On a sunny spring day in Southern California, Mark Parsons, sporting director of Angel City FC, made it clear that he was not interested in following traditional paths. The reason? Angel City FC is not just any club.
Parsons requested to move the interview to his office, where a presentation projected on the wall answered most of the questions about the future of Angel City. The interviewee became the host, a subtle metaphor for how one of the world’s most famous women’s soccer teams is trying to take control of its own narrative on the field.
The presentation was the same as Parsons had shown to players and staff when he took over in January. His mission, and the reason the club hired him, is summed up in the first slide: “To be world leaders in women’s football on and off the field.”
Since its launch five years ago, Angel City has quickly built a recognizable brand off the field. The NWSL team based in Los Angeles made a splash with a group of celebrity owners, including actress Natalie Portman, tennis player Serena Williams, and pop star Becky G. The team broke records for ticket sales and sponsorships before the players even touched the ball in a competitive match.
The team also generated headlines by requiring all sponsors to allocate 10% of their deals to local philanthropy. The sale of the team last year, with a valuation of $250 million, made it the most valuable women’s sports franchise in the world.
However, success on the soccer field has yet to arrive. The team has never won a playoff game and has only made the postseason once in three tries. Last year’s twelfth-place finish was marred by the first-ever point deduction in NWSL history as punishment for salary cap violations. The team’s general manager and head coach departed within four days of each other in the offseason.
The most consistent characteristic of Angel City in its early years was the inconsistency of its performances. It’s a striking juxtaposition: the team with the most defined brand off the field in women’s soccer lacked any distinguishable identity on the field.
Parsons, a 38-year-old championship-winning NWSL coach, must find solutions to that problem. He is also a new character in a Hollywood “reimagining.”
The new head coach, Alexander Straus, will arrive in Los Angeles next month after winning three consecutive Frauen-Bundesliga titles with Bayern Munich. US women’s national team forward Alyssa Thompson is playing at an MVP level to lead a young and rejuvenated squad. And the new majority owners, Willow Bay and Bob Iger (CEO of Disney), have injected both historic money and renewed optimism into the entire operation, according to internal sources.
The season’s results have begun to arrive. Angel City’s 4-3 away win on May 2 over the Washington Spirit, last year’s championship runner-up, was one of the franchise’s most important victories. A stoppage-time goal from forward Riley Tiernan, a guest who was not on the roster and who is second in the league in goals, epitomized the team’s growing tenacity, a trait that had often been lacking in the last-minute collapses of previous years.
Still, Angel City hasn’t won anything yet, and therein lies the challenge. Los Angeles is a city defined by winners, like the NBA’s Lakers and the MLB’s Dodgers. All the great work being done off the field only goes so far if Angel City is just a mid-table team every year.
Parsons stated that “he has no doubt that we have the ability to win trophies in the next three years”, but the margins are narrow between success and failure in the competitive NWSL.When things happen [here], they spread. We haven’t won trophies yet. Imagine what’s going to happen when we win trophies.
Mark Parsons
On and off the field, Angel City is at a turning point, and the business is intrinsically intertwined with soccer. Both aspects of the team recently rebooted the system.
Angel City redefined the standards within the NWSL and attracted praise from global media for being an innovative and progressive brand.
But different didn’t mean perfect. The ownership group had no experience in sports. The team was set up more like a tech startup, a structure that created behind-the-scenes conflicts as the team spent more money than any competitor.
Julie Uhrman, now the team’s CEO, co-founded Angel City with Portman and venture capitalist Kara Nortman. After receiving over a hundred rejections from traditional investors, the group connected with Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit and husband of Serena Williams. Ohanian had attended the 2019 Women’s World Cup in France and became interested in owning an NWSL team.
Ohanian invested millions and became the principal owner of Angel City, but he did not structure the deal to give himself control of the team’s board of directors. The setup created an awkward power vacuum: at one point, he was a representative on the NWSL’s board of governors, but he had to fund decisions he didn’t necessarily agree with. In a post on X last year, around the time of the sale of Angel City, Ohanian called the mistake “one of the many hard lessons I learned as a first-time sports team owner.”
The turmoil seeped into the public view last year when reports from the Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal detailed the internal struggles at the club. The combination of disagreements and growing financial needs ultimately led Angel City to seek a new controlling owner in a process that intensified in early 2024, sources confirmed.
Uhrman argues that the tension was exaggerated. “I think the biggest mistake is that there was much more alignment within Angel City than was reported,” Uhrman said, but the need for change was clear, as the team sought more money to continue on its ambitious path. “Angel City was built differently. We built ourselves like a startup,” Uhrman stated.
In the past, Angel City made cash calls or sought external funding to meet its needs, but Uhrman said that “the conversation changed” in the latest round of discussions, as investors expressed interest in getting more involved and obtaining more capital.
Uhrman said one of his biggest lessons from the team’s first season was “the immense amount of work” and the details involved in developing a style and philosophy of play. “Those are things we could have done beforehand, that we had time to do, that we just didn’t do,” he said.
“The other thing that was a big learning was the true amount of investment needed to build a culture, a staff, and a high-performance team is significantly greater than what was ever invested in any club within the NWSL when we joined,” she said. “When we joined, we had the largest sports staff at the time. We were the only staff with a dedicated representative for player care. So we felt we went above and beyond what the other clubs had done. But the reality was that, in reality, it still wasn’t enough.”
All of which set the stage for Bay and Iger to take majority control of the team, and, fundamentally, for Bay to have total control of Angel City’s board of directors.
Uhrman recently moved to her CEO position from the presidency, and Carmen Bona was hired to become the team’s president of business operations, a newly created position.
Ohanian said several times last year that he was not selling any shares of the team. His ownership percentage decreased through dilution after Bay and Iger took shares of the team from others in Angel City’s initial investor horde, a source with knowledge of the situation confirmed.
The drama unfolded more publicly than Angel City executives would have liked, but, according to all reports, from staff and club sources, there is an optimistic feeling that Angel City is at its best to date, which has allowed the team to focus more intensely on how to start winning on the field.
A new training facility is the most tangible evidence of the recent change. The team abandoned the temporary trailers it had used since its inaugural season to move across the parking lot from Cal Lutheran University and occupy a building formerly occupied by the Los Angeles Rams.
Even that is a temporary solution, it’s a four-year agreement, although Uhrman said that conversations are underway to stay there, but it’s also a big step forward. The 50,000-square-foot space is the largest NWSL training facility. Plans for the move were already underway, but they needed funding from Bay and Iger, who committed to spending another initial $50 million after the acquisition.
“The reality is that, the moment the players saw this performance center and realized that Angel City had kept its promises, had actually exceeded them and provided them with something they feel they deserved and that is above and beyond what they have experienced anywhere else, it felt like a page turn for us,” Uhrman said.
Uhrman conceded that the brand off the field and the product on the field must coexist. There are early signs of progress.
Almost eight minutes of stoppage time had passed at Audi Field in Washington, D.C., on May 2, when Tiernan smashed the ball into the back of the net for the dramatic game-winning goal against the Spirit.
Tiernan is arguably the best story in the NWSL right now. She was a non-roster invitee who earned a contract and the starting forward position for Angel City. Tiernan’s late goal at Audi Field was the second of the match and her fifth in five games, which moved her into second place in the league’s goalscoring chart at the time.
Parsons pointed to Tiernan as proof of what is being built in Los Angeles: a team focused on winning. “The biggest driver of culture is how you pick a team,” said Parsons, who won an NWSL championship and two NWSL shields as head coach of the Portland Thorns.
“When you don’t do that [choose players based on merit], and you choose people because you think they’re going to be good, that’s the biggest thing that will destroy a culture.”
Parsons’ point is implicit but important: Los Angeles is a city obsessed with stars, but making decisions based solely on external expectations is a recipe for disaster. Angel City learned the hard way in 2021 when it went to hire its first coach.
The team’s previous technical leaders identified North Carolina Courage head coach Sean Nahas as the best available candidate for their needs, but after that news leaked, fans expressed outrage that Angel City, whose brand was built around equity for women, would hire a man for the job. Angel City changed course, and while it’s impossible to say what might have been if the team had stuck to its process, the incident was an early example of how the external brand conflicted with the soccer product, and the team allowed its identity to be shaped by someone else.
Every decision made by interim coach Sam Laity and the technical staff, which Parsons leads, shapes the new identity they are trying to build.
Angel City still has star power, including two-time World Cup winner Christen Press, who, at 36 and after ACL recovery, has been limited to limited reserve opportunities so far this year. Tiernan was nobody, but earned the starting number 9 position and the right to keep it through her play. Others, like fellow rookie midfielder Macey Hodge, have done the same.
In his presentation, Parsons shared five offensive and six defensive metrics that he believes, in his more than ten years of involvement in the NWSL, lead to success in the league. Each successful team thrives in those metrics through different styles of play, he said, but the ultimate goal must be to win in these key areas ranging from expected goals without penalty, to the distance of defensive pressure from the goal and goals in the “wide area of the box”, which are a trend in the women’s game lately.
“I think to build a club you have to be very clear about the identity, very clear,” Parsons said. “That identity also has to match your culture and the community of the area you are in. Your identity also has to lead you to the things you need to do to win in this competitive league.”
He confirmed what he already suspected from afar about Angel City and Los Angeles culture by asking people like Bay and Uhrman, who are not “soccer people” but who are a snapshot of the fan base, what they want to see from the team.
“This city is about excitement, energy, winning, scoring,” he summarized. A team in Los Angeles needs to win, but it needs to do it with style. That means owning the opponent and applying pressure higher up the field.
Angel City has done it at times this season, including in that important win over Washington. Still, the telltale signs of a project in its infancy remain. For as good as Angel City has looked at times, the team has still collapsed in matches and conceded 14 goals, the second-worst mark in the league. The win over the Spirit was preceded by a 3-2 loss to the Orlando Pride that saw Angel City squander a 2-0 lead late on, and be defeated 4-0 by Gotham FC in Los Angeles.
Parsons points to those three teams and the Kansas City Current, the top four finishers from last year, as the model for Angel City’s arc. All four were at or near the bottom of the table in recent years before rebuilding to become champions or contenders.
Uhrman said he wants a home playoff game this year. Parsons would also love that, he said, but he also knows that winning a trophy in 2025, at this stage of the team’s development “is not logical” if you look at those four teams as an example.
“We want to be a legacy off the field and a dynasty on the field,” Uhrman said. “That’s not one championship, that’s many. I think we’re laying the foundation today with our staff and our facilities, our training decisions, our player decisions.”
The change is still ongoing. Straus will not arrive as head coach until June, meaning he will only have about half the season to work with the team. Straus will be tasked with showing the players how to get to the point of achieving those dreams. “My job is to make us dream a little,” Parsons said about setting high-level goals as sporting director.
Angel City is still in that dream stage, a startup making its way through some difficult lessons early on. The direction it takes next will determine whether it inserts itself into the appeal of Los Angeles, or risks being just another club.
