Angel City FC Is on Path to Profitability, Bay Says

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00:00I had never imagined right that I would be an owner you might have I certainly

00:06didn't but I and we made the decision really quickly my co-owner and I and but

00:14I was the one in some ways who had the grounding because I used to take

00:16students there every year I teach a sports immersion class in the spring and

00:21Jason knows because he actually partners partners with our New York version of

00:26this and every year we would visit Angel City because I thought it was

00:30imperative that we make sure we were centering women's sports in the in the

00:34array of sports entities that we were exposing students to so every year

00:39students would do a project for them and so it was this very intense snapshot of a

00:45startup year by year and the decisions they were making from you know who's the

00:51first player that we should hire to how can we develop our sponsorship partners

00:57in a way that aligns our community impact with our player interests and values so

01:03every year I got this snapshot including as I joke the box is gradually getting

01:07impact unpacked because they were in startup mode for so long and when the

01:13opportunity arose I had that grounding combined with you know what we were

01:19watching happen with women's sports both at the college level and at the

01:24professional level and you know I literally said to Bob do you have any

01:29interest in doing this and he did not even pause and said absolutely and we there we

01:35were in the in the bidding process Bob Iger is my co-owner and partner in this

01:40and husband and husband all right

01:43and now right well right across the way here we're seeing that earlier that the

01:49league NWSL growing 11% a year a year over year in viewership when you look at

01:55the deal and you acquired it for about 250 million dollars yep are you looking at

02:00this as a double bottom line like what can you do also for the community or you

02:04just think that this could be a three or four X in the next five or ten years so

02:07community impact was embedded in the business model look this is the biggest

02:11investment we've ever made personally and and I expect that it will continue that

02:16well that will hold firm for quite some time so the what was so compelling was the

02:26purpose embedded in the business so one of the things that's different about

02:30Angel City is that their sponsorship model directly invest 10% of

02:37sponsorship dollars into the community so that's not an add-on or nice to have we

02:41didn't wait till we were profitable to do that that was very much built in to its

02:47business equity on and off the pitch and by the time we got there they had

02:53invested roughly three million dollars in the community that's probably up to four

02:58we had delivered just to make that concrete we're at nearly three million

03:03meals right through DoorDash and Sprouts are our sponsors into the into the

03:09community to people in need so this was a community this is a community asset I

03:14think it's a sort of jewel in the in the sports universe of Los Angeles and is

03:20there a bottom line yes do we expect it to improve every year yes are we on the

03:25march towards profitability heck yes but this is really a community and entity

03:31with community at its core