When its season ended earlier this month, Angel City FC finished 11th out of 13 teams, a disappointing result for the Los Angeles soccer franchise that venture capitalist Kara Nortman co-founded in 2020. But the season’s struggles tell only part of a much larger story that is reshaping how investors view women’s sports.
Despite its lackluster performance on the field, Angel City itself has become a case study (including literally, within Harvard Business School) in how best to build a women’s sports property. The team’s group of celebrity owners, including Natalie Portman and Serena Williams, helped generate almost unprecedented buzz. The franchise has also been savvy when it comes to sponsorships, breaking records before players hit a ball.
“We went from zero to $30 million in revenue. We sold the games. We built something that people didn’t think was possible,” Nortman explained in an interview last month, noting Angel City’s commercial success early on in the team’s formation. “That really led to the formation of Monarch.”
That commercial success, not trophies, became the model for Monarch Collective, the $250 million fund Nortman launched in 2023., which became the first investment vehicle exclusively focused on women’s sport. While its origin story may be rooted in a team that has yet to win a playoff game, Monarch’s portfolio and influence has extended far beyond the Angel City practice facility in Thousand Oaks, California.
The fund now has stakes in three other National Women’s Soccer League clubs: San Diego Wave, Boston Legacy FC (which will debut next year) and its latest investment, announced earlier this month, FC Viktoria Berlin. The agreement for 38% of 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 each team’s fortunes. The numbers also support his optimism.
“The overall men’s sports market is estimated to be around half a trillion dollars,” says Nortman. “When we launched Monarch in 2023, the women’s sports market was estimated to be around half a billion dollars. Now it’s closer to $3 billion.”
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Capitalizing on this growth requires adopting a different model than men’s sports, says Nortman. It’s not a simple rinse and repeat. “How many men’s team owners are considering parachuting Sephora boxes from the rafters? Or having at [a New York] Freedom [WNBA game] a Fenty camera to put your [Fenty] lipstick, or Angel City hosting a Hello Kitty collaboration party where people don’t know how to get their hands on the products before they sell out?
Angel City’s innovative approach to marketing and partnerships has helped it generate such buzz that in the fall of last year, power couple Bob Iger and Willow Bay acquired a majority stake in it for $250 million, making it 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 business accomplishments continued to validate Monarch’s thesis. Although there is currently tension – at least in the sports press – between Angel City’s commercial success and its on-field performance, the team has undoubtedly proven that women’s sports can generate significant revenue with the right elements in place.
Now, as with any successful new venture, the question is: can the momentum last? Nortman is keenly aware that women’s sports have already seen promising moments evaporate. She frequently references a striking historical parallel from 1920, when 60,000 people showed up in Liverpool, England, to watch the Dick, Kerr Ladies play football, which was a larger crowd than most Premier League matches today. The following year, the English Football Association banned women from playing and the sport virtually disappeared for decades.
“Anyone can wake up and become a discoverer of women’s sports when they do this,” Nortman says. “But it takes constant, hard work to make that translate into consistency.”
That hard work, she says, requires more than just riding the waves of attention from stars like Caitlin Clark or Angel Reese. This requires systematic investments in infrastructure, governance and operations – the inglorious work of building sustainable businesses.
This is where Monarch’s approach diverges from traditional venture capital. Rather than passively betting on dozens of startups, Monarch takes concentrated positions in a handful of teams and leagues, then becomes deeply involved in operations. The fund describes its strategy as “venture capital-style markets” with “private equity or private equity” style risk management.
“We show up alongside the controlling owners and add a lot of operational value,” says Nortman. The goal is to help teams reach break-even or profitability in their core operations, positioning them to benefit from higher-margin media revenue growth.
Monarch’s investment interest extends beyond football. The fund focuses more broadly on what Nortman calls sports without product market risk, that is, established formats with proven audiences.
“Is it a sport that people like to watch on their computer or television? » she asks. “There are participatory sports, like pickleball, but are people going to stay home and create an event by watching it?
Indeed, although Monarch currently has stakes in four “football” clubs, it also has interests in women’s basketball, golf and tennis – sports with significant media revenue potential, as well as existing infrastructure.
The company’s current backers include Melinda French Gates, former Netflix executives and other wealthy individuals, and interest in its mission appears to be growing. For one, Monarch’s debut fund of $250 million is well above the $100 million Nortman and his co-founder — Jasmine Robinson, a former investor in growth-stage sports, media, gaming and fitness company Causeway — had originally planned to raise. She says the increase in size reflects the rapid maturation of the market during Monarch’s fundraising period.
“When we started fundraising, nine out of ten conversations were, ‘Yeah, we don’t think [women’s] basketball is definitely a thing,” Nortman says, recalling “a lot of skepticism about it.” Then came the meteoric rise of Caitlin Clark, the WNBA’s record viewership, and suddenly basketball was the hottest sector in women’s sports.
This growing interest validates Nortman’s thesis that investing in women’s sports is not about finding the perfect team, but about supporting an ecosystem in which multiple franchises can thrive. Some will win championships. Some will struggle competitively but succeed commercially. The key is having enough capital and operational expertise spread across the market to overcome individual setbacks.
Angel City already seems to be inspiring other ownership groups. “You started to see other teams – Kansas City, Bay FC, Washington DC Spirit – run by women-led ownership groups, come in and show that they could build a real P&L,” Nortman notes. Whether intentionally or not, Angel City has become a model.
As women’s sports enter what appears to be a lasting boom period — the Golden State Valkyries just played their first WNBA next season, the NWSL is growing, media rights deals are multiplying — Nortman remains cautiously optimistic about whether this moment will prove different from past surges of interest.
The key, she says, lies in the fundamentals: strong league governance, ownership commitment, investment in infrastructure and building genuine community connections. Media attention creates opportunities; operational excellence makes it sustainable.
“Each peak is an opportunity to create a cohesive experience around it,” says Nortman. “You have to look at all the underlying criteria to see where this is likely to stay.”
