Disney CEO Bob Iger, Willow Bay to Buy Angel City Football Club

Willow Bay and her husband, Disney CEO Bob Iger, have entered right into a definitive settlement to personal Angel Metropolis Soccer Membership, the soccer membership introduced Tuesday. 

As had been beforehand reported, Bay and Iger will purchase the controlling stake in Angel Metropolis Soccer Membership at a price of $250 million, which makes the L.A. based-team probably the most precious ladies’s sports activities crew on this planet. The couple will make investments an extra $50 million “to assist the Membership’s future development.”

Bay, who’s the dean of the USC Annenberg College for Communication and Journalism, will serve on and have full management of the ACFC Board of Administrators, will function the controlling proprietor for Nationwide Girls’s Soccer League, LLC and can characterize ACFC on the NWSL’s Board of Governors. 

The transaction was unanimously accredited by ACFC’s Board of Administrators and is predicted to shut within the subsequent 30 to 60 days, topic to the approval of the Nationwide Girls’s Soccer League. 

“Willow and Bob convey unparalleled operational expertise, experience, and keenness to ACFC and to the NWSL. They’re lifelong sports activities followers who’ve been supporters of ACFC for the reason that crew’s founding. They’re deeply dedicated to the Los Angeles neighborhood, having been residents, leaders, and philanthropists within the metropolis for nearly three a long time and have a protracted observe document of dedicating their time and assets to assist native Los Angeles organizations,” the ACFC Board of Administrators stated in an announcement. 

“We all know they’re the suitable companions to steer us into this new period – they’re dedicated to additional strengthening ACFC’s place as a preeminent group and model in ladies’s sports activities and to championing the crew’s broader mission, together with the development of fairness for athletes and women-founded companies. With their management, we’ll proceed to harness the trade’s momentum and construct on ACFC’s robust basis of fan and neighborhood assist,” they continued. 

The ladies’s soccer membership was launched in 2020 by Natalie Portman, enterprise capitalist Kara Nortman and entrepreneur Julie Uhrman, with quite a few notable celeb buyers together with Serena Williams, in addition to America Ferrera, Jessica Chastain, Christina Aguilera, Billie Jean King, Jennifer Garner, Eva Longoria and Gabrielle Union. Alexis Ohanian, the co-founder of Reddit, has beforehand been the biggest shareholder of the crew.

The crew has prioritized having majority feminine possession, with a better push for gender and pay fairness in ladies’s sports activities.