Michele Kang is spending millions to scoop up women's soccer teams around the world. What's her plan?

LOS ANGELES -- When club owner and magnate Michele Kang sat in the "Futbol W" studio in L.A. to speak with ESPN, there was an obvious question lingering -- and one without an obvious answer.

Earlier that day, Kang announced her latest large investment in the U.S. Soccer Federation at an event a few blocks away. Seemingly everyone in town for the game between the U.S. women's national team and Brazil was asking the same question: Why? Why had Kang, who owns three professional women's soccer teams, offered to hand over to U.S. Soccer a business she poured $25 million into building -- after she already committed to donating $30 million to the federation over the next five years?

The question comes with some awe, but it is accompanied by the confusion that surrounds a first-of-its-kind splash. Kang, who has been building what appears to be the women's soccer version of City Football Group, has expanded her empire dramatically in a short time. So why donate elsewhere?

"At the end of the day, our vision and our goal is to get all the female teams to adopt these new standards and the way we train our female athletes," Kang told ESPN. "I thought that would be much better accomplished by an organization like U.S. Soccer as opposed to something private."

Kang is trying to transform the women's game by bringing more young players in and raising standards -- not just in the U.S. but around the world -- and a task that big requires buy-in from others. As Kang put it: "We need to do this on a massive scale, because we're talking about half of this population."

Kang has found an unlikely ally in USWNT head coach Emma Hayes. Hayes comes from a long soccer background that Kang readily admits she doesn't have, but both women speak similarly about detesting constant comparisons to the men's game and both emphasize the need to view everything through "a female lens," as Hayes recently detailed in her long-term plan for U.S. Soccer.

"[All parties] need to come together to make this product, women's football, women's soccer, the best sports entertainment product," Kang told ESPN. "And it's not that simple, unlike most of the businesses where you just go into a factory and you build something and you come out. But here, multiple stakeholders, both private and governing bodies, they all need to work together."

Kang's vision for a club ownership model that doesn't copy the men's game

Kang is a self-made billionaire who, until about five years ago, never thought about owning a sports franchise. Since then, she's become one of the most prominent single owners in women's soccer. She's now the majority owner of the Washington Spirit in the NWSL, French giants Olympique Lyonnais and England's London City Lionesses. She also told ESPN she has imminent plans to add a fourth team on a new continent.

Her plan from the beginning was to pool resources to quickly scale up a global network of clubs -- something unprecedented for an operation exclusively focused on women's soccer.

Kang is used to being questioned -- it is an occupational hazard of being a disruptor, which Kang has been in women's soccer since her then-record purchase of the Washington Spirit in 2022. Her $35 million valuation of the Spirit when she assumed majority control of the team was 10 times greater than another NWSL team sale two years earlier. At the time, she reminds everyone to this day, people questioned why she would spend so much.

What has followed since is proof of concept. The record valuation for an NWSL team sale was broken twice last year, reaching $250 million for Angel City. Expansion fees have grown from about $2 million five years ago to $110 million, which a new group in Denver will pay to bring the NWSL to 16 teams next year.

She said she received similar criticism for spinning off Lyon's women's team into separate ownership from the men's team, but she has heard about other clubs planning to do the same thing.

"I can tell you when I first spun off Olympique Lyonnais from the men's team, there were a lot of criticisms," Kang said. "It's like, 'That can't happen,' and all that. Now, actually, the top teams both in France and England are doing it."

Kang says she is not trying to create some kind of player development network that feeds players to one team, which is one of the criticisms of the multi-club model on the men's side -- like, say, City Football Group ultimately serving Manchester City. As she put it: "I'm not going to rob the best players from one team and give them to another team." Rather, she wants to create "the No. 1 team in each country."

Her ambition to be on new continents stems from the idea that seeing is believing: "I don't want the young girls growing up thinking that whatever women's-specific training methodology, dedicated stadium, state-of-the-art training centers are sort of an American, English, French phenomenon. It's going to be in their backyard."

Despite the comparisons Kang's model has drawn to ownership groups in the men's game (where she holds a minority stake in Eagle Football Group, which owns multiple men's teams), Kang insists she is forging something new.

"The worst thing we can do to women's football is to copy and paste" what the men's game has been doing for decades, Kang said. That means determining a competitive format that works for the women's game, for instance, or building a different business model that, unlike a City Football Group or Red Bull's soccer network, is not so reliant on making money off the transfer market, which is still developing on the women's side.

"Our product, in our opinion, is fundamentally different -- and I think men's team owners will say the same thing," she said.

On finding success on and off the field

Two years into her multi-club model, Kang looks right on track. The Washington Spirit finished second in the NWSL and runners-up in the playoffs in 2024, barely falling on each occasion to a historic Orlando Pride team that went 23 games unbeaten to open the season. Washington hired Jonatan Girldez away from global power FC Barcelona to become the team's head coach.

Lyon just clinched its 18th French league title in the past 19 seasons, although the eight-time European champions were upset by Arsenal in the UEFA Women's Champions League semifinals. Over the weekend, London City won promotion to England's top flight in Kang's first full season as owner, making them the only independently owned club to participate in next season's Women's Super League.

None of that is by coincidence. Kang has invested in staff (such as Girldez), infrastructure (such as improvements to training facilities) and players (such as Trinity Rodman, whom Kang said she'll "do everything we can" to keep from leaving the club when her contract expires later this year).

Kang's vision extends to all women's sports. Last year she donated $4 million to the U.S. women's rugby sevens team to provide resources ahead of the 2028 L.A. Olympics.

This is still a business, however, as she is quick to remind everyone. Men's sports team owners have historically lost money until they sell. Women's sports are still fighting against the perception that they aren't good business long term, which, according to Kang, demands a more immediate return on investment.

"One of the very important aspects of what I'm doing is I want to prove that women's sports in general, that women's football is good business," Kang said. "No business can survive by losing money forever, right? So at least break even."

With a smile and her fingers crossed in front of her, she says the Spirit will "hopefully" break even in the near future. Washington finished fourth in the NWSL in average attendance last year -- nearly 14,000 fans per game -- and attendance is up this year.

Imitation might be the sincerest form of flattery for Kang's approach. The multi-club model is in vogue, and more women's soccer club owners are expanding their portfolios in the footsteps of Kang.

Bay FC's owners, Sixth Street, announced plans earlier this year to create a similar global network. Kansas City Current majority owners Angie and Chris Long, who funded the NWSL's first purpose-built stadium as the anchor of a $1 billion waterfront development, previously confirmed to ESPN that more clubs will soon be added to their portfolio. A group called Mercury/13 launched a multi-club model last year, first with the purchase of Italy's FC Como Women.

The recently launched Monarch Collective is dedicated to exclusively investing in women's sports teams and already holds stakes in Angel City FC, Boston Legacy FC and San Diego Wave FC -- the maximum (three) allowed by the NWSL's private equity rules. Avenue Sports Group, led by former Milwaukee Bucks owner Marc Lasry, is focused on NWSL and WNBA investment and held serious discussions with at least four NWSL teams previously for sale.

Kang welcomes others to join her: "I'm actually seeing either intent or already moving in that direction [from] several groups already," she said. "I'm hearing so-and-so is buying this team and so forth. So, this is happening."

Kang has fielded questions about what she's doing -- the multi-club model, but also her Kynisca Innovation Hub that is "dedicated to revolutionizing how female athletes train" -- from more people privately.

"Women's football is kind of exploding," she told ESPN. The bad news, she quickly adds, is the lack of infrastructure and resources in place around it, including staffing and player development.