What Kara Nortman’s WSL investment piece says about the women’s game | OneFootball

Kara Nortman is at the centre of a new business-focused piece on WSL ownership, and the message is blunt: too many women’s teams are still being treated as add-ons rather than serious sporting assets.

That matters to She Kicks readers because this is not just a finance story. It is a story about who controls the next phase of the women’s game, how much ambition owners really have, and whether growth in the WSL will be built for teams themselves or around the needs of men’s clubs.

Who Kara Nortman is and what the profile covers

According to The Guardian, Nortman has spent the past few years building one of the most visible investment track records in women’s sport. She co-founded Angel City FC with Natalie Portman and Julie Uhrman, then helped launch Monarch Collective in 2023 as a fund focused on women’s teams and leagues.

That track record gives weight to what she says about England. Monarch has holdings across football and basketball – including San Diego Wave, Boston Legacy, Viktoria Berlin and now a minority stake in Cleveland’s WNBA franchise – and has reportedly spoken to around a dozen English clubs without completing a WSL deal.

The article itself is about more than one failed transaction. It is about why the WSL remains attractive to specialist investors while still proving difficult to crack, especially when potential buyers believe some owners view the women’s side primarily through a regulatory or accounting lens rather than as a standalone sporting project.

What the piece says about WSL investment and ownership

The sharpest line in the piece is Nortman’s description of many WSL clubs as “afterthoughts” and “adjuncts to the men’s team”. That is significant because it cuts straight through a familiar public narrative that every top-flight women’s side is now automatically part of a serious long-term growth plan.

According to The Guardian, Monarch has the money to do deals – it completed a $250m funding round last year – but wants either genuine ambition from owners or an honest admission that help is needed. Nortman’s point is not that every club must already be fully built out. It is that investors need clarity on whether they are backing a project or merely decorating one.

That matters because the WSL is entering a phase where structure and capital are starting to shape each other. As seen in earlier She Kicks coverage of WSL expansion and the new play-off picture, league growth is not only about adding teams; it is about whether clubs are equipped to cope with a bigger, more competitive and more commercially demanding top flight.

It also lands at a moment when the numbers around the game are getting harder to dismiss. She Kicks has already looked at the surge in women’s football sponsorship across Europe, and that commercial trend supports Nortman’s core argument that underinvestment is increasingly a choice, not an inevitability.

The same applies at club level. Financial gaps inside the league remain real, as shown in She Kicks coverage of WSL wage bills at Manchester United and Arsenal, and those disparities tell their own story about who is pushing forward and who is still moving at half-speed.

Nortman’s Angel City example is part of that wider case. She said the club entered the NWSL on roughly $1m in initial capital in 2020 and was sold four years later for $250m to Bob Iger and Willow Bay. Fine in principle as a proof of concept. But the larger point is not that every women’s team will suddenly hit that valuation – it is that serious operators now have evidence that community-first investment in the women’s game can create major asset value.

Why this fits a wider pattern in the women’s game

This piece fits a broader pattern in women’s football: growth is real, but control over that growth is still uneven. Clubs are attracting new money, new sponsors and new audiences, yet the key governance question remains who that growth is actually designed to serve.

That is why Nortman’s criticism of related-party deals and half-committed ownership models lands so clearly in England. If women’s teams are being moved around balance sheets more readily than they are being built as independent football businesses, then headline growth can coexist with structural weakness.

According to a TechCrunch profile of Monarch Collective, Nortman’s wider thesis is that women’s sports have moved beyond product-market doubt and into an execution phase. That fits the direction of travel in football as well – the question is less whether there is an audience, and more who is prepared to invest properly in serving it.

There is also a pyramid question sitting beneath all this. Big-city valuations and top-flight investment stories are useful signals, but they do not automatically tell the rest of the ecosystem much about access, competitive balance or how benefits flow downward. Bay Collective’s majority move for Sunderland Women shows there is appetite below the top tier too, but the model is still forming.

What this means for the WSL’s next investment cycle

The next thing to watch is not simply whether Monarch buys into a WSL club. It is whether more owners start separating rhetoric from strategy and make clear if their women’s team is central to the business or still attached to it.

England remains an obvious target for specialist investors, and Nortman said Monarch will “definitely do more” there after its first European move into Berlin. The unresolved part is whether WSL clubs want experienced partners to help build something bigger, or only extra capital at the margins. That distinction could shape the league’s next decade as much as any result on the pitch.