Major pro sports teams have turned dozens of franchise owners into billionaires many times over in the last quarter-century, but nobody has made as much money from sports ownership as Stan Kroenke.

The reclusive billionaire—who announced on Tuesday that he is buying a majority stake in the Los Angeles Angels from Arte Moreno, at a valuation of roughly $4 billion, according to a person with knowledge of the deal—made his fortune in real estate and stands as America’s largest private landowner, with some 2.7 million acres of ranches. But it is his sports team investments from the last three decades that now make up the majority of his estimated $27.6 billion net worth. Even before the Angels deal is complete, Kroenke’s stakes in the NFL’s Los Angeles Rams, the NBA’s Denver Nuggets, the NHL’s Colorado Avalanche, MLS’s Colorado Rapids, the Premier League’s Arsenal FC and the Women’s Super League’s Arsenal WFC are worth around $22 billion net of debt, according to Forbes estimates.

Better yet, the 79-year-old Kroenke acquired those half-dozen teams for around $2.4 billion (or about $3.8 billion adjusted for inflation). By comparison, the Rams, who have posted an 18.9% compound annual growth rate since 2010 to outpace the NFL average by five percentage points and easily beat the S&P 500 index’s 12.7% annualized return over the same period, were worth $10.5 billion on their own last year, according to Forbes estimates, making them the third-most-valuable sports team in the world.

The man who has earned the nickname “Silent Stan” may not ever crow about it, but when his MLB purchase closes, Kroenke will also be unmatched among sports owners in terms of breadth, becoming the first person ever to control teams in each of North America’s five major men’s professional leagues.

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Kroenke’s portfolio has benefited from the run-up in team prices across the U.S. sports landscape—MLB valuations have more than doubled on average over the past decade, and each of the other four major North American leagues have seen their average valuations rise at least threefold, driven by surging media rights fees, the modernization of........

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