5 days ago
Women's sports investor Kara Nortman on outlook, experiences and opportunities
Kara Nortman has gained an interesting perspective on the women's sports landscape in recent years. She is known, most prominently, as one of the original owners of Angel City FC when the NWSL franchise launched in 2020.
Then, after a long career in venture capital, she and investor Jasmine Robinson co-founded Monarch Collective, a private equity fund and investment firm. The company's thesis is unique: It only wants to invest in women's sports.
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Now that Nortman is doing that full time, and after topping off its first $150 million fund with an extra $100 million in investment earlier this spring, she talked with The Athletic's Mike Vorkunov about how she sees the field of women's sports investment, at a time when the WNBA is expanding, the NWSL continues to grow and momentum across women's sports is accelerating at an unprecedented rate.
(Note: This interview has been edited for clarity and length.)
Can you walk me through your current investments in sports?
Monarch is the first fund to exclusively focus on women's sports. We just closed on $250 million, and I think (it is) the only fund that is raised of that magnitude that has that exclusive focus. We've now made three investments: Boston Legacy, the Boston NWSL team; Angel City, the Los Angeles NWSL team; and the San Diego Wave.
You had a lot of insight into the NWSL picture with your Angel City role and investment, as well as with Monarch and your three investments across the league. What kind of leaguewide insight have you gleaned?
I'm sort of wired to the macro view. And as a firm, we go very, very deep with our teams. But then I think it's not just the three investments, but we really are doing work across multiple sports, all the most mature sports.
So it tends to be soccer — or football between here and Europe, basketball in the U.S., golf, tennis, and we do spend time in volleyball and flag football and other areas. But I think having that perspective and working across different leagues, which are kind of evolving and emerging right now in a very different way on the women's side than the men's side, I think it just gives us perspective, candidly, on where to be patient and where to be impatient. And then it also gives us perspective, in particular, working across the teams we do, on how to share best practices.
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Building Angel City from the ground up when no one had a real P&L? We were the first team (that) went from zero to $30 million in revenue and 16,000-plus season ticket holders, and we put mission at its core. Like, what does that look like in each team? And how do you make it specific for that market?
When we're working with a team, what are the 80 percent of 'you know what you should do' that are just best practices, and then what's the 20 percent that's unique and different to you as control owners and this market with what you care about, with what your fans care about?
You said you're learning when to be patient and when to be impatient. When do you need patience?
Specifically, it's getting to know markets and stakeholders and decision makers, and understanding that that's often a multi-year-long process. I think the other part of patience is just really understanding that everything comes in stages.
When you emerge from startup land and start building things more entrepreneurially, as I have, you can sometimes rush to secure the best media contract, the best merchandising platform, and the best X, Y, and Z in every role. You've got to define (what is) best for the stage of development, and what are the two or three things that are your highest priority, that are going to have the most impact long-term.
Usually, that's the control owner, who you're working with, who you're bringing in to lead the team day-to-day. And then length of contracts, around things that will drive long-term revenue and visibility for teams at the league level. Those are things I think are deeply thoughtful and strategic about. So that's our patience.
I think a lot of people get impatient when they can't get the actual thing they want done. Like, they can't invest in a particular team or league, and then they just go do something else that takes up all their time, versus being patient and waiting for the right thing, even if it takes a year or two or three to get there.
Have you had to wait to join a team or league that you wanted to be part of? What has been the level of demand for your product compared to the level of demand in the broader market?
We have a lot of conversations very early — or even first, where we can be — and we have been to many people who we don't necessarily work with: 'How would you think about structuring this? What kind of partner are you looking for?'
What are your questions around this kind of strategic plan for this soccer team or this basketball team or this kind of league in another part of the world? And where we can just show up and take all of our knowledge and information — we all are ex-operators in sports — and just be helpful.
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That has led to a couple of our investments. It's how we started with Boston. We just started helping Boston. We've done that with many others.
We have to be thoughtful about that now, because a lot of people call us for help. We're very disciplined on how we set things up for partnership, both in terms of do you actually care about representation and the impact you can have by not just hiring the same old people?
When we underwrite something, it's not just the fundamentals of the market, but it's 'Who are we working with?' and are we going to really empower a team to be the top 20 percent of any team out there?
I think what has been reflected to us by some of our limited partners is we're great at dropping everything when a great opportunity shows up, digging in and doing the work.
For being passive investors, it doesn't sound like you're very passive.
I don't know what that word means. We very much abide by conflict policy and league rules. We view ourselves as change-agent capital at a stage where women's sports need it.
The top teams are edging toward a billion dollars in revenue worldwide. There is a lot of work to be done to take teams from zero to something. So we are passive by league definitions. We stay completely out of the sporting side of the operation. Europe has different kinds of considerations.
But we show up with our expertise, our talent, our playbooks, and we help people build a fan experience, as well as think through the business side, including real estate and practice facilities. With Boston, I think we're on the phone with them three times a day, but in thoughtful ways.
With Angel City, it had the control sale to Willow Bay and Bob Iger at a record-setting number a few months ago. What did that mean for Monarch?
I think for Monarch, it was a huge validation that we cannot just come in when there's a transaction with all the known pieces, but that we can come into moments where other people may not know how to price or even how to move forward with imperfect information. And we have a lot of confidence to understand how to evaluate things, where transaction multiples are all over the place, maturity of organizations is all over the place. We can come in, really thoughtfully look at a situation and come up with a win for all.
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You also invested in Boston Legacy FC. The initial rollout for that franchise and the BOS Nation branding didn't go well. What happened? And how did Monarch help the control owners and management navigate that situation?
I think a huge part of what we do is we immediately drop everything, and it doesn't matter the time of day, the weekend, and we all roll up our sleeves and say, 'OK, what's the problem? What's the solution?'
And then we create a psychologically positive space to understand, 'OK, is this a crisis?' Is this the opposite? Is this just fine? And then how seriously you take it is important, not just for the response to the world, but for how you learn and grow and develop as an organization where there's a lot of pressure in women's sports to live up to the value in their missions.
Specifically on Boston Legacy, we all got on the phone right away. The team is excellent. Came up with, quickly, a couple of key hires, a process to understand what was missed. We extend our network … who are the two or three other people who've gone through this? Get on the phone. And then how do you go and listen to the community?
I think what's interesting is on the other end of it, and now, having sat through many calls and where the team was thoughtful and deliberate about how to decide how to move forward. I think a negative has become a big positive. Everyone in the world of sports knows about the Boston NWSL team.
The organization got so much stronger and more mature through it. And it's not whether you make a mistake, it's how you react to it and respond to it.
You announced another $100 million for your fund last month. Is that a reflection of the growth of the ambitions of Monarch or is that a reflection that you need more money now to be able to invest substantively in women's sports?
We try to be thoughtfully ambitious. What that means is, if you go raise too much money right now, what are you going to put it to work in? And then what's your value proposition behind it, and can you live up to it?
The women's sports market — Deloitte just came out with their numbers — is $2.4 billion compared to half a trillion for the men's. How many premium opportunities are there? And how can you do real work against them if you're kind of spread thin across a lot of them?>
So our ambitions have always been big, but we've always wanted to map them to being able to put capital to work in a thoughtful way that aligned with our strategy. Our strategy has not changed. We'll make seven, eight, nine investments out of this pool of capital. And so that is exactly what we said when we raised the first dollar and closed it.
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What happened was twofold on that first question. One was that you saw the market develop much faster than I think anyone expected, so more teams with real P&Ls across soccer and basketball. Again, when we started, it was just Angel City. Now you have a couple of teams — a few teams in the WNBA, a handful of teams in the NWSL. So valuations went up.
We tend to be doing the most work alongside control owners, and we wanted to be able to put the right amount of capital against that when we do a transaction. Then our limited partners saw our work and were very impressed with how we were doing things, and wanted to put more capital in.
Are you part of any bidding group for a WNBA team as part of its expansion process?
Unfortunately, I can't comment on that one.
I would say that the quality and number of opportunities we can spend time on at Monarch have also grown, really, exponentially since we started the fund. So we don't feel like any one thing is a must-do.
We try to be thoughtful about who we work with and the fundamentals of the market. Do they want partners like us? Do we share values? And then, how can we structure this thoughtfully from a pricing standpoint? Because we spend our lives working on this and need to make sure we deliver returns as well.
What are the biggest opportunities in women's sports now? What are we going to be talking about in a year when it comes to women's sports investing?
I think we're going to be talking about how spikes translate into kind of smoother curves. And I think that's one of the things we're talking about coming out of March Madness, which is you see these spikes over time. I like to talk about the 60,000 people who showed up in Liverpool to watch the Dick, Kerr Ladies in 1920 before the FA banned women from playing football there in 1921. The hard work comes in between.
And so I think it's going to be the non-sexy stuff. It's not: What's something that's coming out of the blue? It's: How do you get all the teams in all the leagues to raise attendance and to build a consistent fan experience that's best for their market? And then how do we do adjacent programming along with media rights to kind of build the interest and intrigue? What are we doing with our rights in media, commerce and gaming?
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It is building out these smooth curves like this, coming out of the spikes, and not being so obsessed with the vanity metric of, 'Did you break a record, post-Caitlin Clark?' and more around, like, 'How is everybody doing with the blood, sweat and tears part?'
All the less sexy stuff that comes from just doing the work behind the scenes. And if we get half the league, three-quarters of the league getting three-quarters of their arenas and stadiums filled for every game, I mean, media rights will continue to take off.
You know the growth is going to be enormous, but it's going to come with hard work.
