Name: MPW Summit 2023: Investing In Women’s Sports
Uploaded: 2023-10-11
Duration: 15 min 27 s
Description: Kara Nortman, Managing Partner, Monarch Collective; Co-founder, Angel City Football Club Christen Press, Soccer Player, Angel City Football Club, U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team Moderator: Emma Hinchliffe, FORTUNE

Kara Nortman, Managing Partner, Monarch Collective; Co-founder, Angel City Football Club Christen Press, Soccer Player, Angel City Football Club, U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team Moderator: Emma Hinchliffe, FORTUNE

MPW Summit 2023: Investing In Women’s Sports

Conferences

Kara Nortman, Monarch Collective; Angel City Football Club, Christen Press, Angel City Football Club, U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team, Emma Hinchliffe, FORTUNE

From the big screen. Now we're going to the playing field. It's been an incredibly exciting few months for women's sports. From the women's World Cup to the women's tour de France, to the US, open the energy and the enthusiasm and the wins and the viewership was real. Would that women continue to show their power and their economic value in professional sports? But the fact is in sports are still not receiving the funding or marketing of men resulting in just a fraction of revenue generation and fewer opportunities for female athletes. Our next guests see this as an incredible moment of opportunity and change. Kara Nortman is co founder of Angel City Football Club, a managing partner of Monarch Collective, an investment platform that's dedicated to accelerating equity in global sport. And Kristen Press is a player with Angel City Football Club and the US Women's national soccer team. They join Fortune, senior writer and MP W Coacher Emma Hinchliff for today's conversation. Please welcome them to the stage. Hello. Hi, Kara. Hi Kristen. Thank you so much for being here. Hi, Emma, how are you? Good. How are you? So, how many people here have been to an Angel City game. We're in southern California after all. Has anyone been? Ok, we've got one back there. Thank you so much. So, for everyone who hasn't been, what is an Angel City game like right now? What's the vibe? What's the energy? Who's in the stands? I mean, I have played in a lot of different arenas and in front of a lot of fans for about a decade and there's really nothing like an Angel City game. And I think that's because everybody that comes to a game comes for more than sport, they come for the community, they come for the fight for equity and progress and they come for the belief that women from all industries can rise and when we do, we create a better world for everybody. Mhm Totally. And Kara, you, as we heard have launched Monarch Monarch Collective, which is investing in women's sports in a lot of ways. Can you tell us what that means? This is $100 million fund. Is that right? It is though we'll announce the final close tomorrow, not today, but we closed fairly north of Target, which I'm excited to share. So, yes. And how are you defining women's sports as you look at investment opportunities? Where will you be deploying this capital? Yeah, I mean, we're so a lot of this came out of Angel City and just sort of set the landscape. I think we defied all expectations and we were fortunate enough to get Kristen as our very, very first player as an A native, but went from 0 to 30 million in revenue a year, selling out really kind of changed sponsorship models and really kind of grew out of just recognizing that it does take purpose and it takes kind of building a community in the cap table or in the investor group in the C suite. But it also is a moment in time where you just show up and you do the work and what we're doing is investing in teams, leagues and rights and in particular in the sports where media revenue is growing like this. And the crazy thing is what got me into, this was actually trying to get Kristen paid. Um So I got involved in the pay equity fight with the US women's national team. And so like the cost of running a team from a salary standpoint is crazy low and the revenues have also been crazy low but to build a sustainable kind of business, which is what I hope we do in women's sports, they both kind of have to grow together. So we're excited about soccer, basketball, golf, tennis, racing, et cetera, but more focused on sports that people want to watch on streaming platforms and broadcasts. Yeah, let's talk about like kind of the opportunity here. I think last time we talked about this, you identified this gulf between like for instance, how easy or not easy it is to watch a women's sports game on TV. And then how many followers these players have on social media demonstrating interest in other channels? Can you kind of describe that Gulf and what the opportunity is? Yeah, I mean, if Instagram didn't exist, Angel City wouldn't exist, I was a fan in the audience with like Kristen trying to find Kristen Jersey with my kids, went to nine stores, couldn't find, it, couldn't find content. But what I could find was Instagram and a bunch of people told me I was crazy that I wanted to watch women's soccer more than every four years. But I could follow Kristen and all of the incredible players on the national team. And so, I mean, social media was the first distribution channel and as I like to say, women have twice as many words as men, they're kind of fun to follow on social media. There's some great lifestyle content. No, totally. And Kristen, how has this explosion of interest in the past few years? You know, changed your experience, your career, your life as a player, you know, what is different now compared to looking back five years ago. I think the thing for me that is the most powerful is that, you know, I spent my career fighting for betterment, fighting for pay equity fighter, fighting for basic resources for athletes that just weren't there. And now when we get a young player, I have an 18 year old teammate in Angel City and her first experience is professional. She has fans, she has a life that can sustain her. And so the goal that we had this with the whole fight for equal pay with the US women's national team. And now the NWL following that, the goal is that the next generation doesn't have to fight. They don't have to spend their entire career doing two jobs. But what's really unique is out of my generation of player. We're actually quite entrepreneurial. So many of us have started our own business because we see the value in women's sports, we see the value in what we're doing. And so it's a really cool generation of players that came together to fight for more and now we're going to continue in the next chapters of our lives to continue to improve and fight for progress and equity. What is that unique insight that players have into the business opportunity here? What do they know that others might not realize the giant gap that exists between the demand for women's sports and the delivery of it? I mean, I can't find my own team play like, you know, I'm injured right now and when the team's away, it takes me 10 minutes trying to find the content for my own team. And so it's like how many people does that deter. And so I think that's where the investment comes in and that's where the belief that this isn't a charity. We don't, we're far past the time that we want people to come in and they say, oh, I'm doing this for my daughter. Like we want people to come in like Kara because they see the business opportunity because they see the potential that we have in women's sports. To not just change sport but to change the world in a really positive way. Totally. I'll come to everyone for questions in a moment. So if you have any start thinking, but Carrie, you know why now, why is this the moment where women's sports seems to be gaining this momentum in business? You know, for me personally, I mean, I spent my entire career in tech and media and if you told me I was going to quit the job that I love to go start a women's sports fund five years ago, I don't know if I would have believed you. And yet I feel so fortunate that I found this at this moment in time. And it is the first place in my life where building representation into coalitions, into cap tables, into C suites where the people we hire actually care that we walk on the field, right? The players, I think care if you look at our team, I mean, we're not perfect and we have to create room for imperfection. But if you look at our team on and off the field and our community in the stands it is a modern consumer community and it is like the country club, none of us ever had. And so the why now is just sort of, it's the first place in my life where I've seen that diversity drive enterprise value and drive revenue stream. So we have generated at Angel City north of $50 million in sponsorship revenue. We have more revenue than the lowest tier of the men's MLS teams without media revenue coming in. But we did it with a new kind of impact sponsorship model. So we take 10% of every sponsor contract and we put it into the community. So with doordash, for example, we will have put over a million dollars into delivering food to food insecure parts of L A. Well, what does that do? We do that with our community and it actually has brought in many new sponsors. So it's not just beer and cars and banks and we love our beer and cars and, but we have supplements and female alcohol and fashion. And so it's a moment in time where you can actually, I mean, I'll talk like an investor for a second because you can, there's literally an arbitrage on sexism right now. But also people, you can tell that people are just showing up to make the money or because they have an arena that they want to utilize versus they actually believe that they can put butts in seats and you know, and and, and still an arena of fill a stadium to watch the best players in the world who aren't small men but are virtuoso in a completely different way. And so I guess I was working on my side project at two in the morning for too long. I had my Jerry Maguire moment in a cathedral and I said I am building the wrong cathedral. It is time to build a different one. Amazing. Well, does anyone have any questions for Kara and Kristen? If you do, you can raise your hand? Ok. Well, we'll keep going. You know, Kristen, the World Cup finished a few weeks ago and I'm sure many people saw the incident in which the Spanish soccer federation leader kissed a player without her consent and ended up in a huge controversy in Spain and internationally. You know, when you are having this kind of conversation about how much potential there is and how much opportunity we see and how much more respect women's sports is getting. Then at the same time, something like that is happening on the biggest world stage in sports. You know, what does that feel like for you as a player to see that dichotomy? Yeah, I think the thing that I take away from this is we've made so much progress and there's so much more progress that needs to be made and so we can't let our foot, we can't take our foot off the gas and I think in the NWSL, we experienced a ton of toxicity, a ton of abuse and as players and with teams and ownership in the league, we really have come together and try to eradicate that behavior in the best way that we can. Um But I think that the, the, it's a silencing mechanism in so many ways that we've been told again and again that if we speak up, if we speak out, oh, the league, you know, the league won't sustain it. You can't say anything because you know, what are the consequences? And so I think we're beyond those silencing mechanisms now and we have the strength and the autonomy to speak out and make our environment safer and, and hopefully inspire everyone across industries to continue to speak out a type against these types of injustices. And I would just say like Kristen's a cultural icon because she couldn't afford not to care about her work environment. It wasn't a choice for you to care, right? And so, I mean, it's very, it's kind of amazing if you look at the women that the athletes who come into women's sports, highly educated, you know, forced to be activists in their own way, very purposeful doing it for the love of the game and twice as many words, right? And so, um I mean, it, and I think in Spain it's really opened it, it's just an example of like the world paid more attention to, to soccer or football than they would have otherwise. Um And then I paid more attention to Spanish policy than otherwise, like they're more progressive in some ways in the United States. And so I think it's an amazing way that sport has become culture and kind of wakes us up to how all these dynamics come together and makes us more of a global community that can care about global topics. Definitely, thank you. Um You know, also at the World Cup, the US women's national team ended up getting knocked out of competition pretty early. You know, at this moment when there's so much momentum and there's been so much attention on the US women's national team, you know, is that, does that end up being a setback? Is that a challenge more than it might be otherwise when at this phase of development, when there's so much momentum and things are still pretty nascent in the grand scheme of things before this World Cup, a reporter asked me if it would be good for the world if the US lost because for the last two World Cups, we were able to use the World Cup to create massive change and fight for equal pay and find a settlement and agree to equal pay moving forward. And so a lot of other countries were just having their beginnings of fights with their federations for pay for resources. And so when I got asked that, of course, I was like no, like we'll just keep leading the way and keep inspiring. And also you always have to like, be blindly foolish and thinking you can win. Um And then after we lost, it was a really interesting series of events where I did understand the merit of other world powers stepping up. Um Both in England and in Spain. Uh the two finalists are having massive fights with their federations about basic rights. Um And so I think we hope as the US women's national team that our fight was able to inspire the fight. And I, and I always think about walking towards a quality with a torch in my hand. And when I joined the US women's national team, I was handed a torch because there was a whole other decade, a generation of players that had already been fighting and when, you know, I continue to carry that torch as far and high as I can. Um And, you know, in, in one way, I thought my job was to pass it to the next generation. But in a lot of ways, I think that over the last 10 years, we were able to, you know, light a little fire and let it spread out and let other countries model after what we did, let other people and other industries start to stand up and fight. And I think that's a lot more powerful than a single torch that you can continue to hand down. That's amazing. So who do you both want? You know? So who do you both want to reach right now? Who should be watching? Who should be sponsoring, who should be investing in women's sports and in women's soccer? You wanna go first? I mean, first I'd say everyone in the audience can play a role, right? If you're in another industry, it doesn't matter what it is, you can come in non profit media tech. It, it doesn't matter. Everyone probably can figure out how to play a small role as an investor, as a sponsor. I think what I would just say is get really curious. Um follow players you like, that's what connects you, I think to, to the sport. And then what I say is when I show up in a stadium or an arena, I feel sometimes like the Forrest Gump of women's soccer, I just show up in the right place at the right time. I fill 12 again. And how often do we get to fill 12 again? Just go field 12 again. And you know, if someone told me that I was going to start a professional women's sports team, you know, I didn't think women in their forties were sports team owners. So to me, it's convinced me that anything is possible and a lot of people told me it was not possible. So I kind of now just think, think something is possible. Make a new friend, show up, go to a game. Enjoy yourself. Definitely sponsor and just buy a ticket, buy a ticket. There's some finals going on at the w right now. Buy a ticket. I, well, hopefully we'll have some more people raising their hands next time when they've been to an Angel City game. Thank you both so much. Thank you very much.