Kroenke Sports Enterprises always said they wanted to deliver the Premier League trophy. For years, many Arsenal supporters struggled to take them seriously; nobody took them literally. And yet on Sunday, Stan Kroenke and his son Josh carried the long-coveted silverware across Selhurst Park to where coach Mikel Arteta, his staff and around 3,000 fans waited to celebrate.

Those final steps were the shortest, but perhaps the sweetest for a family whose ownership was so detested at one stage that frequent protests were held outside Emirates Stadium. And worse.

“When they were hanging us from lampposts?” said Josh Kroenke, in reference to the fallout from Arsenal’s involvement in the failed 2021 European Super League project, stirring up long-standing ill feeling toward the club’s American owners after years of disappointing results.

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The journey from those effigies and jeers to the cheers that greeted their names at Crystal Palace on Sunday is a transformation few owners ever experience. KSE first bought a minority stake in 2007 but only assumed full control in 2018. Eight years later, Arsenal are Premier League champions for the first time in 22 years.

“To make that walk across the field and across the pitch with my father was something I’ll never forget,” said Kroenke, speaking to a small group of reporters at the Sobha Realty Training Centre in the days leading up to Saturday’s UEFA Champions League final.

“It was a moment that I wanted to ask if we could have together. And if it wasn’t both of us, I wanted it to be him [Stan] carrying it out because of everything that we’ve been through over here.

“And, you know, there’s moments in life that can’t be re-created, and that was definitely one of them for me, for sure.”

The success was probably still sinking in. Josh has been an increasingly prominent presence around Arsenal in recent years as co-chair, but the demands on his time are great as KSE owns six professional teams: NFL side Los Angeles Rams, the Denver Nuggets of the NBA, NHL’s Colorado Avalanche, the Colorado Rapids in Major League Soccer and National Lacrosse League team Colorado Mammoth. According to Forbes, KSE is the most valuable sports empire in the world at a combined worth of $21.17 billion.

Josh had been at Emirates Stadium for Arsenal’s penultimate game of the season, a tense 1-0 win at home to Burnley that left Manchester City needing to defeat AFC Bournemouth to keep the title race going. As players and staff assembled at Arsenal’s training ground to watch the game, Kroenke was already flying back home.

“I left after Burnley early Tuesday morning to get back to the States and was planning to come back for Palace,” he says. “So I was always kind of telling the group when I left, ‘Hey, don’t worry about tomorrow. Let’s focus on Sunday. We need to win no matter what.’ And then all of a sudden, as I was landing back in the States, Bournemouth scored. And so you could not not pay attention at that point. And so I started following it on my way home.”

Erling Haaland equalized for City in stoppage time, but the draw was not enough to keep the title race going and Arsenal were crowned champions, sparking euphoric celebrations among Gunners players and staff as thousands of fans gathered outside Emirates Stadium. Several players were pictured still out at 5 a.m. the next morning.

“My first phone call was to my dad. My second was to Mikel,” Kroenke said. “And then I was trying to get a hold of as many people as I could, and who were all celebrating in the moment. So, of course, no one’s going to answer the phone.

“But there was one person who finally answered … Kate [Laurens, Arsenal’s chief communications officer] had me on a video call, getting passed around the room. I just sat there and was in an emotional state as the phone was going around and I was seeing everyone’s faces that were emotional.

“[The conversation with my dad was] jubilation. He and I have both been through it in different ways. I was here present for Burnley, he was covering our American football meetings back in the States at the time.

“As it started to take shape, there were other Premier League owners in the room with him. They started coming over to congratulate him. It was a very interesting moment, different dynamics than in the United States, but we all felt it and were proud in our own way.”

And KSE really have “been through it.” Accused of a lack of investment — and even a lack of interest — by the most disgruntled supporters, there was a time when Arsenal appeared to be endless drifting.

Once fighting with Manchester United at the summit of the English game, by 2018 Arsène Wenger’s reign had petered out. His successor Unai Emery was unable to reverse the decline, missing out on Champions League qualification after losing 4-1 to Chelsea in the 2019 UEFA Europa League final. That compelled 16 fan groups and prominent supporters to write a joint letter to the club’s owners in July 2019, asking: “We Care, Do You?”

“That was a big moment for me because that was very calculated from a supporter standpoint,” says Kroenke. “And when I saw it, I understood. But I had already had so much time and energy and emotions invested behind the scenes at that point.

“It was just coming out of a moment where, you know, as the club was structured a certain way from a publicly traded model where we were majority shareholders to completely private.

“That was the big moment for us where we feel we really took ownership of the club. But being an investor and being the majority shareholder in a place where there were competing agendas at different points in time was difficult to kind of unravel. And so hopefully here we are eight years later that people know that that we’re really invested emotionally, financially, timewise.”

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The journey back was not straightforward. Sporting director Edu and new head coach Mikel Arteta created a five-phase plan to bring the club back, signed off by the owners.

“One of my promises to Mikel was I would be here as much as I could,” Kroenke said. “And I had been over three or four times in December of that year around the hiring process, and then I came back over at the end of February to start putting different plans in place now that we kind of had a little bit of runway.

“And then I think that the craziest thing to ever happen and could happen was COVID. And so that was an interesting moment in time where Mikel was just coming on board and I couldn’t fulfil my promise.

“Not only that, but I think the club had to come together in a way where you had to have some very tough conversations because all of a sudden you’re dealing … The question I kept asking was: ‘How do you prepare yourself for when the world stops?’

“During that transition phase, when I was there in February, and I started to talk to, actually, our previous chairman who was a big mentor of mine, Sir Chips Keswick. We would go to lunch all the time, and we talk through things about the club and, having just taken it private, we were starting to talk more and more about the future.

“I told Chips at lunch one day, I said: ‘Chips, you know, in the States, we’ve had to take a step back to go forward at times, so I think at some point we may have to do that.’ And he kind of smiled and agreed and just looked at me and he goes: ‘Bloody hell, don’t get relegated.’ And I said: ‘I will do my best, to try to thread that needle.'”

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That step back was to ruthlessly cull the squad, paying off nine players to leave the club amid concerns about an erosion in standards and a compromised dressing room culture.

“Mikel has different metaphors where he tries to say it whether you are in the boat or out of the boat,” says Kroenke. “Sometimes we had people that not only weren’t in the boat but they were underneath the water with a rope trying to pull us down. We had to figure out who those people were and we have to snip that rope along the way.”

At the same time, Arsenal needed to identify young talent that could form the nucleus of Arsenal’s new squad.

“I had a great conversation with Per Mertesacker [the academy boss, who leaves his post this summer],” Kroenke said. “After the [Europa League] final in Baku, I made a comment about Virgil van Dijk, who had arrived at Liverpool a year or two before.

“I said: ‘How do we get one of these guys into our system? [Mertesacker replied]: ‘Well unless you’ve got 100 million quid, you better not be thinking about him.’ I said: ‘Well who’s the best young defender in Europe? He turned without hesitation and said ‘William Saliba.'”

Arsenal signed Saliba from Saint-Etienne for £27 million, but he spent the next three years on loan, with sources telling ESPN that many inside the club questioned whether the center back would become a top-level defender. He joined up with Arteta’s squad for the 2022-23 season and has since established himself as one of Europe’s best in the position.

“Mikel and I have now laughed about this because I didn’t tell him the story until much later, but when we acquired William and he went on loan for two seasons, and then we were transitioning to Mikel by the time William rejoined us, there some thoughts on the front end about William rejoining our squad that were very well covered,” Kroenke said. “I’ll let you guys fill in all those blanks. I was sitting over in America laughing, going: ‘Please let this kid work out!'”

And then there was the spending. After taking the club private in 2018, KSE — once heavily criticized for a perceived lack of financial aggression — began investing large sums over several transfer windows. Their total spend with Arteta as manager is around £1 billion, the flagship signing being Declan Rice’s £105 million acquisition from West Ham United in 2023.

“I don’t think that type of deal would have been possible prior to 2018. As that player took shape, I remember Edu, Mikel, [former vice-chair] Tim [Lewis], [chief executive] Rich [Garlick] all sitting here in the conference room and walking me through it for the first time. My eyebrows raised because I didn’t know if we were in that phase just yet to go after a player like that.

“So I asked Mikel a couple pointed questions about how we might use him, which I never really ever do. My main question was: if we are going to be spending this tell me how we’re going to use him. Because this should be what I refer to as ‘plug and play.’ He should fit right into the starting XI and hit the ground running. But if we are also going to be paying this much, what’s the person we are getting? Because this better be a leader as well.

“I think just like Mikel, when you sit down and talk to Declan, you understand the person he is, how focused of an individual he is and so you get more comfortable with the price tag. That doesn’t mean it still fits into our financial model but that was a big moment for all of us.”

Andrea Berta was brought on board as sporting director last summer following Edu’s departure to add expertise to that spending after 12 years at Atlético Madrid.

“When he first joined, I was here and I actually had a dinner with some people,” Kroenke said. “It’s not often I really ever do anything like this, but Andrea was there and I had brought them for a separate reason just to show them to some friends.

“I went into Andrea and I laid out our championship rings. I said: ‘This is what we’re here for. So as we start to shape our thinking, know this is what we’re going for.’ He was looking at them pretty close!”

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And now Arsenal have a Premier League winners’ medal to add to that collection. The run-in was a fraught affair with Kroenke admitting February’s 2-2 draw at Wolverhampton Wanderers — when blowing a 2-0 lead — was “tough,” adding: “I watched that game by myself at home.”

Kroenke said of the moment when 16-year-old Max Dowman scored a last-gasp goal to cement victory against Everton a month later: “I was watching that and we had just adopted a puppy. So when Max went on his run, I scared the hell out of the puppy by jumping up. That dog peed on the floor right there next to me with what I was saying and yelling at the television!”

It is perhaps KSE’s extensive sporting knowledge, or the nervousness of that run-in, that held Kroenke back a little from the idea Arsenal could now embark on an era of dominance with Pep Guardiola leaving Manchester City, Arne Slot under pressure at Liverpool and Xabi Alonso not even off and running with Chelsea.

“I had a good conversation with Bukayo [Saka] the other night where I told him obviously how proud we are of everything,” Kroenke said. “I forget the exact question he asked me, but I responded: ‘Bukayo, you guys have been ready to win for a few years. The thing that no one really wants to acknowledge is at the highest level, you have to have a teeny bit of luck. You got the get the right whistle here, you’ve got to get healthy players which we hadn’t had.'”

Tying down Arteta, 44, to a new deal will be important. He has 12 months remaining on his contract.

“If there is a singular person you can trace this all back to, I’m going to give 100% credit to Mikel, his staff and the players,” Kroenke said. “Those are the ones. As much as Mikel is putting together our tactics, the players have got to go play the games, they’ve got to go and win for you. Keeping Mikel around is [an] utmost priority and I think the good news for Arsenal fans worldwide is he’s enjoying the project, he’s enjoying being here and from his time as a player all the way up until now, he’s an Arsenal man through and through.”

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Improving Emirates Stadium might come next, 20 years after the club’s move away from Highbury. What that could look like it “still to be determined” but, said Kroenke: “They’re putting together a plan right now to renovate the Emirates. We do this stuff in the States in our facilities and our teams. We take great pride in it so I think we have a chance to come over and really give the Arsenal supporters an elevated matchday experience from where they are right now.”

But for now, Arsenal can focus on Saturday’s Champions League final against Paris Saint-Germain and a chance to become European champions for the first time in their history. Whatever the result, hundreds of thousands will line the streets for a parade in North London on Sunday. Kroenke appeared almost unable to take in the transformation as the club has returned to the top of the English game.

“I knew we were a sleeping giant that we needed to awaken in some way,” he said. “We haven’t had a team, a squad like this in the social media age. Social media evolved and the Twittersphere and everything else around it. The instantaneous information, the ‘Banter Era’ — I’m aware of all this.

“I turned 46 last week. I’ve grown up around this and I’ve seen it all from my own perspective. I think that’s what I’m so proud to see. There was almost a time when you were a closeted Arsenal fan. You were still a fan, but everyone was so on top of you at times, you were afraid to show your spirit.

“But the outpouring of emotion and seeing that just driving over here. The guy in the bike cab wearing the Arsenal shirt. Everyone is flooding London with all of their Arsenal gear right now, and it just makes me so proud to see.”