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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 essentially the most priceless ladies’s sports activities group on the planet.
The settlement, which is topic to approval by the league, underscores the speedy appreciation of sports activities golf equipment and ladies’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 actor Natalie Portman, tennis star Serena Williams and her husband, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, and a consortium of buyers from the worlds of Hollywood, enterprise capital and sports activities. Portman and Ohanian would proceed to serve on the board of administrators of the group, the membership mentioned.
The expansion of girls’s soccer, and the NWSL particularly, has accelerated by 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 Road turned the primary institutional investor to turn out to be a majority proprietor of a US sports activities group when it dedicated $125mn to purchase a brand new franchise, Bay FC. That determine included a $53mn growth charge, paid by homeowners of recent golf equipment to the remainder of the league in order to not dilute the worth of current groups, a 10-fold improve in growth charges from 2020.
Bay, the dean of the College of Southern California Annenberg Faculty for Communication and Journalism, will serve and management Angel Metropolis’s board of administrators and signify the membership on the NWSL board of governors. She and Iger can even make investments a further $50mn “to help the membership’s future progress”, in keeping with a group assertion.
Bay mentioned that she and Iger “are dedicated to advancing the membership’s mission of driving fairness on and off the sector”.
Iger rejoined Disney as chief govt in 2022, having beforehand served within the function from 2005 to 2020. Disney owns the sport-focused cable community ESPN and free-to-air ABC, and was the most important supplier of linear sports activities content material within the US final yr, in keeping with MoffettNathanson. NWSL has media rights agreements with ESPN, Paramount’s CBS, Amazon Prime Video, and Scripps Sports activities.
