Walt Disney Co. CEO Bob Iger and his spouse, Willow Bay, dean of the USC Annenberg School of Journalism, are near finalizing a deal that may see them make investments $250 million in Angel City FC, practically doubling the worth of the world’s most precious girls’s sports activities franchise.
Dylan Byers of the information website Puck was first to report the offers, which had been confirmed to The Times by two folks conversant in the funding however who weren’t approved to talk on the document. The deal may very well be accomplished shortly, with Bay and Iger changing Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian because the crew’s controlling shareholder.
Ohanian was additionally the crew’s consultant on the NWSL Board of Governors. It was unclear Tuesday who would take over that function.
Angel City officers declined to remark.
Last fall, Ohanian, Angel City’s largest investor and considered one of its 4 main homeowners, raised considerations concerning the crew’s profligate spending. Angel City had by far the best income within the NWSL final yr, with $31 million, nevertheless it’s additionally spending extra, leaving it years away from profitability.
The ensuing six-month feud finally prompted the crew’s board of administrators to rent Moelis & Co., a New York funding financial institution, to deal with the sale of the NWSL membership.
According to on-line website Semafor, Bay and Iger’s funding has a pre-capital valuation of $250 million. The crew is now valued at $300 million, Semafor stated. That’s $120 million greater than the valuation Sportico gave the membership final October and practically 5.5 instances the typical 2023 valuation of the 11 different NWSL golf equipment.
Angel City FC was launched 4 years in the past by actress Natalie Portman, enterprise capitalist Kara Nortman and entrepreneur Julie Uhrman, who shortly recruited greater than 100 different traders from Hollywood and the sports activities world. The overwhelming majority of the crew’s traders are girls, giving the crew the most important female-led possession group in skilled sports activities historical past. That made Bay’s function within the funding particularly essential to most of the proprietor/traders who needed to log out on the deal.
Iger and Bay attended Angel City’s residence sport towards Orlando on Sunday, a sport Angel City (4-8-3) misplaced, dropping to 11The within the 14-team championship standings.
Investors have flocked to girls’s sports activities over the previous two years, with world funding agency Sixth Street backing Bay FC, the enlargement crew in Northern California; the Levine Leichtman household, who collectively run the funding agency Levin Leicthman Capital Partners, bought the San Diego Wave in March for a document $120 million; and Chicago Cubs co-owner Laura Ricketts bought the Chicago Red Stars final summer time.
Over the previous 4 years, practically each NWSL crew has modified possession or welcomed vital new funding, giving the league extra billionaire backers than at every other time in its historical past.
“The trade, the sports activities trade, acknowledged that girls’s sports activities had been a superb funding,” stated Cheryl Cooky, a professor of ladies’s, gender and sexuality research at Purdue. “And so that they’re form of leaping on the bandwagon.”
