When the season ended earlier this month, Angel City FC finished 11th out of 13 teams, a disappointing result for the Los Angeles soccer franchise co-founded in 2020 by venture capitalist Kara Nortman. But the season's struggles are just part of a larger story that is reshaping the way investors think about women's sports.
Despite the lackluster performance on the field, Angel City itself became a case study (literally, including within Harvard Business School) on how to best build women's sports facilities. The team's celebrity ownership group, which includes Natalie Portman and Serena Williams, helped generate near-unprecedented buzz. The franchise is also no stranger to sponsorship, breaking records before a player has even kicked a ball.
“We went from zero revenue to $30 million in revenue. The game sold out. We created something that people thought was impossible,” Nortman said in an interview last month, pointing to Angel City's commercial success since the team's inception. “That actually led to the formation of Monarch.”
That commercial success, not the trophies, became the blueprint for Monarch Collective, a $250 million fund Nortman launched in 2023, the first investment vehicle focused solely on women's sports. Its origins may be rooted in a team that has yet to win a playoff game, but the Monarchs' portfolio and influence extends far beyond their Angel City training facility in Thousand Oaks, California.
The fund currently owns stakes in three other National Women's Soccer League clubs. The San Diego Wave, Boston Legacy FC (debuting next year), and the latest investment announced earlier this month, FC Victoria Berlin. The deal, which takes a 38% stake in the German club, makes Monarch the first foreign investor to acquire a stake in a German women's soccer team.
It's a diverse collection that reflects Nortman's belief that women's sports have reached an inflection point, regardless of the fate of any single team. The numbers support her optimism.
“The total global men's sports market is estimated to be around $5 trillion,” Nortman explains. “When we launched Monarch in 2023, the women's sports market was thought to be around $500 million. Now it's closer to $3 billion.”
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Taking advantage of that growth will require a different strategy than men's sports, Nortman said. It's not just a matter of washing and repeating. “For example, how many men’s team owners would consider parachuting a box of Sephora down the rafters? [a New York] freedom [WNBA game] Fenty cam for your wear [Fenty] Lipstick or Hello Kitty Collaboration Night is happening in Angel City and who doesn't know how to get their hands on the merchandise before it sells out? ”
Angel City's innovative approach to marketing and partnerships has helped build so much excitement about Angel City that last fall power couple Bob Iger and Willow Bay acquired a majority stake for $250 million, making Angel City the most valuable women's sports franchise in the world.
For Nortman, who left Upfront Ventures and more traditional venture capital to focus full-time on women's sports, Angel City's commercial success continues to test Monarch's theory. While there is certainly some tension between Angel City's business success and on-field performance at the moment, at least in the sports press, the team has undoubtedly proven that with the right facilities, women's sports can generate significant revenue.
Now, as with any successful new initiative, the question is whether the momentum can be sustained. Nortman is acutely aware of the dissipation of a promising moment in women's sports. She frequently cites the striking historical parallels with 1920, when 60,000 people gathered in Liverpool, England, to watch Dick Kerr Ladies' football, a larger crowd than most Premier League matches today. The following year, the English Football Association banned women from playing, and the sport effectively disappeared for decades.
“Everyone can wake up and be the discoverer of women's sports,” Nortman says. “But it takes consistent hard work to do it consistently.”
She insists there's more to that hard work than riding the wave of attention from breakout stars like Caitlin Clarke and Angel Reese. It requires systematic investment in infrastructure, governance and operations – the hard work of building a sustainable business.
This is where Monarch's approach differs from typical venture capital. Rather than passively betting on dozens of startups, the Monarchs are focusing on positions in a small number of teams and leagues and are deeply involved in their operations. The fund describes its strategy as a “venture-like market” with risk management “like growth equity or private equity.”
“We act alongside the control owners and add a lot of operational value,” Nortman explains. The goal is to help teams achieve break-even or profitability in their core business so they can capitalize on growth in high-margin media revenue.
The Monarchs' investment interests extend beyond soccer. The fund will focus more broadly on sports that Nortman calls “free of product market risk,” meaning established formats with proven audiences.
“Is this the sport that people like to watch on their computers or TV?” she asks. “We have participatory sports like pickleball, but are people going to sit at home and watch it and create an event?”
In fact, Monarch currently has stakes in four 'football' clubs, but it also has interests in sports such as women's basketball, golf and tennis, which have significant media revenue potential alongside existing infrastructure.
The company's current limited partners include Melinda French Gates, former Netflix executives, and other wealthy individuals, and interest in its mission appears to be growing. First, Monarch's debut funding of $250 million is significantly higher than the $100 million originally planned by Nortman and her co-founder Jasmine Robinson, a former investor in Causeway, a growth-stage company focused on sports, media, gaming, and fitness. He said the increase in scale reflects the rapid maturation of the market during Monarch's funding period.
“When we started fundraising, nine out of 10 conversations were, 'Yeah, we don't think so.' [women’s] “Basketball is really great,” Nortman said, recalling that “there was a lot of skepticism about basketball.” Then came the meteoric rise of Caitlin Clark, the WNBA's record-breaking viewership, and suddenly basketball became the most-watched area of women's sports.
This increased interest supports Nortman's theory that investing in women's sports is not about finding the single perfect team, but about supporting an ecosystem in which multiple franchises can thrive. Some win championships. Some people may struggle competitively but succeed commercially. The key is to spread enough capital and operational expertise across the market to weather individual setbacks.
Already, Angel City appears to be inspiring other ownership groups. “Other teams like Kansas City, Bay FC and the Washington D.C. Spirit have started to see female-led ownership groups come in and prove they can build a real bottom line,” notes Nortman. Intentionally or not, Angel City has become a template.
As women's sports enter a period of sustained boom – the Golden State Valkyries just played in the WNBA for the first time next season, the NWSL expands and media rights deals expand – Nortman is cautiously optimistic that this moment will prove to be different from past surges of interest.
The key, she argues, lies in the fundamentals of strong league governance, ownership commitment, infrastructure investment and building true community connections. Media attention creates opportunities. Operational excellence makes it sustainable.
“Every spike is an opportunity to create a consistent experience around it,” Nortman says. “We have to look at all the underlying criteria to determine where it is likely to take hold.”