The Angels in the City and the Devil's in the Details
What you can learn about women's soccer from HBO's docuseries Angel City
“You never know if you can actually do something against all odds until you actually do it.”
– Abby Wambach
“When I saw Angel City playing in the pre-season I thought they were awful. We have the biggest stars here in Southern California sports. It’s the most crowded sports landscape in the country, maybe the world. There are things you can do to stand out, but the bottom line is you need to succeed on the field.”
-Kevin Baxter, LA Times
Two Hollywood endings
Two of the most significant moments in the history of US women’s soccer happened in Los Angeles. Separating the two was 15 miles of bad traffic between two stadiums and 23 years of sporting history. The first was Brandi Chastain’s iconic game-winning penalty kick in the 1999 FIFA Women’s World Cup. In front of 90,000 spectators packed into the Rose Bowl, the most ever for a women’s sporting event, Chastain calmly stepped to the penalty spot in sweltering heat with the fate of her country on her shoulders. The US was up 4-3 in a penalty shoot out with China after a heroic save by Briana Scurry. If Chastain scored, they were world champions. Without looking at the Chinese goal keeper once, she sliced the ball with her left foot into the back of the net. Her triumphant celebration is one of the greatest images in the history of sports.
The second was when Angel City FC won its inaugural game in April of 2022. Yet what was significant about this game wasn’t the goals that Vanessa Gilles and Jun Endo scored to beat the North Carolina Courage 2-1 on opening night. The real victory was that they were playing in front of a sold out crowd of 22,000. A new NWSL team selling this many tickets to their opening game was a feat that their many doubters said couldn’t be done. Those that turned down the chance to invest in Angel City FC argued that an easily distracted, traffic-plagued city with 11 sports franchises (including 2 men’s soccer teams) didn’t need another one. They said getting sports-saturated Americans to care about soccer was an uphill battle, getting them to care about women’s soccer, doubly so. Whether these doubts were sexist, pessimistic or both didn’t seem to matter to the 22,000 screaming fans welcoming their team to LA. You just can’t ignore or deny that level of enthusiasm. As the saying goes: “Quantity has a quality all its own.” Angel City’s arrival seemed to be a glorious omen for the future of both this team and women’s soccer in the United States.
Chastain’s penalty kick represents the conventional definition of victory in sports: on the field glory. It’s the confetti-dappled triumph that the US Women’s National Team has achieved 4 times in my lifetime. Angel City’s opening game represents a more behind-the-scenes victory that’s less flashy but arguably much more important in the long run. This kind of win can be invisible to most viewers: revenue-tracking spreadsheets trending in the right direction, the simple math of butts in seats, the dance of wooing sponsors, and backroom negotiations for better broadcast deals. Ultimately both kinds of success are integral to the sustainability of any team or league. The on field game has to be superb and exciting and the behind-the-scenes budgeting, marketing, and operations have to be just as clinical. In a business as results oriented as sports, if either of these flags, failure is inevitable. It’s the fascinating and at times tense interplay between these two definitions of sporting success that the HBO docuseries Angel City unpacks in its 3 episode run. Looming over the series’s examination of the fortunes of this new team is an existential question for the league and a feminist one for our society: Does women’s soccer have a viable financial future in our country?
Wait, since when does Natalie Portman own a soccer team?
It’s fittingly LA that Angel City FC’s origin story is full of Hollywood stars. In the wake of #MeToo, after being involved in the Time’s Up movement, Natalie Portman left the US’s inspiring victory at the 2019 FIFA Women’s World Cup with a burning question in her mind. Why did the players that her son idolized at the tournament had fewer and less lucrative opportunities back home than male players? More importantly, as an impact-minded feminist with a large public platform, what could she do to help rectify this? The answer surprised even her: help start a women’s soccer team in LA.
The team she helped create, Angel City FC, is undeniably the most heavily hyped NWSL team ever. While they landed a few on-the-field stars like Christen Press, what turned heads initially was the star power of their investors. They had a constellation of stars from film, music, business, and sports jumping at the chance to put money into this team. To name but a few, they include: Serena Williams, Jennifer Garner, Mia Hamm, Alexis Ohanian, Abby Wambach, Billie Jean King, Uzo Aduba, Christina Aguilera, Jessica Chastain, Eva Longoria, America Ferrera, Becky G, Julie Foudy, Lindsay Vonn, and Gabrielle Union. Before anyone touched a soccer ball, their majority female ownership group announced an energetic leap towards towards shattering the glass ceiling in women’s athletics.
We need to talk about the production value gap in sports media
Angel City is a very watchable show. Not only is the team’s backstory star-studded and their mission the very definition of laudable, but the production value is incredible. The crisp game footage and immersive storylines of Angel City immediately brings to mind HBO’s bread and butter sports docuseries: Hard Knocks. Yet I honestly preferred this to Hard Knocks, where the low stakes of training camp and red shirts destined to be cut create a narrative entropy that the editing must actively resist. Contrasted with that, being embedded in a new team in its first season there are clear and intriguing plot threads on and off the field and fittingly high emotional stakes. There is a roster to assemble, a fanbase to woo, and a group of athletes trying to gel on the field in time to get the results they need to make the playoffs. The game footage is suspenseful and thrilling, punctuated with lots of juicy slow mo and emotional close ups. It’s spectacular sports TV. The show, like the team it profiles, shines as a proof of concept. The takeaway for me and Alexis sitting in rapt attention on our West Elm sectional was clear: given the same attention to detail and resources as mens sports, women’s sports look just as good on TV. Full stop.
However, between the inspiring player interviews and snappy training montages, you also catch glimpses of the larger, more sobering landscape, which is that for teams not being featured on a high profile HBO docuseries, the production value of women’s soccer still noticeably lags behind the men’s game. At one point Natalie Portman straight up asks the leagues commissioner, Jessica Berman, why it’s so tough for her to stream live games. Later, on a phone call with Angel City’s Co-Founder and President, Julie Uhrman, Portman also notes that many games are frustratingly filmed such that the stands look empty. We learn that this is not because they were, but because the TV crew only had enough cameras to shoot one side of the bleachers, where the majority of fans weren’t sitting. Contrasted with the stunning 4k and dozens of camera angles that NFL games at LA’s SoFi Stadium get, it’s hard to not feel painfully aware of the gender production gap while watching this show. This raises the mobius strip of a question that plagues women’s sports leagues like the NWSL and WNBA to this day: are there fewer viewers because the production value is lower or is the production value lower because there are fewer viewers? Regardless of which it is, how can the league untangle this gnarled knot strangling their growth? The conventional answer is butts in seats and wins on the field. While this is accurate in a “first year of business school” kind of way, the reality is quite a bit more nuanced.
A tale of two soccer teams
Angel City was one of two expansion teams that took the field in 2022. The other was San Diego Wave FC, led by superstar Alex Morgan. While San Diego and LA both started their run with the same sunny optimism, led by a SoCal native and national team vet who was no stranger to winning, they ended up having very different seasons. While San Diego didn’t get an HBO documentary or have a galaxy of star investors behind them, they managed to be remarkably successful on the field, making it to the semifinals of the playoffs in year one. Meanwhile, LA struggled with injuries down the stretch, losing star forward Christen Press to an ACL tear and Sydney LeRoux to an ankle injury. Their backline lacked cohesion and proved to be inexperienced when it mattered most, conceding too many goals. Their sporting director clashed with the coach and left partway through the season. Unable to recover from a free fall on the pitch, they missed the playoffs.
These setbacks contrasted with their rivals’ triumphs are covered in engrossing and heartbreaking detail in Angel City’s second and third episodes, but they’re interspersed with a silver lining of sorts. Even as their playoff hopes fell apart, this team managed to achieve another kind of dream. A slick graphic just before the closing credits of the series shows that despite the injuries and missing the playoffs ACFC nearly matched LA Galaxy’s average per game attendance. They ended their inaugural season with the highest average attendance in the league at over 19,000 fans per game, 15,000 of which were season ticket holders. So while they didn’t win enough games to make the postseason, they may have won over enough fans to stick around. With this many loyal fans showing up when they were losing, you can’t help but wonder what the turnout would be like if they’d ridden the wave of enthusiasm all the way to the playoffs like San Diego did. Fast forward to 2023, and ACFC has second highest attendance in the league just behind the San Diego Wave of course, who now get 20,000 per game. The future for women’s soccer appears to be shining brightest in Southern California.
Can the NWSL succeed? Yes*
*with time, persistence, attention, and money
To put these attendance numbers into more perspective, the MLS’s top 3 clubs by average attendance are Atlanta United FC, Charlotte FC, and the Seattle Sounders, with an average of of 47,000, 35,000, and 33,000 fans attending their games in 2022. The NWSL has been around for over a decade now, but the arrival of Angel City FC and the San Diego Wave FC indicates a sea change. While they haven’t matched the men’s game just yet (it’s worth noting some of the men’s clubs play in much larger stadiums), Angel City and San Diego are certainly on the right track. Both of them had noticeably higher attendance than than my closest MLS team, the San Jose Earthquakes, who averaged 15,000 a game in 2022. When they met at San Diego’s newly opened Snapdragon stadium last year, their rivalry game sold out all 32,000 seats, breaking the NWSL’s all time attendance record.
Yet as rosy as the MLS comparison feels, it comes with a colossal caveat: even in the larger, more established, more lucrative MLS, more than half the clubs reportedly lose money. For every wildly profitable team like LAFC or Atlanta United, there are ones limping along that end up being subsidized by the league. As you’d imagine, this picture is even more exacerbated in the NWSL, where attendance, broadcast deals, and sponsorship agreements are consistently lower for the time being. Being a soccer team in America is a just tough karmic hand to be dealt. We spend our time, money, and attention on so many other things before we even bother looking at the game that The Simpsons wryly summarized as: “Fast kicking, low scoring, and ties? You bet!”
To the producer’s credit, for all of the feel-good momentum you see in Angel City, they don’t hide this, how difficult the road has been or continues to be. For every victory, we see the setbacks in just as gritty detail. We witness the NWSL finally arrive at a collective bargaining agreement with its players as Angel City struggles to find a reliable practice facility. In a moment of triumph we learn that US Soccer has finally agreed to pay the men’s and women’s teams equally. We also learn of a systemic abuse scandal that rocked the NWSL to its core in 2021. It’s a complicated viewing experience that reveals the tough editorial decisions behind this project given the subject matter: how do you inspire people to keep climbing without deceiving them about how steep the path ahead still is?
Despite these obstacles, I still see reasons to be optimistic about the future of women’s soccer. It’s hard not to feel hopeful after watching this series. If you’re like me, after finishing the third episode you’ll wish there were three more episodes to devour and then take to the internet determined to find ways to watch more women’s soccer.
I’ve honestly been wanting to watch more women’s soccer in between World Cups ever since I got tickets to watch the Women’s National Team in San Jose in 2018. Watching them beat Chile 4-0 including a spectacular brace by Carli Lloyd at Pay Pay Park was one of the most thrilling and jubilant sports experiences of my life. So you can imagine my delight when, shortly after I powered through this series, I learned that my home of the San Francisco Bay Area is finally getting an NWSL franchise. Bay FC will kick off a new era of soccer next summer. Fittingly, Brandi Chastain is one of their investors, alongside Warriors legend Andre Iguodala and former Facebook CEO Cheryl Sandberg. Since football and baseball teams are leaving the Bay Area left and right, it seems like my future path as a Bay Area spots fan is laid out in front of me. Bay FC merch and games are definitely in my future.
Redefining our goals
When Brandi Chastain stepped to the penalty spot in 1999, many of the current US Women’s National Team players were watching as young girls. Angel City and National Team star Christen Press was there, sitting in the stands of the Rose Bowl. That ‘99 World Cup, that team, and that moment inspired many young girls to chase their dream of playing professional sports, despite there being no guarantee they’d make any money doing it. Angel City defender Page Nielsen turned down a six figure job at Bank of America to play in the NWSL, where the minimum salary was $6,000 per year when she was drafted.
Today, many players from the ‘99 squad are also investors in Angel City. After hanging up their cleats they’ve doubled down on the future of the sport they loved so dearly on the field. As Julie Uhrman sums it up,
“We have 14 former US Women’s National Team players who are owners of this team. They are why we are here. It is their successes, it was their fight. They did all the hard work. They are responsible not only for us existing, but now they have a seat at the table for how the league grows and how the sport grows and they have a financial stake in how this team succeeds.”
It’s fitting that these two moments, the World Cup win of ‘99 and Angel City’s game-changing arrival to the league are so intertwined. A screenwriter couldn’t have done a better job with that arc.
Yet for Angel City to truly have a Hollywood ending, the team, the league, and us viewers will have to think bigger and work harder. While Angel City is a shiny new team, we can’t lose sight of the fact that the the league they play in is not. The NWSL is the third attempt at a women’s pro soccer league in the United States. It’s two predecessors, WUSA and WPS, played only three seasons each before folding. Meanwhile, the MLS is about to hit its 30th birthday. If we truly want women’s sports to be sustainable, we need to move beyond thinking of them as one-off hits of inspirational content, a World Cup win here, a famous athlete there, and begin to give them the same kind of three dimensional attention, sustained interested, and financial support we give to men’s athletics.
As a documentary, Angel City is undeniably heart-warming, but it’s most effective at challenging us, the viewers to consider this bigger picture. While viewing it fills us with positivity, it also invites us to sit with the hard truth that women’s teams and leagues cannot survive off of our positive sentiment alone. While inspiring the next generation is important, it’s not a viable business model. In the final calculus, revenue is as as important as goals, investors are as important as stars, the sponsor names on the front of the jersey are just as important as the player names on the back. As much as I hate reducing everything to “products,” the biggest takeaway from this series is that unless Angel City and the NWSL can figure out how to create an on-field product that enough people can access and are excited to consume, no amount of celebrity investors or heartwarming documentaries can save them from the inescapable math underlying everything. Ultimately this challenge to do better is as directed at the league as well as us, the viewer. If we aren’t willing to pay to see women’s sports in some way, shape, or form, there will not be women’s sports to see. By the end, this engrossing documentary is as much the throwing of a gauntlet as it is the lighting of a beacon.
At this point I’ll yield my time and let a woman conclude this essay. As Christen Press so elegantly puts it in the first episode:
“This is proof-of-concept. This is proof that the business works. It’s proof that we’re not doing it just so your daughters have a role model.”
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Well said!