By just about any metric, Angel City FC had a stellar first year as a professional soccer club. They have partners and sponsorship dollars galore, packed stadiums, thousands of season ticket holders, and had healthy merch sales. But if past experience has taught teams anything, it’s that capitalizing on the upswell of interest in women’s soccer requires more than just sitting back and letting fans come to you; it takes someone with an actual plan, and then enough people to execute the plan. It takes upfront investment — in both labor and money — and not just an idea that if you build it, they will come.
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That’s where Angel City has perhaps most pushed the bar higher and higher for NWSL teams, and many pro women’s sports teams, as they seem to print money compared to predecessors in WUSA, WPS, and even in their own league. The club has sold merchandise in all 50 states and in 46 countries outside the U.S., to the tune of mid-seven figures in merch revenue, per ACFC head of revenue Jess Smith. They’ve accumulated over $40 million in sponsorships, when you factor in long-term contracts like multi-year deals. Approximately $4.5 million of that sponsorship money is going back into the community programs due to Angel City’s “10% model.” Ticketing revenue is somewhere around the high-seven or low-eight figures, also factoring in long-term contracts, with 1% of net ticket proceeds going back to players who participate in ACFC’s optional revenue-sharing program. Total revenue for their first year operating as a club: Somewhere in the mid-eight figures, though the club declined to give an exact figure.
“As far as I’m concerned, we’re going to be the first women’s team to have a billion dollar valuation in five years,” said Angel City president Julie Uhrman in a call with The Athletic. “There’s no better investment today than women’s sports.”
Like so many sports teams — both men’s and women’s — Angel City isn’t quite making a profit yet, despite all these million-dollar values floating around. But they are projecting profitability within the next three to five years. That’s thanks in part to Smith and her team of about 30 people working on data and analytics, ticketing, sponsorship, merchandise, and event operations. Speaking to The Athletic, Smith and data analyst Drew Henning detailed what went so right for Angel City in 2022 and how they plan to improve for 2023.
“We’re in a really great place revenue-wise,” said Smith. “We renewed our season tickets close to 90%. We’re moving forward on a pretty detailed group sales strategy to make sure that we are (able to) reach out to certain communities and make sure we’re building relationships. … We’re really thinking through expanding the fan base.”
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Who is the Angel City fan base? Los Angeles was a welcome member of the league’s expansion precisely because of the possibilities of such a large market, and on the California portion of the west coast, where the NWSL had previously not had a presence to go with the Pacific Northwest bastions of Portland and Seattle.
“Our ticketed database actually mirrors Los Angeles,” said Smith. “We’re not just families. We’re not only people driving minivans. Of course families are important to us and big, big keys for our demographic. But we’re also 20-year-olds that are going to any entertainment event, (and) coming and building our supporter groups and building that culture. We’re also 50-, 60-, 70-year-olds that are looking for a community at that point in their life and showing up and sitting beside fans talking about how they wish that this had happened sooner.”
Henning also called the ACFC fan base “vastly diverse” based on polling data conducted by the club.
“Obviously ethnically-wise very diverse,” he said, “But in terms of where they are within their lives — in terms of household income, number of kids, the types of jobs or social class that they fit into, white collar, blue collar. … There’s somebody who might make like six figures, who has the money to buy suites or buy something premium. They’re sitting with our supporters, because they just want to be in all the action.”
If you mapped ticket-buyers against a map of LA, it would simply be a map of LA, according to Smith.
“We actually were hyper aware of that during the whole deposit time to conversion,” said Smith. “Julie (Uhmran) and I were constantly asking, needing to know, are we missing people? Are we only, like, Malibu moms? That means we don’t have the right message of inclusivity to be drawing these different groups from around Los Angeles. And what we found is that we mirror that in a great way.”
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So you have all these fans, and you have data on what kind of fans they are. Henning said that the club uses a combo of information sources, including Ticketmaster data and Personicx, a marketing analysis tool that allows users to organize customers by things like demographics and buying behavior. The club looks at categories like gender, age range, education, occupation, income, and race or ethnicity, and they also look at behavior like the average spend of customers on Angel City tickets, or ticket holders on game day, from who arrives early, to who goes to the store to buy merch, to who stays afterwards to get autographs.
Some data points: The items that Angel City has sold out consistently are often their $100-200 items like custom jerseys, because they’re speaking to an audience that is seeking high quality items, particularly after years of living in a women’s soccer merch desert — local and national. (Some top jersey sellers: Sydney Leroux, Ali Riley, Jun Endo, Simone Charley, and of course, Christen Press.) Or one of their biggest demographics in terms of purchasing behavior typically spends about $2,100 on average for seats throughout the season. The money is clearly there, and fans want to spend it if they perceive they’re getting value for their dollar.
They don’t just look at gameday fans, either; Smith candidly pointed out that like most live events, only 1% of the fans of the event will ever be able to attend in person, whether they’re not local or aren’t able to travel to games. They ask what international fans are doing: What they’re buying, who’s doing the buying, and how that might differ from fans in other sports markets.
“How are we harnessing the power of Angel City to be really that Yankees cap of women’s sports?” Smith posited.
In order to sell to their customers, they have to understand them, and they have to understand how to talk to them. The former they’re starting to capture with all their surveys and ticketing information; the latter is more complex.
Henning told a story about a friend who went to an NHL game to encapsulate the importance of the right messaging for the right fan; within a couple of days, the team had emailed the friend asking was he interested in a suite? “He’s just like, I’m a college kid with no money. Why are you sending me information about a suite rental?” Henning said, laughing.
“We’re just getting started on the data side,” said Smith. “The reason we wanted to do it is as a business, you should know who you’re talking to, number one, so that you can actually monetize your business accordingly. So it’s always been important to us. But two, we also knew innately that the misconceptions of who women’s soccer fans were, were not accurate or really given enough attention to (in order) to actually understand the power of that demographic.”
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Smith was clear that, in her opinion, based on the work Angel City has been doing, the understanding of women’s soccer fans in the business context has been woefully inadequate. Of course, fans and teams alike have felt this anecdotally for decades. Money left on the table from not having enough merchandise to sell, or not selling merch at all. Undervaluing broadcast deals, not bothering to promote games to sell tickets, not investing in a better product to make it look more appealing. Angel City is now out to prove it quantitatively.
“Valuations to date are wrong for women’s sports because they’ve never been customized. They’ve only been done the same way that they value men’s sports,” said Smith, rattling off categories like media impressions, what networks the games are on, how many jerseys sold, and so on. She said that Angel City themselves had been presented with an evaluation that their front-of-jersey sponsorship was high six figures, maybe a million dollars at most. (DoorDash’s five-year sponsorship ultimately landed in the “low eight-figure” range per Sports Business Journal.)
“The issue with that is that (for) women’s sports, what these valuation systems do is they also historically look at what your peers get for the same items,” Smith explained. “Say it’s for Kansas City, and I’m looking at LA and New York, maybe you don’t necessarily get the same media market value. So you’re going to be maybe 15% lower, so innately that doesn’t serve women’s sports correctly, because it’s only media based, which isn’t necessarily the main strength at this moment in time for what it is. And so what we sold and how we were able to get the values is that we shared very transparently that that valuation system isn’t actually doing the diligence to women sports that it serves.”
The needle has been moving; look at the $35 million that Michele Kang dropped on the Washington Spirit, or the rumored $50+ million asking price for the Portland Thorns. Maybe some of the talk about rising valuations is just noise, but in Smith’s opinion, there is a very real value to not just women’s soccer, but women’s sports in general that needs the right understanding. “I think the realness of the valuations,” said Smith, “Is that it’s a unique product offering. You truly can’t buy anything that makes consumers respect you, in my opinion, (for moving) towards the path of equity that’s like women’s sports.”
Smith called women’s soccer audiences an unduplicated value set, a group of consumers that really do care about the brands that their teams align with, and the values represented by membership in the team’s fan group. She pointed to the time a group of fans tracked her down at a game — “No one’s looking for me at a game. No one’s like, ‘Where’s the head of revenue?’” — to specifically tell her they liked the Cedars-Sinai sponsored corner kick, and had made shirts that said “Cedars-Sinai corner kick.” And they have real data that shows many of their fans are more likely to use the businesses that partner with Angel City, like seeking healthcare at Cedars-Sinai, or shopping at grocery store Sprouts.
“Women’s sports, you have to value your values, right?” said Smith. “Yes, you might be able to buy a Super Bowl ad or you might be able to go buy media impressions with a men’s professional team, but you’re not triggering to consumers that you believe in equity. You’re not showing to consumers that what you’re buying actually, is…a better tomorrow. And there’s a value in that. So yes, I can’t go in and say, ‘Hey, I’m going to have the same number of impressions that you will from this entity,’ but I can go in and say when you partner with Angel City, your consumers know that you stand for this and they are more likely to buy (your product) and support your brand. And not only do that, but become loyal to it and actually talk about it.”
Smith and the Angel City revenue team are acutely aware of the pitfalls of equity in sports being one of their big valuation points, pitfalls like sportswashing. She said that she has walked away from several conversations over the past two-and-a-half years, whether it might be as obvious as a company that doesn’t support gay marriage, or a company “where maybe they’ve had a bad press moment come out,” Smith said, “And they think that by partnering with Angel City, they’re going to get the benefit of that and it will wash out the negative. We’re not willing to be that person for (a company), regardless of the dollar amount.”
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“Our fans are really into community efforts and politics,” Hemming said. “They want to know who we’re donating to, what organization it’s going towards, how much of it is going towards the organization.”
Smith said that she will be expanding her revenue team in 2023; her position is “always hire into revenue.” They’ll be taking that money they earned in 2022 and pumping it right back into the club.
“Something I don’t think we’ve spoken about enough within women’s sports, and still isn’t, is that to get equity, you do need money,” said Smith. “You actually need real resources, you need significant ownership, you need great viewership, you need an incredible viewing experience, you need an incredible game experience. It obviously attracts other resources like ticketing revenue and sponsorship revenue, but you have to have all of those things together that actually drive towards equity. So everybody needs to have a for-profit brain on when it comes to women’s sports building.”
“We’re not going against market factors,” said Uhrman. “Women’s sports is growing. Attention and awareness is growing. Investment is growing. Kansas City, San Diego, all the teams in the playoffs proved if you invest, the fans show up. And everybody proved the fans show up when you put it on prime time. The money’s there, you just have to build the product.”
(Photo: Jayne Kamin-Oncea-USA TODAY Sports)
