Angel City Football Club 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.
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.
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. 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.
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.
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.
NICOLE KELLER: Yeah, I think that was the real “aha” for us in this case. I think as Jeffrey pointed out early on, most professional teams start with a local audience, and then as they become successful, they started to build a global audience. But Angel City really inverted that model growing the brand of Angel City globally, right from the start in parallel with their local efforts.
So, in that sense, it raises this very interesting question for our students, which is what kind of business are they actually building? And it’s very clear that if you ask what is driving the economic outcomes in the business, there will be a point at which the team becomes so phenomenal that you could say that’s the driver.
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah, it’s a really unique opportunity if you think about it, because you’re creating something from whole cloth here, whereas an owner acquiring a team, and a league that exists, a team that’s been around for a long time, doesn’t have the same desire maybe to try and figure this out.
JEFFREY RAYPORT: That is definitely the central question in the case. I think one lesson here is that if you have the luxury of a control owner, as Kara said, you wind up not being under pressure necessarily to innovate around the model. If you don’t have that luxury meaning to survive, you’ve got to make money.
KARA NORTMAN: I’ll say a couple things to answer that question at a high level. One, people like to win in sports, and it doesn’t feel good to lose. Two people show up at Angel City, even when we’re on long losing streaks, and we try to avoid that. But the stadium dynamic, and how players feel in our stadium with our fans, away teams comment to me on it every week, and it raises the energy, the level of play, the enthusiasm, and the desire to come.