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 by venture capitalist Kara Nortman.
Despite its lackluster performance on the field, Angel City itself has become a case study (inc literallywithin Harvard Business School) on how to best 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 also dabbled in sponsorships, breaking records before the players even kicked a ball.
“We went from zero to $30 million in revenue. We sold out games. We built something that people didn’t think was possible,” Nortman reflected in a interview last monthhighlighting Angel City’s commercial success since the group’s inception. “That really led to the formation of Monarch.”
That commercial success, not trophies, became the blueprint for Monarch Collective, the $250 million fund Nortman launched in 2023, which has become the first investment vehicle to focus exclusively on women’s sports. While its origin story may be rooted in a team that has yet to win a playoff game, the Monarch’s portfolio and influence have extended far beyond Angel City’s training facility in Thousand Oaks, California.
The fund now owns stakes in three other National Women’s Soccer clubs: San Diego Wave, Boston Legacy FC (debuting next year) and its newest investment, announced earlier this monthFC Viktoria Berlin. The deal 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 a turning point, regardless of the fortunes of any individual team. The numbers also support her optimism.
“The total men’s sports market worldwide is estimated to be around half a trillion dollars,” Nortman explains. “The women’s sports market when we launched Monarch in 2023 was thought to be about half a billion dollars. Now it’s closer to $3 billion.”
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Tapping into that growth requires a different playbook than men’s sports, Nortman says. It’s not a simple rinse and repeat. “So how many men’s team owners are considering skydiving Sephora boxes from rafters? Or have at [a New York] Freedom [WNBA game] a Fenty camera to wear [Fenty] lipstick or Angel City having a Hello Kitty collaboration night where people can’t figure out how to get their hands on the merchandise before it sells out?’
Angel City’s innovative approach to marketing and partnerships helped it generate so much excitement 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 commercial achievements continued to validate Monarch’s thesis. While there’s tension — certainly in the sports press, at least — between the Angel City’s business success and its performance on the field, the team has proven beyond doubt that women’s sports can generate serious revenue with the right pieces in place.
Now, as with any successful new endeavor, the question is: can the momentum last? Nortman is well aware that women’s sports have seen promising moments evaporate in the past. A striking historical parallel is often cited from 1920, when 60,000 people turned up in Liverpool, England to watch the Dick, Kerr Ladies play football, which is a bigger crowd than most Premier League games today. The following year, the English Football Association banned women from playing and the sport effectively disappeared for decades.
“Everybody wakes up and is discovering women’s sports when they do,” says Nortman. “But it takes consistent, hard work to do that consistently.”
This hard work, he argues, requires more than the waves of attention from stars like Caitlin Clark or Angel Reese. It requires systematic investment in infrastructure, governance and operations – the impossible task of building sustainable businesses.
This is where Monarch’s approach diverges from typical venture capital. Instead of making passive bets on dozens of startups, Monarch takes concentrated positions in a handful of teams and leagues and then gets deeply involved in the businesses. The fund describes its strategy as “venture markets” with “growth equity or private equity” risk management.
“We sit alongside the controlling owners and add a lot of operational value,” Nortman explains. The goal is to help teams reach break-even or profitability in their core businesses, positioning them to benefit as higher-margin media revenues grow.
Monarch’s investment interest extends beyond football. The fund focuses more broadly on what Nortman calls sports with “no product purchase risk,” that is, established formats with proven audiences.
“Is it a sport that people like to watch on the computer or TV?” she asks. “There are participatory sports, like pickleball, but are people going to sit at home and create an event by watching it?”
Indeed, while Monarch currently has stakes in four “soccer” clubs, it also has interests in women’s basketball, golf and tennis – sports with significant media revenue potential, along with 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 $250 million debut fund is significantly more than the $100 million that Nortman and her co-founder — Jasmine Robinson, a former investor in sports, media, gaming and fitness-focused developer Causeway — originally planned to raise. He says the increased size reflects the rapid maturation of the market during Monarch’s fundraising period.
“When we started raising the fund, nine out of 10 conversations were, ‘Yeah, we don’t think so [women’s] Basketball is really a thing,” says Nortman, recalling “a lot of skepticism around it.” Then came the meteoric rise of Caitlin Clark, the WNBA’s record-setting viewership, and basketball suddenly became the hottest field in women’s sports.
This growing interest confirms Nortman’s position that investing in women’s sports is not about finding the one perfect team, but about supporting an ecosystem where multiple franchises can thrive. Some will win championships. Some will struggle competitively but succeed commercially. The key is to have enough capital and operational expertise spread across the market to deal with individual setbacks.
Already, Angel City appears to be inspiring other ownership groups. “You started to have other teams – Kansas City, Bay FC, Washington DC Spirit – with female-owned ownership groups coming in and showing they can build a real P&L,” notes Nortman. Willingly or not, Angel City became a model.
As women’s sports enters what looks like a sustained boom — the Golden State Valkyries just played their first WNBA next season, the NWSL is expanding, media rights deals are on the rise — Nortman remains cautiously optimistic about whether this moment will prove different from previous surges of interest.
The key, he argues, 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 viable.
“Every spike is an opportunity to build a consistent experience around it,” says Nortman. “You have to look at all the key criteria to see where it’s likely to stick.”
