LOS ANGELES — When club owner and magnate Michele Kang sat in the “Futbol W” studio in L.A. to speak with ESPN, there was an obvious question lingering — and one without an obvious answer.
Earlier that day, Kang announced her latest large investment in the U.S. Soccer Federation at an event a few blocks away. Seemingly everyone in town for the game between the U.S. women’s national team and Brazil was asking the same question: Why? Why had Kang, who owns three professional women’s soccer teams, offered to hand over to U.S. Soccer a business she poured $25 million into building — after she already committed to donating $30 million to the federation over the next five years?
The question comes with some awe, but it is accompanied by the confusion that surrounds a first-of-its-kind splash. Kang, who has been building what appears to be the women’s soccer version of City Football Group, has expanded her empire dramatically in a short time. So why donate elsewhere?
“At the end of the day, our vision and our goal is to get all the female teams to adopt these new standards and the way we train our female athletes,” Kang told ESPN. “I thought that would be much better accomplished by an organization like U.S. Soccer as opposed to something private.”
Kang is trying to transform the women’s game by bringing more young players in and raising standards — not just in the U.S. but around the world — and a task that big requires buy-in from others. As Kang put it: “We need to do this on a massive scale, because we’re talking about half of this population.”
Washington Spirit in the NWSL, French giants Olympique Lyonnais and England’s London City Lionesses. She also told ESPN she has imminent plans to add a fourth team on a new continent.
Her plan from the beginning was to pool resources to quickly scale up a global network of clubs — something unprecedented for an operation exclusively focused on women’s soccer.
to bring the NWSL to 16 teams next year.
She said she received similar criticism for spinning off Lyon’s women’s team into separate ownership from the men’s team, but she has heard about other clubs planning to do the same thing.
“I can tell you when I first spun off Olympique Lyonnais from the men’s team, there were a lot of criticisms,” Kang said. “It’s like, ‘That can’t happen,’ and all that. Now, actually, the top teams both in France and England are doing it.”
Kang says she is not trying to create some kind of player development network that feeds players to one team, which is one of the criticisms of the multi-club model on the men’s side — like, say, City Football Group ultimately serving Manchester City. As she put it: “I’m not going to rob the best players from one team and give them to another team.” Rather, she wants to create “the No. 1 team in each country.”
Orlando Pride team that went 23 games unbeaten to open the season. Washington hired Jonatan Giráldez away from global power FC Barcelona to become the team’s head coach.
Lyon just clinched its 18th French league title in the past 19 seasons, although the eight-time European champions were upset by Arsenal in the UEFA Women’s Champions League semifinals. Over the weekend, London City won promotion to England’s top flight in Kang’s first full season as owner, making them the only independently owned club to participate in next season’s Women’s Super League.
None of that is by coincidence. Kang has invested in staff (such as Giráldez), infrastructure (such as improvements to training facilities) and players (such as Trinity Rodman, whom Kang said she’ll “do everything we can” to keep from leaving the club when her contract expires later this year).
Kang’s vision extends to all women’s sports. Last year she donated $4 million to the U.S. women’s rugby sevens team to provide resources ahead of the 2028 L.A. Olympics.
Bay FC’s owners, Sixth Street, announced plans earlier this year to create a similar global network. Kansas City Current majority owners Angie and Chris Long, who funded the NWSL’s first purpose-built stadium as the anchor of a $1 billion waterfront development, previously confirmed to ESPN that more clubs will soon be added to their portfolio. A group called Mercury/13 launched a multi-club model last year, first with the purchase of Italy’s FC Como Women.
The recently launched Monarch Collective is dedicated to exclusively investing in women’s sports teams and already holds stakes in Angel City FC, Boston Legacy FC and San Diego Wave FC — the maximum (three) allowed by the NWSL’s private equity rules. Avenue Sports Group, led by former Milwaukee Bucks owner Marc Lasry, is focused on NWSL and WNBA investment and held serious discussions with at least four NWSL teams previously for sale.
Kang welcomes others to join her: “I’m actually seeing either intent or already moving in that direction [from] several groups already,” she said. “I’m hearing so-and-so is buying this team and so forth. So, this is happening.”
Kang has fielded questions about what she’s doing — the multi-club model, but also her Kynisca Innovation Hub that is “dedicated to revolutionizing how female athletes train” — from more people privately.
“Women’s football is kind of exploding,” she told ESPN. The bad news, she quickly adds, is the lack of infrastructure and resources in place around it, including staffing and player development.
“We all need to move all those things together to really advance this game so that we don’t miss a beat,” Kang said, “because the last thing we need is: somehow, right now, things are really great, but what’s the sustaining power?”
Kang’s rhetorical question is the short answer to people asking “Why?”
Her plan is to boost investment in a space that has historically lacked it, much like any other business opportunity. How? Infrastructure, better player development and more training to build out a larger, more qualified network of staff. The money she has donated to U.S. Soccer is all earmarked for those initiatives.
With that foundation, the product of women’s soccer can flourish at a scale beyond just a few clubs — that’s the plan, at least.
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