NFL Owner Stan Kroenke Wants to Take Over L.A.

He takes what he wants. Now he wants L.A.

- Ira Boudway

At the NFL owners’ meetings at the Waldorf Astoria New York in October, reporters are kept in a hallway behind velvet ropes. They wait all day for anything they can get.

“You guys are in the pen? What’s going on over here?” NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell says as he walks by in the morning.

“You make the rules,” says one reporter. “I didn’t make those rules,” Goodell says over his shoulder. Now and again, an owner, this time Jerry Jones of the Dallas Cowboys, leaves the ballroom where the meeting is and walks down the hall to the men’s room at the other end. “Mr. Jones? Jerry?” the reporters plead. “Do you have a minute?”

Jones stops, and a scrum forms. Nobody has to say what everybody wants to know: What’s the latest on Los Angeles? “We have the opportunity to do something special,” Jones says, before ambling away. The reporters huddle to parse his words. He must mean the Stan Kroenke plan.

The National Football League wants to put at least one franchise in Los Angeles by the start of next season. Kroenke, the owner of the St. Louis Rams and arguably the most powerful owner in sports, wants it to be his. He’s ready to build a $1.9 billion stadium southwest of downtown. He has big backers. Jones, who built an 80,000-seat cathedral to excess known as “Jerry’s World” for his Cowboys in 2009, admires the grandeur of Kroenke’s plan and has sided with him against owners from the San Diego Chargers and Oakland Raiders, who want to build and share a stadium in the L.A. suburb of Carson, bringing two franchises to the city at once. Jones’s tossed-off comment about “something special” is the tiniest scrap, but when you’re covering Kroenke, that feels like a meal. He seldom gives interviews.