Kang, London City Lionesses and the promise and pitfalls of an intriguing project

Michele Kang walks purposefully to the press conference table at the Landmark Hotel. Her diamond earrings and bracelets shimmer beneath the chandelier, like a portal about to transport London City Lionesses, the lowest-ranked of Korean-American businesswoman Kang’s three women’s football teams, into this brave new world. The vehicle to get there? Former Paris Saint-Germain coach Jocelyn Precheur, who last summer took PSG to the semi-finals of the Champions League, and forward Kosovare Asllani, a double Olympic silver medallist, Women’s Super League (WSL) winner with Manchester City and now City Lionesses’ marquee signing.

It has been a busy week or so for Kang, with one of her other clubs, the NWSL side Washington Spirit, having unveiled quadruple-winning Barcelona manager Jonatan Giraldez as their manager a day earlier (Kang missed his press conference to be in London).

In the fittingly-named Empire room, Kang reels off London City’s latest news as though delivering a bulletin. There is Asllani’s arrival, then Precheur’s on a three-year deal, then the news Kang has purchased the Lionesses’ 28-acre training ground and enlisted the architectural team behind the Tottenham Hotspur training centre to dream up something similar that she can then duplicate for the Spirit and Olympique Lyonnais Feminin, the third and historically most successful of her clubs.

While there, players will benefit from cutting-edge sports science research, staffing ratios of better than one to one and will play in the 5,000-capacity Hayes Lane stadium owned by League Two club Bromley because “we cannot have our top professional players play at a less-than-acceptable stadium, on youth club or community-level pitches”. Kang has sold one company, the medical technology group Cognosante that she founded in 2008, to pay for it all.

She has no background in women’s football but describes herself as someone who has never been good at being told she cannot do something. “I create the infrastructure where people can execute the vision but also be very successful,” she says. “My job is to bring the best people in and then let them go for it. I’m not going to tell anyone, any team, what the style of the play should be and all that. That’s their job, right?”

With the acquisition of the Spirit and Lyon, Kang, now 64, created the first multi-club model in elite women’s football. In doing so, she has already established herself as one of the potential big shakers in women’s sport; should she pull all this off — the aim is for the Lionesses to be promoted to the WSL within two years and eventually win it — she will have changed the game beyond recognition.

She speaks impressively for more than an hour and the City Lionesses fans following it all on Twitter giddily post the next day that they feared it was all a dream. Other women’s football fans remain more sceptical of Kang’s ambitions in a sport where leagues and clubs have promised the world and collapsed within a few years. Kang herself described the difficulty in getting players and coaches to drop down to the second tier and buy into her vision. “We approached a lot of top coaches, a lot of top players. A lot of them told us: ‘Call me when you are promoted’. A lot of people were very nervous about joining a Championship team, but Asllani took that risk.”

At the very least, though, the Kang project has generated intrigue. Whatever the outcome, the WSL could be forever altered. These are the stakes Kang is playing for and London City is the most curious club in Kang’s portfolio given its status — they finished eighth in the 12-team Championship last season, the second tier of women’s football in England — and history. Just five years old and founded as a breakaway club from Millwall, Kang bought one of the few elite women’s sides fully independent from a men’s team when the deal went through in December.

The multi-club model has also generated anxiety given the precedents set by the likes of Red Bull and the City Football Group. Kang was eager to speak to this. “I am fully aware of the negative connotation of multi-club (ownership), especially on the men’s side,” Kang said. “I will submit to you that on the women’s side multi-club is a necessity, not of luxury or greed. Because we need to invest to professionalise women’s football to the level that they deserve and the potential that women’s football has, we need to invest. Because of the lack of media dollars, there isn’t that much money to invest.”

She explained how, upon taking over the Spirit, she learned that women’s football often borrowed its methodologies and training methods from men’s football and ran through some of the sport’s major talking points: hormonal differences, ill-fitting boots, the increased risk of anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injuries. “Ninety-four per cent of all science and medical research projects on athlete performance is dedicated to men,” Kang continued. “So we decided to take on the primary research. Without that data, we can’t really properly train our female players. At the end of the day, we are in the business of producing the best football games for our fans. For us to do that, our athletes have to be in their best shape.

“For you to do that for one team is not possible because it takes a lot of money. If you have multiple teams, then you can pool the resources and do it once at the central level… There are a lot of things that you can do essentially once and make it available.” That research, she says, is “well under way”, with an announcement due shortly.

She is often asked, too, who she will cheer for if the teams ever face each other. “Let the best team win. We are not going to sacrifice one team to make another team successful. Absolutely not. Our goal is to make every team the champions in each of their leagues. We’re going to do everything in our power to be the champion in the WSL. This is not to make one team successful like some of the common models that you see on the men’s side; we are not going to steal or move players around so that one team is going to be better than the others.”

The City Lionesses may find it harder than others to build a fanbase. Every WSL team is partnered with Premier League sides; brands, identities and traditions stretch back decades. Most WSL teams hail from football hotbeds but London City Lionesses face particularly staunch competition in Arsenal, who have some of the most recognisable England internationals, and Chelsea. Tottenham Hotspur, West Ham United and the newly-promoted Crystal Palace may cause further issues.

Kosovare Asllani and Jocelyn Precheur are presented as London City Lionesses’ new star player and manager (London City Lionesses)

Kang explained how the clubs would take a “data-driven” approach to gathering fans: one survey distributed to 6,000 Lyon supporters garnered 5,000 responses within 48 hours, a response unlike anything in Kang’s “entire professional career. And that means there’s a pent-up demand. A lot of people are finding out there’s actually a clear difference between fans for the men’s team and fans for the women’s team. It doesn’t necessarily translate immediately.”

Kang is coming into a growing, but still tough-to-crack market. Findings from Deloitte’s Annual Review of Football Finance, released this month, showed revenue in the WSL is increasing but that the top four revenue-generating clubs — Arsenal, Chelsea, Manchester United and Manchester City — made up 66 per cent of total revenue across the WSL. Manchester City could not clear £1million ($1.3m) in matchday revenue, even though their game-day earnings vastly outstripped Liverpool’s £112,486 and Tottenham’s £226,388 (Tim Bridge, lead partner in the Deloitte Sports Business Group, noted: “It’s important the industry does not hold women’s clubs to a profitability metric the wider game has yet to consistently achieve”). Since buying her first club, Kang has reiterated that none of this is born of altruism; these are sound business decisions.

“A media deal clearly is a pretty significant component,” Kang explained. “In the UK, we’re moving in the right direction in terms of media, but it’s going to take some time. So we can’t rely on that. With the investment we’re making, we are now thinking we will at least break even in two to three years. Profitable is going to be a little more challenging.

“In the men’s games, whether it’s NFL, NBA or a lot of those games, if you take the media dollars out, a lot of teams are struggling to be profitable on just game-day operations. That’s sort of the nature of the game. And a lot of fans now are watching from streaming services as opposed to coming. So trends are not necessarily in our favour, but in my opinion, there’s nothing that’s better than just being there physically. And we just have to make sure a lot of them experience that and love it. We have a serious investment going in terms of fan experience, building and branding.”

“You have to risk big to win big,” Asllani says. “I’ve been in other clubs where you talk about wanting to win. Then we say: ‘But can we have resources?’ Then they come back and say: ‘Well, you haven’t won anything’. With the men, you invest before and you wait for the result. In the women’s game, it’s always been perform, win and then we will invest.” She explains that she and Kang have the same mindset. “It takes investment to create a better product. She’s doing it and all on board, going wholeheartedly into this project. I believe in it. I believe in everything she says.”

Still, Kang has found herself coming up against people who think her vision is too grand, too fanciful. Some might be hard to win over given how many others have let them down: just this week, for instance, it emerged Manchester United are moving their female players from their training centre to make room for the men’s team, while Reading have withdrawn their women’s side from the Championship. “I think it’s perfectly OK for teams to say, as a business, their priority is the men’s team, because that’s where more money is,” Kang says. “But then let the women’s team either go free or get somebody else who is interested in investing in it. Let them do it.”

GO DEEPER

Late drama, grand ambitions – and big sunglasses: Michele Kang arrives at London City

Is she worried given the cycles of boom-and-bust that litter the history of women’s football? Scores of teams have professionalised with a bang only to fold within a few years. “I’m not worried at all,” Kang says. “I think the train has left the station. I don’t think there’s any turning back. The question is how quickly and how fast and to what extent? And I think it’s all depending on how much we invest collectively. The interest among the investors group right now, the investment community, is huge. You can really tap into that as well, if necessary. So I’m not worried about all that aspect.

“I think the thing we have to worry about is really putting out the best product. I tell my players and staff that we’re not competing against men’s football teams. We’re in, to a large extent, the entertainment business. You all have seven evenings a week. You can go out to dinner with your friends. You can go see a movie. You can go see a Taylor Swift concert. Why would you come to watch women’s football? What’s the value proposition? Why would you come to our game 13 weekends in a row? So that’s our job. We have to convince people this is the best form of entertainment.”

Maybe everyone should have a little more faith. It is hard to see someone of Kang’s ambition and business pedigree letting this fail. She uses the word “when” in relation to buying further clubs — in South Africa, South America, Japan, China, South Korea. Is she moving too fast? Perhaps, but in many ways this is exactly the kind of investment women in football deserve. If others follow suit, what will happen then?

“I think this is raising the women’s game to the next level in the investing part,” says Asllani. “Obviously people think I’m crazy, maybe for being here when having the opportunity to go to some of the biggest leagues, biggest teams in the world. I told Michele I was scared — but I’m going to do it anyway because I believe it. This is a passion decision. Passion and mission. And I’m a brave person. We’re jumping on board with this together.”

(Top photo: London City Lionesses)