Multi-club ownership is spreading in women’s football – but is it good news? | OneFootball

When the billionaire American businesswoman and investor Michele Kang spoke to journalists after the Sweden international Kosovare Asllani and former Paris Saint-Germain manager Jocelyn Prêcheur had been recruited by her then WSL2 side London City Lionesses, she was candid about the significance multi-club ownership can play in women’s sport.

“I am fully aware of the negative connotation of multi-club ownership on the men’s side,” Kang said in June 2024. “But I will submit to you that multi-club ownership is a necessity, not a luxury or greed, on the women’s side because we need to invest to the level that the players deserve to deliver on the potential of the women’s game.”

It was a bold statement and, looking at the current landscape, many others clearly believe she has a point. Alongside Kang’s Kynisca are a host of other multi-club owners and investor groups.

Mercury 13, founded by the sports entrepreneurs Victoire Cogevina Reynal and Mario Malavé, announced in September it had purchased a second club, Bristol City joining Como in its portfolio. The Bay FC investor Sixth Street announced the launch of its multi-club ownership organisation, Bay Collective, in January 2025. Crux Football, launched by the former New Zealand international Bex Smith and backed by investors including the former Netflix executive and early Angel City investor Cindy Holland, was announced in August, with the unveiling of its first club, Montpellier, coming two months later.

Meanwhile, Monarch Collective, co-founded by the venture capitalist Kara Nortman, who also co-founded the NWSL side Angel City, and the investor Jasmine Robinson, last month announced its minority investment in Viktoria Berlin, the group’s first European investment after investments in Angel City, Boston Legacy and San Diego Wave.

Nortman co-founded Angel City with the businesswoman Julie Uhrman and actor Natalie Portman and, in Viktoria Berlin, saw many similarities with the LA-based project that began her women’s football investment journey. “It was just the creativity and the execution, those two things going hand in hand,” says Nortman.

Viktoria Berlin’s women’s team had been split from the men’s in 2022, when six female investors, including the former Germany international and two-time World Cup winner Ariane Hingst, acquired 75% of the team. They built up a group of almost 250 investors with 90% female ownership before Monarch came on board.

“The way they went about doing it, finding the perfect club, really seeing its potential, and then building the relationships and structuring it was incredibly clever and inspiring,” says Nortman. “I actually got chills after the first conversation with them. I was just lit up and they reminded me of me, Julie and Natalie in the early days.”

The decision to come into European football, and Germany in particular, for their first investment outside the US was also pragmatic.

“We are thesis-driven, we are proactive, we really look at everything: league structure, GDP, the ownership group we can partner with,” says Nortman. “We spend a lot of time with leagues, we spend time with teams; each country we look at in its own distinct way.

“What we particularly liked about Germany was a few things. It’s got the largest GDP in Europe and is a very desirable place to do business. The audience potential is attractive there. The football and women’s football market specifically is primed and ready to go.

“Then Germany is the second most successful national team on the international stage and so the grassroots piece, that dream for young girls and the quality of domestic talent, is huge. Berlin is also one of the most prominent cities in Europe, it’s an arts capital, a sports capital, an EDM [electronic dance music] capital, and where there’s a real opportunity to continue to build something that is female-first and female-forward.”

These are the conversations being had around women’s football and Nortman is keen for clubs across the world, including in England, to view what they are doing as a model for what’s possible.

“This is a version of something that every club can do,” she says. “There’s always a structural solution. It may not look exactly the same, but it’s about how you create, in this case, total independence but also an independent spirit that thoughtfully leverages all of the history, shared services and other things that exist within the men’s club and then build the women’s team in a way where it’s really the focus of a group of people who are operating it day-to-day with a thoughtful partner behind the scenes with capital and operating expertise.”

The ambition is big. “We are building the Real Madrids, the Manchester Uniteds, the Dallas Cowboys, the Golden State Warriors, the Los Angeles Dodgers of tomorrow, but it’s not going to happen by accident,” says Nortman.

Women’s football has changed the course of Nortman’s career in ways she couldn’t have imagined. “Passion doesn’t come from making money, it’s doing the things that you’re talking to people about at cocktail parties and at two in the morning and driving your husband crazy over,” she says.

There are concerns over whether multi-club ownership and private investment are right for women’s football, but whether you agree with multi-club ownership or not, whether you agree with private equity involvement in women’s football or not, for now, it is here to stay, welcomed and embraced by clubs, leagues and federations as a way to spread the load of uplifting a historically underfunded and undersupported sport.

Many of those involved in championing private investment in women’s football are very well-meaning people, many are women, all are primarily driven by a passion for equality and a belief in the potential of women’s football (while profitability is not an immediate prospect). Agree or disagree with the method, and the systems that allow a sport born from working-class factories to become something very different, they are championing it with the financial tools they understand in the way they know how in the current economic system.

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