A C F C
angel city football club
HOW WE HELPED BUILD
A TEAM THAT WAS
BIGGER THAN THE GAME
At the start of 2020, entrepreneur Julie Uhrman came to Battery with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: help build the foundation for a new women's professional soccer team in Los Angeles.
THERE WAS NO TEAM. NO STAFF. NO STADIUM.
NOT EVEN A NAME.
But there was a vision.
Our job was to help turn
that vision into a brand.
T H E S T R A T E G Y
BIGGER THAN A GAME
Julie and the other founders—Kara Nortman, Natalie Portman and Alexis Ohanian—had an audacious vision for something much bigger than soccer—part sports franchise, part entertainment brand, part platform for equity and change. We worked closely with the founders to distill years of thinking around equity, entertainment, community, fandom and women’s sports into one organizing idea.
Then we built the brand Playbook for a club determined to change the game—on and off the field.
this wasn’t just a creative opportuniTy.
this was personal.
I grew up playing soccer.
Parks & Rec → Club
JV Captain→ Varsity
I was 13 when Brandi Chastain ripped off her jersey and celebrated a game changing 1999 Women's World Cup win. It was a profound core memory my teammates and I would reenact over and over.
So when the opportunity came to help build a women's professional soccer team in my hometown of Los Angeles,
I. WANTED. IN.
what do you call something
this big?
Turns out, naming a soccer club is hard. We weren’t the first agency to take a swing at it.
It had to feel unmistakably LA without leaning on cliché. Big enough to become a global brand.
Specific enough to belong to the city. And we had to be able to actually own it.
Naming exercises can go round after round. We got there in one.
WE GAVE OURSELVES FOUR RULES:
01
OWNABLE BY LA
02
RESONATE WITH YOUNG GIRLS WHILE TRANSCENDING MASCULINE / FEMININE CLICHES
03
BE SIMPLE & MEMORABLE
ENOUGH TO TRAVEL
THROUGH CULTURE
04
VIABLE IN THE
SPORTS LANDSCAPE
LA SHOW
❌
LA SPECTACLE
❌
LA WONDER
❌
LA GOLDEN
❌
LA BREAKERS
❌
LA ATHENAS
❌
LA SUPREMAS
❌
LA SHOW ❌ LA SPECTACLE ❌ LA WONDER ❌ LA GOLDEN ❌ LA BREAKERS ❌ LA ATHENAS ❌ LA SUPREMAS ❌
B U T O N E H I T D I F F E R E N T
SOMETIMES THE BEST IDEAS FEEL OBVIOUS. ALMOST INEVITABLE. AND THEY HIT YOU OUT OF NOWHERE.
A TEXT BECAME
A NAME
I brought Angel City into our naming exploration, and the team ran with it. It captured Los Angeles without saying Los Angeles, felt bigger than a traditional sports moniker, and left room for the founders' ambitions to extend far beyond the pitch. Not long after, I found myself on Zoom pitching it to the founders.
My thirteen-year-old self had an out-of-body-experience.
BEFORE THEY COULD BUILD THE CLUB, WE BUILT THE PLAYBOOK TOGETHER.
Working with Julie and the growing Angel City team, we developed a strategic and creative foundation that could guide everything—investors, partnerships, PR, social and eventually the fan experience.
Not a campaign.
A blueprint.
FROM A NAME TO A WORLD
Photography shown for creative exploration only. Images by Christin Rose, Claire & Jeremy Weiss, Ethan Gulley, Jazmin Garcia, Steven Counts, Alex de Mora, We Are The Rhoads, Radka Leitmeritz + additional visual references.
AND THEN THINGS GOT REAL.
With the strategy and name taking shape, I began exploring a visual world that could live somewhere between sport, entertainment and Los Angeles culture.
THE ANNOUNCEMENT
📢
THE ANNOUNCEMENT 📢
J U L Y 2 0 2 0 W A S J U S T
T H E B E G I N N I N G
As Angel City staffed up, the work began moving in-house and to new partners.
The launch film pulled language from our manifesto and the brand foundation we'd created at Battery.
PRESS CONFERENCE PHOTOGRAPHY AND DESIGN BY HAYLEY GRAVES
AND IN 2022 THE TEAM
HIT THE PITCH
RESULTS
🤯
BIGGER THAN THE GAME
🤯
RESULTS 🤯 BIGGER THAN THE GAME 🤯
$1.5B
EARNED MEDIA IMPRESSIONS
956K
NEW SOCIAL FOLLOWERS WITHIN 60 DAYS OF LAUNCH
4X
YEAR-ONE REVENUE PROJECTIONS
SOLD OUT
INAUGURAL SEASON
$250M
VALUATION
In 2024, Willow Bay and Bob Iger's controlling investment made it the most valuable women's professional sports team in the world at the time.
harvard busIness school case study
“A NEW BUSINESS MODEL FOR WOMEN’S SPORTS”
The case study specifically noted that the founders had inverted the traditional sports-franchise model by building local and global brand interest from the outset.
⚽ CREDITS ⚽
AGENCY - BATTERY
CEO - Anson Sowby
CCO - Phil Khosid
ECD - Scott Brown
HEAD OF STRATEGY - Sean McNamara
CD / AD - Drea Schneider
CD / WR - Michelle Nam Fischer
CW - Ashanna Molokwu