Disney CEO Bob Iger and his wife Willow Bay have agreed to acquire a majority stake in the Angel City FC club in the US National Women’s Soccer League. The value is $250 million. This is a record deal for the league that would make it the most valuable women’s sports team in the world.
The agreement, which still needs to be approved by the league, underscores the rapid rise in popularity of sports teams, particularly women’s sports, and is the Iger family’s first foray into sports ownership.
Los Angeles-based Angel City FC was founded in 2020 by a group that includes actress Natalie Portman and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian. Ohanian’s wife, tennis star Serena Williams, was one of the early investors. Portman and Ohanian will continue to serve on the team’s board, the club said, as will entrepreneur Julie Uhrman and Gillian Berry, another early investor.
The growth of women’s soccer, and the NWSL in particular, has accelerated due to the pandemic. Angel City was the league’s ninth franchise when it was founded in 2020 – since then, the NWSL has grown to 14 clubs.
Last year, investment firm Sixth Street became the first institutional investor to become majority owner of a U.S. sports team when it raised $125 million to buy a new franchise, Bay FC. That sum included a $53 million expansion fee paid by owners of new clubs to the rest of the league in order not to dilute the value of existing teams. That represents a tenfold increase in expansion fees from 2020.
Bay, dean of the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, will lead Angel City’s board of directors and represent the club on the NWSL’s board of directors. She and Iger will also invest an additional $50 million “to support the club’s future growth,” the team said in a statement.
Bay said she and Iger are “committed to advancing the club’s mission of promoting equality on and off the field.”
Iger returned to Disney as CEO in 2022, having previously held the position from 2005 to 2020. Disney owns sports-focused cable network ESPN and free-to-air ABC and was the largest provider of linear sports content in the U.S. last year, according to MoffettNathanson. NWSL has media rights agreements with ESPN, Paramount’s CBS, Amazon Prime Video and Scripps Sports.
This story has been changed since its original publication to reflect that Serena Williams was an investor in Angel City
