Angel City FC, the women’s club powered by entertainment stars

With movie stars like Natalie Portman and Eva Longoria among its promoters, Angel City FC is preparing to bring women’s soccer to Los Angeles (USA) with a new team that, before taking the field, has already aroused much expectation.

Angel City begins its preseason this Saturday with the Challenge Cup, a tournament organized by the National Women’s Soccer League and which serves as a prelude to the NWSL regular season, which will begin the last weekend of April.

The Los Angeles team will start the Challenge Cup against San Diego Wave FC, another new team that debuts this year and that has American star Alex Morgan in its ranks.

Angel City will play the Challenge Cup at Cal State University’s Titam Stadium in Fullerton (California, USA).

But his debut at the Banc of California Stadium, the brand new venue in the heart of Los Angeles that he will share with LAFC, will not come until his first regular season game, which will be played on April 29 against the North Carolina Courage.

founding group

In July 2020, the Angel City adventure began with Natalie Portman leading its small founding group.

“Seeing my son idolize players like Megan Rapinoe and Alex Morgan in the same way as Leo Messi or Karim Benzema, I realized that supporting female athletes could quickly make a cultural change,” Portman told the British newspaper on Friday. TheGuardian.

The Oscar winner for “Black Swan” (2010) was thus referring to the sexist scandal over salary inequality between the players and the players of the US team, which was resolved last February with the commitment of the United States Soccer Federation that everyone will receive the same salary and with 24 million dollars for women as compensation.

Many colleagues from Hollywood and the world of entertainment signed up as owners of the team, such as Eva Longoria, Jennifer Garner, Jessica Chastain, Sophia Bush, Becky G, Uzo Aduba and Gabrielle Union.

Of this group, it is striking that there is an overwhelming majority of women, something that Longoria highlighted in an interview with Efe in June 2021 when he said that what Angel City is doing is “revolutionary.”

“It’s like stepping behind the camera to be a director. To get good opportunities and change things (for women), we need to sit in the boardrooms of companies”, defended the Latin figure.

The team revealed this week that it has already sold almost 15,000 tickets for the 2022 season (the Banc of California Stadium has a capacity for 22,000 people).

Massifying football

Apart from the dispatches and the preparations, now comes the turn for the Angel City players to bring to the field of play all the expectations placed on them.

“It’s amazing, overwhelming, just exciting. I don’t think there’s a team in the league that has this kind of overwhelming support that we have,” Angel City coach Freya Coombe said Thursday.

“I think this will definitely energize the players. There’s a feeling of excitement to go and play in front of that big crowd,” she added.

Angel City lands in a city like Los Angeles which, in the men’s section, has two very important football teams such as Javier ‘Chicharito’ Hernández’s LA Galaxy (five-time winner of the MLS Cup) and the most recent but in constant growth LAFC of Carlos Vela. (I)