How Angel City became âthe most valuable womenâs sports team in the worldâ with new owners
On Wednesday, Angel City FC became âthe most valuable womenâs sports team in the worldâ after the club entered into a definitive agreement for Willow Bay and Bob Iger to become the new controlling owners.
The teamâs board of directors unanimously approved the sale via a vote, but it still must be approved by the NWSL, the sportâs top womenâs league in the United States. The sale is expected to close in the next 30 to 60 days.
Bay, dean of the Los Angeles-based USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, and Iger, CEO of The Walt Disney Company, have acquired the controlling stake of the club at a total valuation of $250million (ÂŁ192m), and have committed to an additional $50m in investment. Bay will serve as the clubâs primary representative on the NWSL board of governors and also serve on and control Angel Cityâs board.
âWe are so excited to be here,â Bay told The Athletic before the announcement. âI keep thinking how historic this moment is â historic in sports and in womenâs sports. What weâre seeing now is breathtaking, and itâs only the beginning of the ascent, and thatâs for womenâs sports but particularly for this team.â
The dollar figures attached to the sale will make history.
According to Angel Cityâs official press release, the $250million enterprise valuation makes it âthe most valuable womenâs sports team in the worldâ. While thereâs no official list, a $250m valuation outstrips the most valuable team in womenâs basketballâs WNBA (the Las Vegas Aces at $140m, per Sportico, earlier this year) and the Womenâs Super League in England (Chelsea has explored the sale of a minority stake in its womenâs team with a total valuation around $200m).
Doug Emhoff, the second gentleman of the United States, recently visited Angel Cityâs practice facility to highlight the efforts of Kamala Harris, the U.S. vice president, to promote gender equality. He called the sale a âgreat statementâ for the league.
âThe fact that people like Bob Iger and Willow Bay are potentially investing in that team is a great statement about the health of the league and the prospects going forward, especially with the media,â Emhoff told The Athletic on Tuesday during the Olympics send-off game for the U.S. womenâs national team.
Originally founded by actor Natalie Portman and entrepreneurs Kara Nortman and Julie Uhrman, the expansion team was the unexpected result of connections between Portman, Nortman and the USWNT playersâ association via Timeâs Up. The three brought on businessman Alexis Ohanian as the clubâs largest shareholder and controlling owner before the teamâs launch in 2020. Despite that title, Ohanian did not actually control the Angel City board, writing on social media that it was âone of many hard lessons (he) learned as a first-time sports team ownerâ.
For all the reporters who keep reaching out: when I bought the franchise to launch @weareangelcity in 2019, I didnât setup board control for myself. (One of many hard lessons I learned as a first-time sports team owner). But as Iâve said from jump, Iâm not selling any shares inâŚ
â Alexis Ohanian đŚđ˛ (@alexisohanian) July 3, 2024
The club also added dozens of smaller investors, among them former USWNT players, including Abby Wambach, Mia Hamm, Julie Foudy and Lauren Holiday, as well as celebrities and other famous athletes, such as Billie Jean King, Jennifer Garner and Uzo Aduba.
Angel City has largely struggled on the field since starting play in 2022 â though they did make the 2023 NWSL playoffs before being knocked out in the first round â but the team has been a runaway success from a business perspective.
Wednesdayâs $250million valuation is a massive step up from last yearâs Sportico figures, which Angel City led at $180m, and the Los Angeles club laps the rest of the NWSL in revenue. It makes more than $30m a year, about double that of the next highest, fellow Californians San Diego Wave.
This year, Angel Cityâs four primary owners voted to hire New York investment bank Moelis & Company to find a new controlling owner, with that decision becoming public in March after reports of squabbling among the board. Four months later, the board collectively announced the clubâs sale to Bay and Iger, but individual founding owners were not made available to the media.
âWillow and Bob bring unparalleled operational experience, expertise and passion to Angel City and the NWSL,â the club statement begins.
âThey are the right partners to lead us into this new era â they are committed to strengthening Angel Cityâs position as a preeminent organization and brand in womenâs sports and to championing the teamâs broader mission, including the advancement of equity for athletes and women-founded businesses.
âWith their leadership, we will continue to harness the industryâs momentum and build on Angel Cityâs strong foundation of fan and community support.â
Portman, Uhrman, Ohanian and another early investor and board member, Gillian Berry, will continue their roles on the board once the sale is completed. But Bay will soon be at the head of the table, along with Iger, hoping to advance the existing Angel City mission. Bay believes that the work ahead must be done as part of a local community, even as Angel Cityâs reach extends globally.
âWeâre committed to doing whatever it requires â leveraging expertise, capital and our networks to continue building and elevating this franchise on and off the pitch,â Bay said on Tuesday
When Angel City unveiled itself as a new NWSL expansion team four years ago, no one could have predicted that it would be up for a $250million sale, even with all the excitement of Hollywood connections, USWNT star power, and the anticipation for the return of womenâs professional soccer to Los Angeles for the first time since 2010.
The team brought in forward Christen Press as their first signing, then pulled out all the stops for their home opener in May 2022, with a sold-out crowd of 22,000 watching them eke out a win over North Carolina Courage.
âWhat you see here (with Angel City) is a combination of so many people getting together and going, âNo. It can be different. It can be this, donât do thatâ. We can make this whatever we want,â Wambach said before that 2-1 victory.
Thatâs largely been the story of Angel Cityâs approach: leverage the knowledge and experiences of Wambach, Hamm and the rest across various former leagues â WUSA, WPS, even the early days of the NWSL â then combine it with the ambition of new investors who are bound by the historical fear of a league folding too soon. For the most part, it has worked â though not perfectly.
Chief among the criticisms of Angel City has been that the club has been more interested in building a brand than an actual soccer team. While most of the teamâs early language has been scrubbed from its website, the business-centric theme is still present in the page description for its online store: âAngel City is not just another football club. Weâre a brand on a mission to make a difference in this world. Weâre born of the streets of Los Angeles and stand side-by-side with our community.â
Since March, however, the team has been followed by reports of infighting on its board as it decided to find a new controlling owner.
The Los Angeles Times reported Ohanian was unhappy over the teamâs spending. This week, The Wall Street Journal went in-depth on power struggles within Angel Cityâs leadership, primarily between Ohanian and Uhrman. According to that report, internal documents show team officials complained about Uhrmanâs âfinancial and personnel managementâ, with Ohanian cited as having concerns over her spending, the hiring of her sister as a team executive, and her temperament.
The Wall Street Journal also reported there is disagreement over Uhrman continuing as the teamâs president. That decision would fall to Bay as the new controlling owner, with Uhrman herself mentioning that in the Journalâs story. However, Wednesdayâs confirmation that Uhrman (and Ohanian) will remain on the board following the saleâs closure shows she will still have some role with the team moving forward.
Still, there was always going to be incredible interest in the clubâs controlling stake thanks to the growth of Angel City, the NWSL and womenâs sports as a whole.
Angel City had the NWSLâs highest attendance in 2022, was barely off San Diego Waveâs pace the following year, and leads the league again in 2024. According to the club, they also top the league in season ticket membership and sponsorship revenue.
âWeâre going to be the first womenâs team to have a billion-dollar valuation in five years,â Uhrman told The Athletic last year. âThereâs no better investment today than womenâs sports.â
On the league front, when Angel City was still building its ownership group in 2019, team valuations had not yet exploded. In December of that year, OL Groupe bought out Seattle Reign for just $3.5million. Last month, when a group led by Seattle Sounders of MLS and investment firm Carlyle finalized its purchase of the Reign from OL Groupe, it was for $58m. Just before the Angel City news broke in March about the search for a new controlling owner, San Diego Wave sold for $120m.
Valuations canât be viewed in a vacuum, however, with media rights, facilities, attendance and other metrics weighing in. The NWSL has enjoyed good news on those fronts, too, whether itâs the purpose-built stadium in Kansas City, last yearâs media-rights deals, or increases in attendance and engagement figures in 2024.
Womenâs sports, in general, are having an extended moment.
Global financial company Deloitte had to revise its initial predictions on womenâs sports revenue, predicting that 2024 would be the year that it would surpass $1 billion. North America is expected to account for 52 percent of that revenue, with soccerâs revenue forecast figure ($555m) the highest among all sports.
It is not surprising that there were interested bidders, though a representative of Bayâs declined to comment on other bids or the bidding process itself. Marc Lasry, former owner of the NBAâs Milwaukee Bucks and CEO of Avenue Capital Group, as well as Avram Glazer, part owner of the Premier Leagueâs Manchester United and the NFLâs Tampa Bay Buccaneers, were linked as potential bidders, with sources confirming to The Athletic this month that Glazer had pursued Angel Cityâs controlling interest.
The Bay-Iger bid emerged as the favorite this month, with the deal already close to completion.
It is easy to assume that Angel City â a product of the connections formed between women â would want a woman as its controlling owner, they could do one step better: someone who had been a fan since day one.
âThe team has been on our radar since its inception,â Bay said, calling herself and Iger, her husband, members of the Angel City community â but she also knew two of the founding investors, Uhrman and Nortman, so she took particular interest in their new project. Bay and Iger have attended games, but Bay has gone further and included Angel City in her role as a professor at the University of Southern California.
âI bring students as part of my sports class to visit Angel City, to learn about the trajectory of the team and its development,â she said, adding she has also hosted the teamâs co-founders on campus. âItâs important to offer a platform to this team, part of this community, and these women who have helped create it.â
Bay, who has a lengthy media and journalism resume that spans Huffington Post, Good Morning America, Moneyline, the Today Show and NBA Inside Stuff, loves a narrative.
âThis is a great business story, a great sports story, a great community story, and certainly a great story about driving equity with a purpose-driven brand,â she said. âSo for all those reasons, Iâve followed this team since the beginning.â
Asked about changing her mindset from fan to owner, Bay didnât want to get into too many specifics about the clubâs new day-to-day. To her, there is time ahead to dig into priorities, strategic planning and the decisions that have to be made. The sale is a month or two from being finalized, and sheâs still embracing the moment to celebrate. Bay is in big-picture mode, not the nitty-gritty logistics.
That said, the purchase of Angel City has repercussions beyond just the club. Bay will be one of 15 (eventually 16, once the next expansion team is chosen) governors who can help shape the leagueâs future.
âThere have never been limits for this team,â Bay said. âThat also applies to the NWSL, with this new infusion of energy, capital resources, and incredible people joining this ownership group. There are certainly no limits to what we can expect from these athletes.â
One of those athletes, Press, addressed the player side of the sale, acknowledging that the team does have âa lot of things that they need to get rightâ. The deal â plus that extra $50million of investment â means a lot of money is about to flow in.
âIt allows the club to continue to professionalize. Angel City recognizes that they have a lot of room to grow on that end,â Press told The Athletic this month.
While Bay promised the specifics of priorities would come later, she did say that facilities are absolutely on the list, âparticularly with player development and player supportâ.
Thatâs not new information. The Bay-Iger groupâs pitch deck, acquired by news website Semafor, shows that the group wants to âimprove team performance, player support and retentionâ, which does include a training facility â but Bay and Iger also offer their expertise on media, content creation, and managing brands.
A pitch deck is one thing, reality can be another. Bay, unsurprisingly, said the first couple of months once the sale closes will be filled with a lot of listening.
âItâs premature to even speculate about where we land first and what we do first, but weâre committed to listening, understanding where the opportunities are, then making decisions about how to prioritize resources,â she said. Player support and development across the board, including players, technical staff and front office staff, are areas they have already circled.
As of Wednesday, theyâre one step closer to the real work ahead.
(Top photo: Angel City in recent action against visitors San Diego Wave; Ronald Martinez/Getty Images)
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