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Disney chief govt Bob Iger and his spouse, Willow Bay, have agreed to purchase a controlling stake within the US Nationwide Ladies’s Soccer League membership Angel Metropolis FC at a valuation of $250mn, in a document deal for the league that will make it probably the most precious ladies’s sports activities staff on the earth.
The settlement, which is topic to approval by the league, underscores the fast appreciation of sports activities golf equipment and girls’s sports activities specifically. It’s also the Iger household’s first foray into the realm of sports activities possession.
Los Angeles-based Angel Metropolis FC was based in 2020 by a gaggle together with actor Natalie Portman and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian. Ohanian’s spouse, tennis star Serena Williams, was amongst its early buyers. Portman and Ohanian will proceed to serve on the board of administrators of the staff, the membership mentioned, as will entrepreneur Julie Uhrman and Gillian Berry, one other early investor.
The expansion of ladies’s soccer, and the NWSL particularly, has accelerated via the pandemic. Angel Metropolis was the league’s ninth franchise when based in 2020 — since then the NWSL has grown to 14 golf equipment.
Final yr, funding agency Sixth Avenue turned the primary institutional investor to turn out to be a majority proprietor of a US sports activities staff when it dedicated $125mn to purchase a brand new franchise, Bay FC. That determine included a $53mn enlargement payment, paid by homeowners of latest golf equipment to the remainder of the league in order to not dilute the worth of present groups, a 10-fold enhance in enlargement charges from 2020.
Bay, the dean of the College of Southern California Annenberg College for Communication and Journalism, will serve and management Angel Metropolis’s board of administrators and characterize the membership on the NWSL board of governors. She and Iger may even make investments an extra $50mn “to assist the membership’s future progress”, in accordance with a staff assertion.
Bay mentioned that she and Iger “are dedicated to advancing the membership’s mission of driving fairness on and off the sphere”.
Iger rejoined Disney as chief govt in 2022, having beforehand served within the position from 2005 to 2020. Disney owns the sport-focused cable community ESPN and free-to-air ABC, and was the biggest supplier of linear sports activities content material within the US final yr, in accordance with MoffettNathanson. NWSL has media rights agreements with ESPN, Paramount’s CBS, Amazon Prime Video, and Scripps Sports activities.
This story has been amended since preliminary publication to state that Serena Williams was an investor in Angel Metropolis
