Push The Doors Open: The Women’s Game, post-World Cup ‘23

[67YAZ]

CONCACAF is starting a Women’s Champions League that will feed into a Women’s Club World Cup. The NWSL will get 3 slots as will Liga MX. Group Stage games will be Aug-Oct and the knock outs in May, so it’s an awkward fit with with the NWSL calendar.

Lots of details to still work out, but another necessary step on the road to bigger, better women’s professional game. In nothing else, getting regular NWSL-Liga MX riots will be great and NWSL-European champ matches will be must-see.

 

[67YAZ]

Less than 3 years after their founding & just before the start of their third season as a club, the San Diego Wave are sold for $113m (technically a $120 valuation but $113m in cash…basically a rounding error). That’s nearly double what the Thorns went for earlier this year. Insane.

 

[InstaFace]

Less than 3 years after their founding & just before the start of their third season as a club, the San Diego Wave are sold for $113m (technically a $120 valuation but $113m in cash…basically a rounding error). That’s nearly double what the Thorns went for earlier this year. Insane.

I guess from having read a bit of the history, Burkle really wanted to put his team in Sacramento. And then the whole Sacramento MLS deal fell apart, and he couldn't make it work with just an NWSL team. So he looked around at options and found San Diego - particularly, found the Snapdragon Stadium situation (alongside the successor to the Sacramento MLS bid - who will be playing at Snapdragon when they debut next year). He hired a great team, built the business, it did very well (literally makes more revenue than Barcelona Femeni, second in the league to Angel City), but his heart never was in San Diego, it would seem. So he paid his $2M expansion fee in 2020, put in his investment, and is probably getting 3x his money back ~4 years later. The real surprise is how much someone was willing to pay for the pre-built option, as opposed to the DIY kit of "start a new franchise somewhere".

Spoiler: nitpick

The valuation today is actually $100M, they're just building in a time-value-of-money buffer into the second phase of the transaction. From Sportico:

Lauren Leichtman and her husband Arthur Levine, founding partners of Levine Leichtman Capital Partners, are paying $35 million now for 35% of the team, and have agreed to buy the other 65% for $78 million after the 2024 season, said the sources, who were granted anonymity because the details are private. The deal carries a weighted average of $113 million, though the valuation in the later transaction is $120 million.​

The transaction today values it at $100M ($35 for 35%), and in 7 months time, a valuation of $120M. So to defer the full purchase, they're paying about a 30% annual rate of return to Burkle. There aren't enough comps on the market to really say whether he's taking a slight discount to get more upfront, or is over-charging on the back half of the transaction and they're paying a premium. But either way, the valuation today is $100M, and will be $120M in 7 months.

edit: anyway, the one thing I don't know that I wish I did is, why did Burkle want to sell? He came into the league as like one of the first truly professional and deep-pocketed team-builders it has had, helped take them from the era of "owner running around with a wrench to fix the players' plumbing" to "fastest-growing sports league in the world", and could've sat on it for another 10 years as it continued growing enormously in value. It can't possibly be that his heart wasn't really in owning and running a women's sports team - he came in just before it became cool. Nor can he have possibly thought that the valuations were excessive and he wouldn't get a better offer later. So why bail on it?