London City Lionesses’ owner Michele Kang: ‘This is a serious investment’ | OneFootball

There is an aura of assertiveness about Michele Kang, as she walks through the reception area of a central London hotel. It is there again in her handshake, then it is most prominent when she is soon calmly, yet enthusiastically, explaining her firm belief that investing in women’s sports makes total business sense.

She has already put her money where her mouth is. A couple of weeks ago, the owner of Washington Spirit in the National Women’s Soccer League, Lyon’s women’s team and London City Lionesses announced a $50m (£39m) investment to improve female athletes’ health.

In the same week, after seeing the USA’s women’s rugby sevens team win Olympic bronze at a packed Stade de France, on the spur of the moment she pledged a further $4m in a bid to see them win gold in Los Angeles. “Yes, that was an expensive game for me,” she says, jokingly but her tone is deadly serious when she says she is “very, very surprised” that a lot more investors did not put their money in before her.

“I’m on a mission to prove that women’s sports is good business,” says the South Korea-born Kang, whose Spirit host Arsenal Women in a pre-season friendly in the US capital on Sunday. “The gap between where it is and what it could be, is huge. I’m flabbergasted that no one saw that.

“This is not charity. Absolutely not. This is a serious investment. As a woman, I think it’s almost insulting that these world-class athletes are being considered by some people as some sort of ‘DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] project’. No, I want to apply my business skills to solve these problems.”

To sit above the three women’s football teams she owns, she has set up Kynisca Sports International Ltd, a multi-club ownership group, vowing that its new “innovation hub” and centralised resources for research on specific female athletes’ performance are a necessity for the women’s game.

The $50m pledge is a lot of cash but she points to the recent, rapid increase in sale prices for clubs in the NWSL, with valuations of between $2m and $5m a few years ago to Angel City’s $250m valuation this year as a key indicator that women’s sports will be profitable. “The growth has been exponential. This is not somebody’s PowerPoint presentation. The proof is there.”

She had never attended a women’s rugby game before seeing what she labelled as “unbelievably engaged fans” at that bronze medal match in Paris, nor had she attended any professional women’s football matches until after the Covid pandemic.

Women’s sport was not, she says, originally part of her career plan. A keen tennis player in her youth, she moved to the US as a student and won awards for entrepreneurship and enjoyed lucrative success in the medical technology industry and venture capitalism, but now her motivations – as well as being financial – are based on a desire to improve things for young women.

“I’m an immigrant and I was lucky enough to realise my American dream. So it’s my turn to provide the opportunity,” she says with passion. “I can’t guarantee an equal outcome, but I want to provide equal opportunity, and then the rest is up to you. I want more people, especially underprivileged, under‑resourced young people, to be able to achieve their dream.

“I’ve seen incredibly talented young girls and women have to give up their dreams because there’s no viable professional career path – too many girls drop out of sport right before college or when menstruation comes at 11, 12, so I want to provide an environment where young women can pursue their dreams without any constraints, just like the next-door boy would have.”

And when she says “everyone”, she means in every corner of the globe. For now, her new multi-club ownership group is just three-teams strong, all in football, but asked if Kynisca might branch out into other women’s sports she says “eventually, probably”, and then when asked how many football clubs around the world she wants to own, she says: “I don’t know [how many] but I definitely want to have one in each continent, and that’s not about greed or vanity. I don’t want girls around the world to watch on TV and say: ‘Oh, that’s just an English, French, American phenomenon.’ I’ll bring exactly the same thing everywhere so they can see it’s in their backyard and within their reach. That’s one of the major drivers for expanding globally.”

After buying into Spirit in 2020 and taking over in 2022, in May last year she acquired a majority stake in the eight-time Champions League winners Lyon. The third part of Kang’s global expansion came last December, when she purchased the English second-tier side London City Lionesses. They were a bottom‑half club last term with rather modest turnouts, but Kang has snapped up Paris Saint‑Germain’s head coach, Jocelyn Prêcheur, and signed a flurry of players including the Sweden veteran Kosovare Asllani.

Kang has moved the team to Bromley for the new season and announced plans to build a “world-class” dedicated training centre in Kent. Many outsiders may be asking, why choose the relatively unknown London City Lionesses?

“The first and primary reason was, it’s independent,” says Kang, who has come straight from a meeting with the training ground architects. “Spinning off a women’s team that’s part of a men’s team is a very complicated deal.

“Second, ‘London’, the fact that the name is ‘London City’, that’s huge in my opinion, and in the London City area there’s really no football presence there so it’s really right for us to go in and take that as the future.”

Kang, who has said that her long-term target is to win the Women’s Super League, knows larger broadcast deals will be key to the future profitability of the women’s leagues, but concludes defiantly with an insight drawn from the Women’s National Basketball Association.

“If you look at men’s sports, if you take the media money out, there aren’t that many teams that are profitable,” she says. “Now look at the deal the WNBA just made. It’s going to happen. The numbers are there for women’s football, it’s just a matter of time.”

Header image: [Photograph: Jill Mead/The Guardian]