THOUSAND OAKS, Calif. -- On a typically warm, sunny spring day in Southern California, Angel City FC sporting director Mark Parsons made it clear that he wasn't interested in doing things normally. Why? Because Angel City FC is not just another club.
Parsons requested to move his interview with ESPN from the team's news conference room to his office down the hall, where a slideshow presentation being projected onto the wall answered most conceivable questions about Angel City's future. The interviewee had become 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 to ESPN was the same one, minus a few confidential pages, that Parsons had recently given to players and staff upon taking the job in January. His mission -- and the reason the club hired him -- is relatively simply laid out in the first slide: "Be world leaders in women's soccer on and off the field."
Indisputably, Angel City has quickly built a recognizable brand with its off-field moves since launching five years ago.
The Los Angeles-based NWSL franchise made a splash with a celebrity ownership group that includes Hollywood actress Natalie Portman, tennis icon Serena Williams, and pop star Becky G. The team broke ticket and sponsorship records before players kicked a ball in a competitive match. The team made headlines by mandating that all sponsors dedicate 10% of their deals to local philanthropy. Last year's sale of the team at a $250 million valuation made it the most valuable women's sports franchise in the world.
Success on the soccer field, however, is yet to follow. The team has never won a playoff game and has made it to the postseason only once in three attempts. Last year's 12th-place finish was further marred by the first points deduction in NWSL history as punishment for salary cap violations. The team's general manager and head coach exited four days apart in the offseason.
The most consistent on-field characteristic of Angel City in its early years was the inconsistency of the team's performances. It's a striking juxtaposition: The team with the most defined off-field brand in women's soccer lacked any distinguishable identity on the field.
Parsons, a 38-year-old NWSL championship-winning coach, must find solutions to that problem. He is also only one new character in a wider Hollywood reboot.
New head coach Alexander Straus will arrive in L.A. next month after winning three straight Frauen-Bundesliga titles with Bayern Munich. U.S. women's national team forward Alyssa Thompson is playing at MVP levels to lead a young, rejuvenated roster. And new majority owners Willow Bay and Bob Iger (CEO of Disney, which owns ESPN) have injected both historic cash and refreshing optimism into the entire operation, according to those throughout the building.
Early-season results have begun to follow. Angel City's 4-3 road victory on May 2 over the Washington Spirit, last year's championship runners-up, was one of the franchise's signature victories. A goal deep in stoppage time by forward Riley Tiernan -- a non-roster invitee who ranks second in the league in goals -- embodied the developing grittiness of the team, a trait that had too often been lacking during late-game collapses of yesteryear.
Still, Angel City hasn't won anything yet -- and there lies the challenge. Los Angeles is a city defined by winners, like the NBA's Lakers and 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.
"When things happen [here], it ripples," Parsons told ESPN. "We haven't even won trophies yet. Imagine what's going to happen when we win trophies.
"I think we have a responsibility to win because people copy sports teams that win. [NBA star] Steph Curry starts shooting from wherever, everyone starts shooting from wherever. Angel City wins, what's everyone going to start doing? They're going to empower female athletes. They're going to be rooted in the community and make a difference in their cities."
Parsons said he has "no doubt we have the ability to be winning trophies within the next three years," but the margins are thin between success and failure in the ultra-competitive NWSL.
On and off the field, Angel City is at an inflection point -- and the business is inherently interwoven with soccer. Both aspects of the team recently hit the reset button.
A major shake-up in ownership, and a new direction
Angel City redefined standards within the NWSL and drew global media praise for being an innovative, progressive brand.
But different didn't mean perfect. The ownership group had no background in sports. The team was set up more like a startup tech company, a structure that created conflict behind the scenes as the team spent more money than any competitor.
Julie Uhrman, now the team's CEO, co-founded Angel City alongside Portman and venture capitalist Kara Nortman. After receiving over a hundred rejections from traditional investors (according to Uhrman), the group connected with Alexis Ohanian, the co-founder of Reddit and husband of Serena Williams. Ohanian had attended the 2019 Women's World Cup in France and grew interested in owning an NWSL team.
Ohanian invested millions and became Angel City's principal owner, but he did not structure the deal to give himself control of the team's board. The setup created an awkward power vacuum -- at one point, he was a representative on the NWSL's board of governors, but had to fund decisions with which he did not necessarily agree. In a post on X last year around the time of Angel City's sale, Ohanian called the mistake "one of the many hard lessons I learned as a first-time sports team owner."
Turmoil spilled into the public eye last year as reports from the Los Angeles Times and Wall Street Journal last year detailed infighting at the club. The combination of disagreements and growing financial needs ultimately led Angel City to look for a new control owner in a process that intensified in early 2024, sources confirmed to ESPN.
Uhrman argues that the tension was overplayed. "I think the biggest misnomer is there was a lot more alignment within Angel City than what was reported," Uhrman told ESPN in April, 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 were built like a startup," Uhrman said.
In the past, Angel City made cash calls or sought external funding to keep up with their needs, but Uhrman said "the conversation changed" in the last round of discussions as investors expressed interest in becoming more involved and obtaining more equity.
Uhrman said one of her biggest lessons from the team's first season was "the immense amount of work" and detail that goes into developing a playing style and philosophy. "Those are things that we could have done in advance, that we had the time to do, that we just didn't do," she said.
"The other thing that was a really big learning was the true amount of investment needed to build a high-performance culture, staff and team is significantly more than was ever invested in any club within the NWSL when we joined," she said. "When we joined, we had the largest sporting staff at the time. We were the only staff with a dedicated player care representative. So, we felt like we went above and beyond what the other clubs had done. But the reality was that, actually, it wasn't enough still."
All of which set the table for Bay and Iger to take over controlling interest of the team -- and, crucially, for Bay to have full control of Angel City's board of directors.
Uhrman recently shifted to her CEO role from president, and Carmen Bona was hired to become the team's president of business operations, a newly created role.
Ohanian said multiple times last year that he was not selling any shares in the team. His percentage of ownership decreased by dilution after Bay and Iger took over shares of the team from others in Angel City's horde of initial investors, a source with knowledge of the situation confirmed.
The drama played out more publicly than Angel City executives would have liked, but by all accounts, from personnel and sources across the club, there is an optimistic feeling that Angel City is in its best place 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 recent proof of change. The team ditched the temporary trailers it had used since its inaugural season to move across the parking lot at Cal Lutheran University and take over a building previously occupied by the L.A. Rams.
Even that is a temporary solution -- it's a four-year agreement, although Uhrman said discussions are underway to stay there -- but it is also a major step forward. The 50,000-square-foot space is the largest training facility in the NWSL. Plans for the move were already in motion, but they needed funding from Bay and Iger, who committed to spending another initial $50 million post-acquisition.
"The reality is, the second the players saw this performance center and realized that Angel City had delivered on its promises -- actually overdelivered and provided them something that they feel that they deserved and is above and beyond what they've experienced anywhere else -- it did feel like a page turn for us," Uhrman told ESPN.
Uhrman conceded that the off-field brand and on-field product must co-exist. There are early signs of progress.
Early signs of Angel City's progress on the field
Nearly eight minutes of stoppage time had gone by 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 role for Angel City. Tiernan's late goal at Audi Field was her second of the game and fifth in five games, bringing her to second in the league scoring table at the time.
Parsons pointed at Tiernan as proof of what's being built in L.A.: 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 on merit], and you pick people because you think they're going to be good, that's the biggest thing that will rip a culture apart."
Parsons' point is implicit but important: L.A. 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 is impossible to say what could have been if the team stuck to its process, the incident was an early example of both the external brand conflicting with the soccer product, and the team allowing its identity to be shaped by someone else.
Every decision made by interim head coach Sam Laity and the technical staff, which Parsons leads, shapes the new identity they are attempting to build.
Angel City still has star power, including two-time World Cup winner Christen Press, who at 36 and post-ACL recovery has been limited to limited reserve opportunities thus far this year. Tiernan was a nobody, but she earned the starting No. 9 job and the right to keep it through her play. Others, like fellow rookie midfielder Macey Hodge, have done the same.
In his presentation to ESPN, Parsons shared five attacking metrics and six defensive metrics that he feels, in his decade-plus involved in the NWSL, lead to success in the league. Each successful team thrives in those metrics through different playing styles, he said, but the end goal must be to win these key areas that range from non-penalty expected goals, to distance of defensive pressure from goal and "wide box area" goals, which are a trend in the women's game lately.
"I believe that to build a club you have to be very clear on identity -- very clear," Parsons told ESPN. "That identity also has to match your culture and the community of the area that you're in. Your identity also has to lead you to the things that you need to do to win in this competitive league."
He confirmed what he already suspected from afar about Angel City and the L.A. culture by asking people like Bay and Uhrman -- who are not "soccer people" but are a snapshot of the fan base -- what they want to see from the team.
"This city is about excitement, energy, winning, scoring," he said in summary. A team in L.A. needs to win, but it needs to do so in style. That means out-possessing the opponent and applying pressure higher up the field.
Angel City has done that at times this season, including in that important victory over Washington. Still, the telltale signs of a project in its infancy remain. As good as Angel City has looked at times, the team has still collapsed in games and conceded 14 goals, second worst in the league. The win over the Spirit was preceded by a 3-2 loss to the Orlando Pride that saw Angel City blow a 2-0 lead late, and getting thrashed 4-0 by NJ/NY Gotham FC in LA.
Parsons points to those three teams and the Kansas City Current -- last year's top four finishers -- 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 she wants a home playoff game this year. Parsons would love that too, he said, but 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 pitch and a dynasty on the pitch," Uhrman told ESPN. "That's not one championship -- that's many. I believe we are laying the foundation today with our staff and our facilities, our coaching decisions, our player decisions."
Change is still in progress. Straus won't arrive as head coach until June, meaning he will have only about half the season to work with the team. Straus will be tasked with showing the players how they get to the point of achieving those dreams. "My job is to make us dream a little bit," Parsons said of setting the high-level goals as sporting director.
Angel City is still in that dream stage, a startup wading its way out of some hard early lessons. Which direction it heads next will determine whether it inserts itself into LA lure, or risks being just another club.
