Washington, D.C. (05/25/2023) Sports activities Enterprise Journal (SBJ) introduced that Michele Kang has gained “Deal of the Yr” as part of its sixteenth Annual Sports activities Enterprise Awards for her 2022 acquisition of the Washington Spirit.
Kang, who was chosen by SBJ as a 2022 Energy Participant in Ladies’s Sports activities, was one among 5 nominees that included the Walton-Penner group’s acquisition of the Denver Broncos, Main League Soccer and Apple’s ten-year media rights settlement, the Massive Ten Convention’s seven-year media rights settlement with FOX, CBS and NBC amongst others. She was the one girl represented.
“As a feminine entrepreneur who has some sources, I felt this was my duty. However extra importantly, I see this as a enterprise with unimaginable industrial viability,” mentioned Kang in her acceptance speech. “We’re not charity.”
Upon buying the Washington Spirit for a record-setting $35 million on March 30, 2022, Kang grew to become the primary individual of shade to carry a majority stake in an NWSL membership. Per SBJ, “The $35 million acquisition, the costliest in league historical past on the time, reset the marketplace for NWSL franchises, straight resulting in the league extracting a file $58 million growth price from the house owners of the just lately introduced growth crew within the Bay Space.”
Her SBJ “Deal of the Yr” victory additionally got here on the heels of her acquisition of eight-time Champions League-winning French membership Olympique Lyonnais (OL). OL competes in Division 1 Féminine, the best degree of ladies’s skilled soccer in France.
This transfer will carry collectively the Spirit and Lyon in a world community of ladies’s soccer golf equipment. It would grow to be the primary woman-owned and -led group of its type, cementing Kang’s new mission of rewriting the narrative of what’s potential in girls’s skilled soccer.
Her dedication to establishing the Washington Spirit as a perennial powerhouse and world-caliber skilled sporting group has been evident ever since she acquired the membership.
Paramount to Kang’s mission have been each hiring a fleet of extraordinarily certified professionals in a number of roles throughout the group and establishing an unique, state-of-the-art stadium situated in Washington, D.C.
Not even a yr into her tenure as proprietor, Kang efficiently executed each of those objectives because the membership struck a multi-year deal to name Audi Discipline its new dwelling and employed a few of the brightest minds in sport and enterprise – President of Soccer Operations and Common Supervisor Mark Krikorian, President of Enterprise Operations Emma Could, Head Coach Mark Parsons and Vice President of Efficiency, Medical and Innovation Daybreak Scott.
Among the many Spirit’s newly established management, one theme is constant: Kang’s dedication to establishing the Spirit as a world-class group.
A part of Kang’s deal to accumulate the Spirit got here with the mandate of offering a world-class expertise {and professional} product to followers. There at the moment are extra choices at each value level than the membership has ever provided, together with inexpensive season plans, pitch-side premium seating and an prolonged roof at Audi Discipline for extra protection from the weather.
To buy tickets for a Washington Spirit sport, please click on right here.
About The Washington Spirit
The Washington Spirit is the skilled girls’s soccer crew primarily based at Audi Discipline in Washington, D.C. Launched in 2012, the Spirit performs within the Nationwide Ladies’s Soccer League, the premier girls’s soccer competitors in North America. For extra details about the Spirit, go to WashingtonSpirit.com and observe the membership on Twitter, Instagram, and Fb.