(CNN)For Alexis Ohanian, it all started with a simple phone call last summer. The entrepreneur and Reddit co-founder was in London and his friend wanted him to come to Paris: “He says you’re an idiot if you don’t come down to see the US play France.”
Shortly thereafter, Ohanian was among 45,000 other fans watching as Megan Rapinoe scored twice for the US women’s national team in the quarterfinals of the Women’s World Cup and led her country to their fourth world title.
“It was admittedly the first time I’ve ever been to a women’s soccer game,” he told CNN Sport, “and the crowd was electrified. I walked away thinking how did I not pay enough attention to this? How did I do this? didn’t even know there was a pro league in the States?”
A few days later, he and his wife, tennis legend Serena Williams, watched the tournament final on television. Their little daughter Olympia was walking around wearing the jersey of one of the team’s star players, Alex Morgan.
Loudly, Ohanian wondered about the possibility that Olympia would one day play the game professionally, but Serena cut him off.
“Without missing a beat, my wife was like, not until they pay her what she’s worth. And she was half joking, but not really.”
In that moment, Ohanian says he felt compelled to try to make a positive contribution to the world of women’s sport. “All right baby,” he declared, “challenge accepted!”
READ: Megan Rapinoe says ‘We all have a responsibility to make the world a better place’
raise women
Twelve months later, Angel City has become a reality. Ohanian is a lead investor in a new Los Angeles soccer project led by Hollywood actress and activist Natalie Portman.
The National Women’s Soccer League was formed in 2013 with just five teams, four have since joined and the league will be in double figures in 2021 when Racing Louisville FC joins. The following season, Angel City will have eleven teams in the league.
According to Angel City President Julie Uhrman, the idea for this new team came during Portman’s involvement with Time’s Up, a movement founded in 2018 to combat sexual harassment.
“You can see that she genuinely cares about the causes that are important to her and she does meaningful work for those causes,” Uhrman told CNN Sport, adding, “She wanted her commitment to improving women’s athletics.” , for pay equity and for make it public and meaningful.”
While promoting Angel City’s July launch, Portman spoke about the challenges that have traditionally held women’s sports back. She spoke to someone on Instagram who’s experienced it firsthand over the past 20 years – Williams.
“Our team told me that only 4% of sports coverage is women’s sports,” Portman said, “it’s crazy that we’re here in 2020 and it’s so disproportionate.”
READ: Alexis Ohanian on his marriage to Serena Williams
Swim against the current
The team, which has no official name yet — Angel City is just a nickname — and won’t play until 2022. But it is already clear that those behind the club do things differently.
For one thing, the founding investors are almost exclusively women. “I think you can count the number of clubs that are mostly female owned on one hand and probably just a couple of fingers,” Uhrman told CNN, “I mean, it’s very unusual.”
The club’s website lists the 31 founding investors, and only four are men; Alexis Ohanian is one of those underdogs.
Describing an early meeting with Uhrman, Portman and venture capitalist Kara Nortman, “the three sat down and said, ‘Let’s build this, this is how we want to build it,’ and it really mattered to them from day one, a majority to have a team led by women.
“I think we can talk about so many differences in professional sports. And I think one of the ways that we’re going to make real change is not just to prove that this is an amazing business that’s going to generate a lot of money and a lot of attention and a lot of success, but it also shows that every detail, how that organization is run can be different and as a result can be just as successful, if not more so.
“And not because it feels good, even though it feels good, but because it’s absurd that it’s not more normal.”
The club know they are trying to swim against the tide, and not just because they hope to change perceptions of professional women’s sport. They’re also starting a club in an already saturated Los Angeles sports market.
READ: Natalie Portman and Serena Williams are among the investors behind Angel City
Crowded Market
Uhrman rattles off the thugs they will soon meet in a city notorious for congestion: “Los Angeles is a market that already has nine professional sports teams and [collegiate] Powerhouses like the University of Southern California and the University of California, Los Angeles.
So the very idea of bringing another professional sports team here, bringing the third football club here is an ambitious, big idea.”
But Angel City believes their novel approach will cut through the noise and create a local, community club with global appeal. “We know that women’s football was incredibly successful during the Olympics and the World Cup,” says Uhrman.
“The question is why do they attract so much attention every four years? And I think the answer lies in awareness and awareness.”
Behind the principal investors is a supporting cast of Hollywood stars, including Jennifer Garner, Eva Longoria and Jessica Chastain, plus Serena Williams and 14 former US women’s national team players; it’s a group of women with tens of millions of followers on social media; They will use their collective platforms to shout it from the rooftops.
“There’s this general problem: if you can’t see it,” says Uhrman, “it can’t be you. If you can’t see it, you can’t follow it. [If] You can’t cheer for it, you can’t get your friend to be a part of it and so there is a systemic issue that we need to fix and change.
Uhrman continues, “We have a group of people that come from entertainment, media, sports and technology.
Ohanian says the focus will be on social media storytelling to build the brand and it seems to be working already, “Tens of thousands of people are very excited [we’ve] sold-out merchandise for a team that doesn’t exist yet.”
He compares women’s football to esports, which attracted a surge in investment five years ago, and concludes that the market has massively undervalued women’s football.
“These are clubs of players, young men, who attract hundreds of millions of fans around the world. [But] The average American doesn’t know who the best League of Legends player is, while Megan Rapinoe and Alex Morgan are already cultural icons.
“From a marketing standpoint, no offense to esports, they are far more marketable for brands looking to align with consumer spending in this country.”
In her conversation with Williams on Instagram, Portman noted that Angel City have already changed the conversation, “People are starting to think about how to do that in other sports.”
Women stand up for and uplift other women; the sisters do it for themselves. It’s an LA story that could have a Hollywood ending, and it’s a potential game changer for women’s sports around the world.
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