Angel City Football Club (ACFC) was founded in 2020 by venture capitalist Kara Nortman, entrepreneur Julie Uhrman, and actor and activist Natalie Portman. As outsiders to professional sports, the all-female founding team had rewritten the playbook for how to build a sports franchise by applying lessons from the tech and entertainment industries. Unlike typical sports franchises that built their teams and track records over many years before extending their brand beyond a local base, ACFC had inverted the model, generating both global and local interest in the club during its first three years.
The club’s early success was reflected in its market valuation of $250 million as of its sale in July 2024 — the highest in the National Women’s Soccer League. Equally important, ACFC had started to bend the curve toward greater pay equity in women’s sports — the club’s ultimate goal.
But the founders knew there was much more to do to capitalize on the club’s momentum. As they developed ACFC’s first three-year strategic plan in 2024, they weighed the most effective ways to build value for the franchise. Was it better to allocate the incremental budget to investments in digital brand building or to investments in the on-field product?
Senior Lecturer Jeffrey Rayport is joined by case co-author Nicole Keller and club co-founder Kara Nortman to discuss the case, “Angel City Football Club: Scoring a New Model.”
BRIAN KENNY: To say that men’s leagues have historically dominated the world of professional sports is understating the case. In fact, it literally took a World War to launch the first professional women’s league. In 1943, Philip Wrigley, owner of the Chicago Cubs proposed the idea of a professional women’s baseball league to keep baseball in the public eye, while many of the best male players were overseas. The All-American Girls Professional Baseball League was the catalyst for the launch of another women’s baseball league, and eventually women’s leagues in all other sports. Today, women are well-represented in major league sports, including hockey, basketball, golf, soccer, softball, lacrosse, and more. But the playing field is far from level when compared to the resources, and reach of men’s leagues.
What will it take to even the score? Today on Cold Call, we welcome Professor Jeffrey Rayport, and guests to discuss his case, Angel City Football Club scoring a new model. I’m your host, Brian Kenny, and you’re listening to Cold Call on the HBR Podcast Network. Jeffrey Rayport is an expert in online media, and e-commerce with a focus on new business opportunities enabled by emerging digital technologies, and he’s been on Cold Call several times. Welcome back, Jeffrey.
JEFFREY RAYPORT: Thank you so much, Brian. It’s great to be here.
BRIAN KENNY: And today we are really happy to have a couple of other guests. Nicole Keller is assistant director at Harvard Business School’s California Research Center, and a co-author of the case. And Kara Nortman is the founder and managing partner of Monarch Collective, and the co-founder of the Angel City Football Club, and she is one of the protagonists in today’s case. Nicole, Kara, welcome.
KARA NORTMAN: Thank you so much.
NICOLE KELLER: Thank you.
BRIAN KENNY: Great to have you all here. I think people are really going to enjoy hearing about this case. Women’s sports has been in the headlines as of late with Caitlin Clark, and her rise into stardom as a college basketball player, now as a professional basketball player. And it’s really brought to the surface again, all of the disparity that exists between men’s sports and women’s sports. And that’s part of what we’re going to talk about today, and the new model that you’re trying to pursue at Angel City Football Club. So, let’s just dive right in. Jeffrey, I’m going to ask you to start, if you can introduce us to the Angel City Football Club, and explain why you decided to write this case.
JEFFREY RAYPORT: Well, Brian, it is a real pleasure to talk about this really exciting story. It came to us from a friend, and colleague named Jennifer Fonstad, who’s been an executive fellow at the business school here at HBS. She is an alumna of the school, and she’s an investor in Kara’s fund at Monarch, and hence an indirect investor in Angel City. Jennifer proposed to me about a year ago that this case would be a fascinating one to teach in the context of a growth stage tech ventures course I teach called, “Scaling Technology Ventures.” The intent we had coming into it, obviously this doesn’t look like a tech business, was to apply tech in a non-tech situation to kind of ask what would happen if you took the Silicon Valley, and Hollywood playbooks, and you brought them to the world of professional sports. The thing that turned out to be fascinating is that of course that is what the case is about, but it’s about something else, which is that Kara, and her partners, Julie and Natalie, essentially flipped the model of how you build a professional sports franchise.
In general, people tend to build teams by getting a local following, playing a bunch of games, getting attention, and expanding their brand, and awareness, and audience from there, these guys primarily because of what you just talked about related to Caitlin Clark, which is that there’s an overriding goal here around pay equity, and social impact, and the fastest route to social impact, they concluded taking a Silicon Valley, and Hollywood Playbook was in fact to invert the model. To go global first, and build a global brand, and then deliver a team, or what they refer to as the on-field product after that. So, it has been a fascinating series of hypotheses about what brought us to this case.
BRIAN KENNY: I have to ask you how, I always ask how you start the class. What’s the cold call that you use to start the conversation?
JEFFREY RAYPORT: It is literally the choice, do you as Kara, and Julie, and Natalie going forward, prioritize what would seem intuitively obvious, which is invest in the team, the locker rooms, the pitches, get medical facilities, coaching, mentoring, psychologists, or do you allocate the incremental dollar to continued brand build against things like CRM systems for loyalty programs, e-commerce platform, and merchandise? And that’s a tough one because as I say intuitively, everyone wants to invest in the players, but the question is what puts you in a position to do well as a business is what puts you in a position to do well for the world.
BRIAN KENNY: It’s a cart horse thing, isn’t it?
JEFFREY RAYPORT: Absolutely. Or, a horse cart.
BRIAN KENNY: Or a horse cart.
JEFFREY RAYPORT: It’s unclear which, and that becomes a fascinating point of debate that takes us through the entire class.
BRIAN KENNY: Kara, let me turn to you for a second. I’d love to hear a little bit about your background, and just tell us in your own words what your motivations were for starting the club, and what you’re hoping to accomplish with it.
KARA NORTMAN: I’m just thrilled to be here with Professor Rayport, Nicole, and you. It was such an honor to write this case with everyone. It turned out terrific. My background, I spent essentially 25 years in tech and media at places like Morgan Stanley, Battery Ventures, IAC, and operating roles at mergers, and acquisition roles, investor roles. And so if you told me I was going to start a professional women’s soccer team with Natalie Portman, and Julie Uhrman 10 years ago, I don’t know if I would’ve believed you, but I always had what I considered a side hustle, something that brought me joy, which was nonprofit work around gender equity, and eventually also racial equity, and just equity in general. And so, I saw something in the world that seemed like it just didn’t make sense, and I think that happens for a lot of us every single day.
But this thing stuck with me for five years, and I was doing what I realized later was market research. And the very quick version of the story is that I went to a 2015 Women’s World Cup finals. I tried to buy jerseys, I tried to find content for this league I didn’t know existed, called the NWSL. And I was an American who was just having fun. I was a working mom of three, and no one would take my money, and I just couldn’t understand it. So, the analogy I make is it’s as if you were watching a Gatorade commercial for 90 minutes, and it was the most fun thing you ever saw, and there was no Gatorade in the store for four years. So, it was this big marketing activation event, and there was nothing to do with my fandom, my consumer energy. And eventually four years later, that led to the founding of Angel City.
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah, that’s awesome. Nicole, I want to turn to you for a second, and I teased a little bit in the intro about the history of women’s professional leagues. I’m wondering how the case goes about addressing some of the challenges faced by women’s professional soccer leagues in the US. We’ve seen the women’s team in the Olympics do remarkably well. You would think that would translate to instant success for a professional league, but it’s been challenging.
NICOLE KELLER: Yeah, you’re exactly right. There’s been sort of this paradox in women’s soccer where on the world stage, the US Women’s National team has been simply remarkable, winning four World Cup titles in 1991, 1999, 2015, 2019, and attracting enormous viewership. The 2019 Women’s World Cup final drew over 14 million viewers in the US, which was far higher than the men’s 2018 final. But back here in the United States, women’s soccer has had a really hard time developing a sustainable league, which is strange. And there’s been several attempts. We had the Women’s United Soccer Association that was launched in 2001 by a group of cable TV executives and businessmen, but that folded because operational costs exceeded sponsorship revenues. Then we had the Women’s Professional Soccer League launched in 2009 that was launched by some deep-pocketed folks, including Phil Anschutz, and John Hendricks, the founder of Discovery Channel. But that one folded as well.
But then in 2012, the National Women’s Soccer League was established with really a much more diverse set of owners, and it had the backing from the Canadian Soccer Association, and the Mexican Football Federation. And this one has shown strong success starting with eight teams, and now growing to 14, and more to come. So, the league is now 12 years old, and it’s going strong. And I think part of the success is attributable to the ownership, and the structure of the league, but it’s also dovetailing with what you said, this surge of interest in women’s sports. And we saw that this year with basketball with Caitlin Clark.
That was the first time in history that the women’s NCAA final generated higher viewership than the men’s final. And we saw the same thing in volleyball last year when the Nebraska women’s volleyball team hosted a rivalry matchup in the university’s football stadium with a record setting 92,000 fans. So, the trend is happening across sports, and research really backs this up. We found that almost 40% of Gen Z-ers report that they’re watching more women’s sports now than they were a year ago. So, I think now is the right time, and women’s soccer is really in the sweet spot.
BRIAN KENNY: Jeffrey, I want to come back to you for a second, because you were talking about how Angel City has done things differently. What’s the traditional model for launching a sports franchise? Not that I’m thinking about doing it, but I just want to know what… Just in case I decide to start one.
JEFFREY RAYPORT: There’s a good reason why you, and I might not do it the traditional way. You start by being white, male, and a billionaire, and you go by a team as an expression, no disrespect, but usually an expression of ego. You’re not running it as a business. You are looking to win. You’re looking to become Bob Kraft with the Pats, and get Super Bowl ring after ring. But interestingly, you’re focused, as we said before, on a local following, and building the franchise out from there. What is very interesting, and different about Angel City is that Kara comes from a venture investing background. Julie Uhrman is a serial tech leader and CEO, Natalie Portman obviously comes from the Hollywood realm.
These women recognized on day one that first of all, nobody in the party was showing up as a billionaire. Second of all, if you wanted to have the social impact, you needed a business, an economic engine that would drive the impact, including being able, when you get to pay equity, those dollars have to come from somewhere. And that makes this a very different story from the traditional kind of ego-driven avocational expression of most pro sports franchises.
BRIAN KENNY: Kara, let me come back to you because I’m curious about the composition of your ownership, and the people who are running the team. Very different backgrounds than we would expect to see in professional sports league management.
KARA NORTMAN: Yeah, no, I mean it’s fun. I was just on with another professional sports team that’s heavily female backed, and the kinds of conversations you have, we have now about what are the best types of talents to bring in the team, I think are very different because of what Angel City has accomplished. People tend to look for rinse, and repeat, okay, take this person from the NFL, or this person from this team. And actually this first principal’s perspective was something that turned out to probably be the most invaluable thing. And men in tech use those words all the time, and now I really understand what they mean. But I would call it beginner’s mindset. And so the background, we all came out of tech content, Hollywood, and finance to some extent. We had no one from sports. And we did talk to hundreds of people.
I mean, we literally, Julie, and I, and Natalie did an extensive amount of due diligence. I was working on it for probably four years beforehand, and then we all worked on it together for a year before we actually kind of brought the capital in. And anyway, the backgrounds, I mean, out of tech, and out of media, and out of startup land were critical because it’s very, very different to build a team from a zero to one, right? A scaling a team from zero to one in a league that doesn’t have any revenue versus buying the Milwaukee Bucks, or let’s go with the Timberwolves since that’s in the news.
BRIAN KENNY: So, are the Celtics.
KARA NORTMAN: Oh, Celtics, Let’s go with the Celtics!
BRIAN KENNY: A little Boston plug.
KARA NORTMAN: Yes. Go, Boston. And I’m a Lakers kid. I mean, this is really generous of me. So, yeah, so the backgrounds were, we came out of tech, we came out of startups, we came out of Hollywood, so we could tell stories, but we also weren’t afraid to question as assumptions, and it’s probably the first time, and execute, and execute quickly, and make mistakes, but also really deeply grounded in mission. And we knew where to prioritize not making money to be authentic in mission. And that’s something that I think is a huge differentiato