If Stan Kroenke feels unloved by Arsenal fans, such disdain pales into insignificance compared with the feeling on the streets of St Louis.

Late into the New Orleans night on Sunday, LA Rams owner Kroenke pronounced, “We’re going to the Super Bowl”, after a thrilling overtime win against the Saints. But the Rams’ passage to a showdown with their most despised adversary in the New England Patriots has been far from universally popular.

Until the end of the 2015 season, the Rams were the St Louis Rams, owned by one of their own outright since 2010. As Kroenke put it when he bought the remaining 60 per cent in the franchise: “I’m born and raised in Missouri. I’ve been a Missourian for 60 years. People in our state know me. People know that I can be trusted. People know I am an honourable guy.”

Kroenke’s actions suggest otherwise. As the St Louis-born TV presenter Andy Cohen put it after the game, there was no reason to celebrate the result, “because the Rams were ripped from my hometown by their crook owner” before raising his middle finger in a closing message to Kroenke.

The disdain for Arsenal’s owner is not simply down to the fact that he shifted the franchise to California. After all, that had been the Rams’ previous home in a country where the relocation of sports teams is not uncommon.

But Jim Thomas, who covered the Rams for the St Louis Post-Dispatch, explained: “It was a messy divorce. It was bad enough that Stan Kroenke misled the team’s fans as to their intentions, but he trashed the city on the way out of town, likening St Louis to a dying city that couldn’t support three professional teams (the Cardinals baseball team and ice hockey franchise the Blues are based in the city).

“This is the same Kroenke who said he took great pride in bringing NFL back to St Louis and said he would do everything in his power to keep the team there. Lies.”

On the day Kroenke’s fellow NFL owners agreed the shift, some fans publicly burned their jerseys, others piled them up on the fencing outside the team’s practice facility. Today, it is virtually unheard of to see a Rams jersey in the city and there is a local expression called “hate watch”, in which people only watch Rams games to see them lose.

Before Kroenke’s exit, St Louisans’ public enemy No1 were the Patriots, who they felt cheated them out of Super Bowl XXXVI in 2002 by illegally taping the Rams’ practice the day before — denied by the Patriots — thereby knowing their plays in advance of the annual showpiece.

Now, explained Thomas, “the prevailing opinion seems here to be that most fans will root for the evil Patriots to beat the Rams... that’s how much they dislike what Kroenke did to St Louis”.

The sentiment appeared to be echoed by a litany of Arsenal fans on social media yesterday. But unlike at Arsenal in this January transfer window, Kroenke has spent big since the LA move. A new stadium is being built at an estimated cost of $3billion (£2.3bn), while Aaron Donald became the richest defensive player in the league on a $135million (£105m) contract.

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That is in contrast to the Rams’ time in St Louis when, as one fan Chelsea Osterby put it, he was “just running the team into the ground”. “I was left absolutely heartbroken,” said the 33-year-old, who has no plans to watch the Super Bowl and says her disdain for the two sides is such that she half hopes the game gets cancelled.

Three years on from the Rams’ departure, she said of the final years in St Louis: “Kroenke was putting a losing product on the field, made out that St Louis was a horrible place to be. No one thinks favourably of Stan... all he cares about is money. What I’d say to Arsenal fans is just wait. He’ll do the same to you if he can find a way to make more money. He doesn’t care about the fans at all, he doesn’t care about legacy, he just cares about money and nothing else.”

St Louis may yet have the final say in the money stakes to a certain degree. Already, Kroenke has had to settle for $24m (£18.6m) and pay $7m (£5.4m) in legal fees in a case from owners of personal seat licences at the old stadium, whose supposed 30-year leases lasted just 21 years.

There are three other lawsuits still ongoing, the biggest — potentially amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars — filed by the city itself, claiming that it was misled about the relocation process as they spent millions developing plans for a new stadium project aimed at keeping the Rams in the city.

In St Louis, the hope is Kroenke loses both that case and next month’s Super Bowl.