anaheim’s offer instead, with no such naming demand attached. The city came back in 2018, when the Angels briefly opted out of their Anaheim lease: officials pointed to a 13-acre waterfront parcel next to the Long Beach Arena, with then-Mayor Robert Garcia calling the downtown waterfront “the perfect location for a major league sports stadium” and preliminary estimates pricing a new ballpark there at $900 million to $1 billion. Nothing came of it because the Angels stayed. But the underlying offer — a developable waterfront site in a county with no MLB team of its own — does not expire, and a new owner who has never signed Anaheim’s lease is exactly the kind of buyer for whom that kind of leverage matters most in negotiations.
None of this means the Angels are leaving. Kroenke has said he wants to keep the team in Anaheim, and the lease runs through 2032 with extension options into the late 2030s. But the sequence matters for taxpayers: the city does not yet know what its own stadium is worth or what it will cost to fix, it has already given away a zoning concession tied to nothing more binding than a team name, and it is negotiating the actual stadium deal with a buyer who has both the capital to walk and a rival city that has spent sixty years periodically reminding him he could. Anaheim residents are being asked to trust that the numbers will work out in their favor before anyone in City Hall can say what the numbers even are.
Human-Directed AI Journalism — reporting and analysis produced under human editorial direction with AI research and drafting assistance.