Inside Washington Spirit Owner Michele Kang's Plan To Revolutionize Women's Soccer

Forbes

4 days ago

Settling into a gray upholstered chair in her living room in central London, beneath an enormous chandelier that makes even the nearby grand piano look compact, Michele Kang finds her mind drifting to the PBS home improvement series This Old House. She is fresh off a meeting with architects—down a glass-encased elevator to the conference room below her five-bedroom Knightsbridge apartment—and she has buildings on the brain.
She enjoys design, she says, clad in a cardinal-red double-breasted Valentino dress coat against the chill of a February afternoon, but she doesn't have the patience to slog through a long television season. 'I just want to see the before-and-after picture,' says Kang, 65. 'Who cares about the middle? I want to see the final product.'
Her entire life, Kang has focused on the endgame. Her outcome-oriented approach has made her a phenomenally successful tech entrepreneur—ranking 28th on Forbes' 2025 list of America's Richest Self-Made Women (which publishes on June 3) with a net worth estimated at $1.2 billion. But while she might privately wish that she could skip the process, she's also a woman who, after earning an economics degree from the University of Chicago and an MBA from Yale, meticulously mapped out the next 30 years of her career. She decided she would spend ten years consulting, to learn all aspects of a business, and then a decade as an executive before finally achieving her lifelong dream: becoming a CEO. She checked that last box in 2008 when she founded Cognosante, a health care IT company, which she sold last year for more than $1 billion.
Acquaintances and business partners describe Kang as unfailingly prepared. John Textor, a former executive chairman of sports-focused streaming service FuboTV, says he will try to catch her off-guard at her other home in Florida, but 'it doesn't matter how early I get to her. She's still perfectly ready to go—couture, perfect hair, on her game. She's been taking notes while I'm still waking up.'
Even so, Kang never could have foreseen her second act. Six years after a chance meeting at an event on Capitol Hill awakened an interest in professional soccer, she is the owner of three prominent teams: the Washington Spirit of the National Women's Soccer League (NWSL), OL Lyonnes of France's Première Ligue and the London City Lionesses, recently promoted to England's Women's Super League. Even more unexpected, the humble Kang finds herself widely recognized as the global face of investing in women's sports.
GOAL GETTER | Michele Kang's London City Lionesses (top) earned promotion to the Women's Super League by claiming the title in England's second division this year—and it wasn't her first championship as a team owner. Her Lyon club (middle) has won back- to-back titles in France, and the Washington Spirit, built around star Trinity Rodman, won the NWSL Championship in 2021.
By The FA/getty images; uefa/Getty Images; brad smith/isi photos/getty images
'I didn't know who Leo Messi was,' she says of the Argentine soccer superstar, laughing. 'Now, here I am.'
Kang took control of the Spirit in 2022 at a $35 million valuation, then considered an astronomical price for a women's team. In reality, it was a bargain. Forbes estimates the Spirit are worth $130 million, and they aren't the only NWSL club to have seen such dramatic appreciation. Last year, L.A.'s Angel City FC sold at a record $250 million valuation to Disney CEO Bob Iger and his wife, Willow Bay. Then, in January, the league selected Denver as its 16th franchise for a $110 million expansion fee. 'Michele really set the valuation boom in motion,' NWSL commissioner Jessica Berman says.
Once again, Kang has an ambitious goal in mind, and this time, she is expecting her grand plan to take a lot less than 30 years. In the not-too-distant future, she believes, women's soccer teams will be trading for $1 billion or more—and she's willing to spend whatever it takes to make that happen. Between purchasing her three clubs, seeding a handful of women-focused sports startups and donating $30 million to the U.S. Soccer federation, Kang entered the sports world with an ante of at least $200 million. And she's not done: Her February meeting with architects centered on her plans to construct a practice facility in Kent, southeast of London, for the Lionesses, and in April, she announced what amounted to a $25 million donation to U.S. Soccer as she handed over the nonprofit research arm of her holding company, which focuses on the biomechanics of female athletes.
At the same time, Kang and her fellow owners face a steep climb to approach the valuations of the 124 teams in the four major North American men's sports leagues, which are all worth at least $1 billion and have appreciated nearly 1,800% on average since Forbes started valuing them in 1998. By comparison, the women's leagues are still in their infancy, and many of the clubs have yet to show they're able to generate real money. For example, despite having won the NWSL title in 2021 and reached the 2024 championship game, Kang's Spirit posted roughly $15 million in regular-season revenue last year. Meanwhile, Major League Soccer's D.C. United, playing home games at the same stadium, collected $90 million in 2024, according to Forbes estimates.
Those concerns—paired with massive pay gaps between male and female players, unequal media coverage and occasionally outright discrimination—have led some critics to write off the recent women's sports boom as nothing more than a social cause.
Kang isn't buying that.
'This is not charity; this is not some corporate DEI project,' she says. 'I'm on a mission to prove that this is good business—not just a business, but a good business.'
Kang considers herself a 'very, very private person' and says she is still adjusting to the spotlight that has come with her involvement in professional sports. Sitting with a reporter in her home, she chuckles. 'You're going to interview me for an hour?' she says. 'I don't have a story for an hour.'
But don't mistake her modesty for timidity. 'When she comes in the room, she commands that room, and that's hard to do—especially in a male-dominated situation,' says billionaire NBA legend Earvin 'Magic' Johnson, who joined the Spirit last year as a minority investor and strategic partner. Berman, the NWSL's commissioner, remembers her first time meeting Kang, at a breakfast in 2022: 'She was the most put-together human I had ever seen—a little bit intimidating for me.'
From her earliest days, Kang has had no trouble taking charge. Growing up in South Korea as a self-described tomboy, she refused to practice piano and would play sports instead. (Years later, after a few of her friends went on to study at Juilliard, she joked with her mother, 'You should have made me practice!')
While Kang, whose given name is Yongmee, aspired to follow in her father's footsteps by studying in America, her parents weren't exactly keen to see their youngest daughter cross the Pacific. But she managed to convince them that, amid the 1980s political unrest that pushed South Korea from dictatorship to democracy, they were better off paying for college than saving for a wedding. 'I used a slight threat that 'If you don't let me go, then who knows what could happen to me?'' Kang, now divorced, recalls with a knowing smile.
After business school, she became a partner at Ernst & Young, specializing in the high-tech and telecommunications sectors, and in 2000 she jumped to TRW as head of corporate strategy for the nonautomotive divisions at the conglomerate, which developed weapons and spacecraft. When the company was acquired by aerospace giant Northrop Grumman in a hostile takeover two years later, she saw an opportunity. 'They gave me this health IT business that was failing miserably,' she says. 'They felt like, if you screw up, you can't really do damage.'
In fact, Kang's timing was perfect. In 2004, President George W. Bush began a push to guarantee Americans access to electronic medical records and created the Nationwide Health Information Network to help. Northrop Grumman was among the four companies selected to build the network and secured a $68 million contract to digitize the medical records of U.S. Defense Department employees. Between 2003 and 2007, Kang more than tripled the revenue of her division.
Armed with new expertise in health care IT—an industry that was (and some would argue remains) technologically antiquated—Kang then decided to strike out on her own. In 2008, from an office above her garage in Bethesda, Maryland, she launched Cognosante.
To hear Kang tell it, nothing Cognosante did was revolutionary. But she recognized that as hospitals and pharmacies moved their paper records online, too many systems were popping up that couldn't communicate with one another—using different file formats for insurance information, for instance, or different codes to identify diseases. Cognosante essentially connected the dots, helping doctors and health care professionals access notes and imaging results from anywhere, with a particular focus on improving the flow of information at state government agencies.
This go-round, her timing wasn't ideal. Within months of Cognosante's founding, the subprime mortgage crisis sent the economy into a nosedive. With banks in disarray, Kang sold around $700,000 of her Northrop Grumman stock to fund her business. 'I had a lot of offers to invest in what I was doing, and I didn't take any of the money—not because I didn't need money but rather because, if I took their money, I could not take the kind of risk that I was planning to take,' she says.
After emerging from the financial turmoil, Cognosante expanded its client base to federal agencies, including the Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. It also extended its services into areas such as cybersecurity and Medicaid fraud detection. The company got to a point where, Kang says, she had two options: go public or bring in new management. Last year, she chose to sell, to a subsidiary of Irish IT giant Accenture.
'At some point, if you really want to take the company to the next level to compete against the big guys, then you need a different set of leaders,' Kang says. 'Even when I started, I knew that ten years was going to be the maximum for me to lead this organization.'
Kang imagined that her next decade would center on philanthropy, and that was still the plan when she wrote a roughly $2 million check for 35% of the Spirit in 2020, not long after meeting the team's owners at a D.C. reception held for the U.S. women's national soccer team, which had just won the World Cup.
'It was not an itch—I didn't know anything about it,' she says of the NWSL at that time. But she liked the idea of supporting female athletes, and she believed that if the league could help close the gap with men's sports, 'the future is just incredible—not only for the players but, more importantly, a lot of young girls.' Besides, she says, across her career, 'I'm the first one to jump in when everyone else is trying to figure it out.'
'I see the value, and if I don't start valuing it, who else is going to do it for us?' says Kang, who paid $35 million for her first team.
Kang got her chance after a scandal engulfed the team a year later. Three players told the Washington Post that Spirit coach Richie Burke had repeatedly screamed at them, insulted them and threatened to bench them, during games and at practice. Kaiya McCullough, a rookie defender, told the Post that Burke had made racially insensitive jokes and that the experience had sent her 'into survival mode.' She questioned whether she would ever play soccer again.
Burke denied any wrongdoing but was fired, and an ensuing leaguewide investigation uncovered similar allegations against coaches at three other clubs. The Spirit's players published an open letter calling on Steve Baldwin, a tech executive who was then the club's CEO and majority owner, to sell the team to Kang. Negotiations turned ugly, with Baldwin reportedly accusing Kang of organizing 'a coup attempt,' but she eventually took control by besting an offer from billionaire bond investor Todd Boehly, who turned around and bought the men's and women's clubs of English soccer powerhouse Chelsea FC for a combined $5.2 billion in May 2022.
Kang's $35 million price tag shocked observers, given that valuations in the NWSL historically had been under $5 million and that, despite the success of the U.S. women's national team, women's pro soccer had a bumpy track record. The Women's United Soccer Association, a $40 million effort to capitalize on American excitement around the 1999 Women's World Cup, began play with eight teams in 2001 and folded after three seasons, reportedly racking up $100 million in losses. A second attempt, known as Women's Professional Soccer, also managed to eke out three seasons, from 2009 to 2011.
The NWSL arrived in 2013 and showed more promise—enough that Kang was comfortable raising her stake to an estimated 80% in the 2022 sale, despite the league's lack of profitability. 'I see the value, and if I don't start valuing it, who else is going to do it for us?' she says. 'Whether I paid $5 million or $35 million wasn't going to make a whole lot of difference.'
Changes came quickly, with investments in the Spirit's front office and coaching staff and a reinforced roster around superstar forward Trinity Rodman (the daughter of NBA great Dennis Rodman). When Kang first joined the Spirit, its annual revenue was an estimated $5 million; by 2024, that number had tripled. Attendance climbed to nearly 14,000 per game, up from fewer than 6,000 in 2022.
'She hasn't wavered on spending money not only to make the Spirit better but also women's sports better, period,' says Magic Johnson, who notes that he had an opportunity to invest in the NWSL's Angel City FC but was won over by Kang and ended up putting his money in the Spirit. 'She won't stop until she's happy about where women's sports can go and she's achieved the goal of taking it there, even if she had to do it herself.'
Looking beyond Washington, Kang agreed in May 2023 to buy 53% of the French club then known as Olympique Lyonnais Féminin, separating the operations of one of the world's best women's teams from its male counterpart. Later that year, she acquired the London City Lionesses and formed Kynisca Sports International to house her soccer investments under one roof, in London. She is now targeting a South American squad.
Multiclub ownership is common in men's professional sports—for example, City Football Group owns more than a dozen soccer teams, including Manchester City and New York City FC. But that model—and the operating efficiencies that come with it—is a new development in the women's game. By centralizing global scouting and player and coach development, Kang can reduce the organization's spending, and she hopes to attract global brands as sponsors because of her presence in multiple countries. The company is also developing best practices with its facilities as Kang works to build new training centers for all three of her clubs.
'Michele shows up, and she starts talking about the incidence of ligament injuries during the menstrual cycle—she's putting money into research on women's bodies and how to train as women,' says Textor, whose Eagle Football Holdings owned the Lyon team, now known as OL Lyonnes, before Kang's purchase and maintains a minority stake. 'She's definitely not the boat floating up on the rising tide. She is the reason the tide rises.'
Now, others are—finally—matching her enthusiasm. The NWSL has added blue-chip sponsors including AT&T and Google in the past year, and it achieved a financial breakthrough in 2023 when it signed media rights deals with CBS, ESPN, Ion and Amazon Prime Video collectively worth $240 million over four years—roughly 60 times the league's previous fees.
Kang, at the center of it all, has a hard time wrapping her mind around everything she has accomplished in five years, saying, 'The fact that I'm talking about the word legacy is surreal.' But she is also enjoying the moment and taking pride in her teams, trying to travel to most Spirit games. When the topic of the 2024 championship game loss is broached, she can only laugh and say, 'Don't go there.'
So will the Spirit avenge the defeat and raise the trophy in November? 'Absolutely,' she says with a grin. 'Mark my words.'