Stan Kroenke is not a figure who is well-liked among Arsenal supporters - but the tide may be beginning to change.
The Missouri-born billionaire owns Kroenke Sports & Entertainment, which is the holding company of the Premier League side, the NFL's Los Angeles Rams, the NBA's Denver Nuggets and others as part of a sports empire.
Kroenke's company first bought a 9.9% stake in Arsenal in April 2007 and gradually started buying more, becoming the majority shareholder in 2011, until a full takeover was completed in August 2018.
The Kroenkes have often been viewed as distant and disengaged, unwilling to spend their own money, but the perception is begging to change thanks to some massive transfer kitties and the increased involvement of Stan's son, Josh Kroenke.
Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta praised the Kroenke's for their vision during the summer, saying he had never seen ownership at that level that was so "committed, close and engaged".
So how did Stan get acquire enough money to buy the club? And how much is he putting into it now?
Kroenke started out sweeping the floor at his father's lumber yard, but by the age of 10 was keeping the company's books.
He became very wealth when he Walmart heiress Ann Walton, whose father was a co-founder of the retail giant, with the two inheriting a stake in that company worth £4billion in 1995.
Stan starting to make money through real estate development and now owns 60 million square feet of real estate - much of it shopping plazas near Walmart stores.
The 75-year-old founded Kroenke Sports & Entertainment in 1999 and became owner of the NBA's Denver Nuggets and NHL's Colorado Avalanche in 2000.
His sports empire grew in 2004 when he purchased the National Lacrosse League's Colorado Mammoth and Major League Soccer's Colorado Rapids.
He also acquired the St. Louis Rams NFL team - and moved them to California in 2016 where they became the Los Angeles Rams.
But it is not only in traditional sports that Kroenke has interests in, with the American also owning eSports teams the Los Angeles Gladiators and the Los Angeles Guerrilla.
According to Forbes, his net worth as of October 2022 is a staggering $12.9 billion, which has gone up from $10.7 billion at the start of the year.
In the Forbes 2022 list he was ranked as No.48 in the Fobres 400 list of richest Americans and 183rd in the Billionaries list.
When Kroenke first came to Arsenal there was much excitement, but the club drifted out of the Champions League spots and the furthest they've been in decades from winning a Premier League title.
In September 2013, the Gunner's owner claimed there would be more big cash made available after the "fantastic" £42million record signing of Mesut Ozil.
He insisted he was determined to help build a title-winning team and that he wanted to be at the Emirates for the long term.
"There would be nothing cooler, I’ve never experienced it over here, to win the championship of the Premier League. Some of my American cohorts have experienced that and we haven’t been able to," he told The Mirror.
"I'm not getting any younger. It’s something I would like to achieve. There would be nothing more thrilling than to win a championship."
Kroenke, who had a 66 per cent stake in the club at that time, dismissed any notion of selling and claimed he has never taken "a dime" out of any of his sporting clubs.
"What I always say is that you can look at all our teams, you can say positively or negatively about them, but one thing’s for sure: we never sold one," he said.
"We are here. We like being here. We have a lot of money invested in Arsenal. We put our head on the line so to speak. My only mistake was to not get involved sooner on a few levels."
However, many Arsenal fans felt he was preciding over a steady decline - and tensions were particularly apparent when the club made redundancies at the start of the pandemic and tried to be founding members of the European Super League.
There has been bitterness and backlash among Arsenal fans for some time, who were also angered by the Los Angeles Rams' Super Bowl win at the start of the year.
Seeing Kroenke proudly holding aloft the the Vince Lombardi trophy made Arsenal's lack of success under his reign even more apparent - and many do not buy into the claim that the Kroenke's only really started to have proper influence until 2018.
However, it is now hard to argue that the Kroenke's are not putting their all into trying to rebuild the club.
They abandoned the self-sustaining model and have been splashing out during the last few transfer windows - with their spending in the summer of 2021 the highest in the Premier League.
"If you look at how other teams have done it and where we were, there is a transition moment where that (curve) has to change at some stage," said Arteta this July during a media appearance at Universal Studios.
"Look where we are investing the money — we are not spending the money, we have made big investments — but investment for the future with huge talent and a lot of performance.
"Possibly in the future, we have to do something to have a squad that can sustainably be financed by itself. That’s the objective."
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