How Mikel Arteta and Sean McVay’s bond helped Arsenal and Rams become title contenders

Demov said the competitive nature of Arteta and McVay “is what drives them”. She now leads the rest of the organization too, with the working relationship between KSE’s top coaches embodying the way the group wants all its staff to work.

Besides the annual KSE Team Summit, the connections between the sports are more organic than directive. But when those opportunities arise, like the Rams’ recent game in London, their employees are encouraged to share ideas and insights, to “think about the bigger picture and connect the dots.”

Before the Rams’ first game in London in 2012, they trained at Arsenal’s training base and saw their players wearing tracking devices. The Rams introduced it in 2013, allowing them to monitor a player’s workload, and since then the team has suffered the fewest injuries in the NFL.

Once when Arsenal trained at the Rams facility, Arteta noticed the number of cameras filming the players and said “this is the thing we have to do.”

Some of Demov’s closest friends in the industry are at the San Francisco 49ers, who now also own Leeds United and Rangers, but “we’re all competitors. There are a lot of people who want to get involved, whereas here, there are no limits. Everyone realizes that being an open book makes us all better.”

In recent years, Stan and Josh Kroenke’s vision has been to bring KSE teams and entities closer together, both mathematically and commercially.

As the Rams play international matches this season and next, they have worked with Arsenal to see how they can grow their fan base and brand globally.

In January, Boursa Kuwait established Kroenke Signature Properties (KSP), a division dedicated to sharing resources and facilitating the connection of partners if they wish to branch out from the UK market to the US, or vice versa.

“It’s more interconnected, it’s the ability to spread that scale,” Garlick said. “We can leverage those different areas that we have around the world.”

“The goal is to increase revenues, to be useful in the US and to direct revenues to Arsenal, where this is clearly valuable from a PSR (Profit and Sustainability Rules) perspective,” Demov added.

“But also to tell the story of ‘there is power when your brand is visible at Emirates Stadium or SoFi Stadium’, especially in light of the global events coming to Los Angeles via the World Cup (2026), the Super Bowl (2027) and the Olympic Games (2028).”