NFL to OK Stan Kroenke $571M payment to St. Louis - sources

NFL team owners are expected to approve a resolution Tuesday that will have Rams owner Stan Kroenke paying the remaining $571 million owed to St. Louis over the team's relocation to Los Angeles, multiple owner and league executive sources told ESPN.

NFL teams already have contributed a total of $219 million toward the $790 million settlement reached with the city last year. Under the resolution expected to be approved at Tuesday's quarterly league meeting in New York, Kroenke would be responsible for the remainder.

Owners also would waive the league's limit on allowable debt in order for Kroenke to do so, the sources said.

The settlement announced last year ended a 4½-year-old lawsuit filed in the wake of the Rams' departure from St. Louis. Kroenke and the NFL had failed in bids to have the lawsuit dismissed or at least moved out of St. Louis, and courts were sympathetic to the St. Louis side's effort to disclose financial information of team owners — rulings that hastened the push for a settlement.

The lawsuit sought more than $1 billion. It claimed the team's move cost the St. Louis region millions of dollars in amusement, ticket and earnings tax revenue.

Then-owner Georgia Frontiere moved the Rams from Los Angeles in 1995 to her hometown of St. Louis, where they stayed for 21 seasons before Kroenke moved them back.

Kroenke, a Missouri real estate developer who is married to an heir of the Walmart fortune, became a minority owner when the team first came to St. Louis. Frontiere died in 2008 and left the team to her children, who sold the Rams to Kroenke in 2010.

Not long after the sale, the Rams began pushing for hundreds of millions of dollars in improvements to the downtown domed stadium, which was built with