Inside a KC couple’s vision for our city’s newest pro team as women’s soccer returns
The news hit and many of you cheered and others ignored and some thought about why Sporting Kansas City won’t embrace our city’s new women’s soccer team. We will get to all of that here, promise, but the most initially striking part of a local couple’s new purchase is right out in the open:
Angie and Chris Long are starting a sports team now? In a pandemic?
Really?
The lift is enormous and the challenges will come from all angles, but a week spent talking to the Longs and others, including some involved in the NWSL team that left town three years ago, found reasons to believe.
The Longs are Kansas Citians. Angie grew up here. She and Chris started an investment management firm that now holds around $12 billion in assets, so they do not dream small and they are not afraid of a challenge.
Good thing, too, because they have a gajillion things to do, each with deadlines rushing closer. There’s a staff to hire, logo to design, colors to choose. Players need to be relocated from Salt Lake City. Ticket plans, fan events, preseason training sites, all of these done with the NWSL season set to begin with training in seven weeks and the return of the Challenge Cup in mid-April.
COVID-19 presents even more difficulties. Moving the players. Finding a safe way to train in Arizona or Florida. Connecting with fans — building customers — and debuting at a time when (best-case scenario) crowd sizes will be limited.
Their vision is enormous: They’ll begin at T-Bones Stadium but then build the country’s first soccer-specific stadium for a women’s team, with around 10,000-seat capacity regularly sold out for families, young professionals and fans around the Midwest to watch the world’s best players.
The road from here to there stretches beyond the horizon. It involves enormous investment, lots of hope, the right decisions and a little luck.
“It’s busy,” Angie Long said. “But we’re pretty used to things being busy in the Long household.”
They’re back ...
This is the NWSL’s second time around in Kansas City, and the persistence is warranted. We call ourselves The Soccer Capital of America. We regularly rank at or near the top in women’s soccer viewership, including in the top 10 for at least three NWSL matches in 2020 and No. 4 for the 2019 World Cup.
There is a not insignificant number of fans in the area who will buy season tickets and scarves and kits no matter the team’s name or logo or roster. If the NWSL is to succeed, Kansas City is a place it should thrive. But it failed once before here, and that’s worth talking about.
“This is really our team now,” Angie said. “There’s just a lot of things that are just so different, it makes it not even an apples-to-apples comparison.”
She is correct in many ways, of course, and actually she is a significant reason for that. Angie and Chris are the sort of local owners with deep roots and deeper pockets that every sports startup wants.
The problem with FC Kansas City was not talent — U.S. Women’s National Team stars Lauren Holiday, Heather O’Reilly and Becky Sauerbrunn headlined two championships in five seasons.
The problem was support.
“It was a (spit)show,” said one person involved with operations back then. “Oh my God. I could tell you stories that I probably should not.”
The short version is that the original ownership group did not establish enough or deep enough connections around town. Some blame a disinterest in paid advertising, weak branding or a false assumption that the star power of the USWNT would be enough.
The team struggled with credibility. They played some games at a high school stadium, others at UMKC or Swope Park. They had no permanent home and, except for an occasional game at Children’s Mercy Park, no stadium that felt professional.
The team’s on-field success only made the gap feel wider.
“You need a stadium, you need a training complex, locker rooms, all the basic things,” said Vlatko Andonovski, who coached FC Kansas City and now heads the USWNT. “We didn’t have that. That’s the minimum standard now, and anything below that is not going to be acceptable. We’re talking about some of the best players in the world. We have to treat the league like that, the teams like that, the players like that.”
The first ownership group — Chris Likens, his sons Greg and Brad Likens, and Brian Budzinski — sold the team in a mess of lawsuits and allegations. Elam Baer, a Minneapolis businessman, bought the team in 2017.
Reached this week, Baer said Kansas City was a strong market but described a split between teams partnered with MLS clubs and those owned independently. The financial margins are small, Baer said, so you need owners willing to invest and operate collectively.
Baer said his biggest complaint about owning FC Kansas City was that he couldn’t get out of an agreement that he felt charged exorbitant rent to play at Swope.
Told the new NWSL team will play at T-Bones Stadium, Baer went silent for a moment.
“You know,” he said. “That’s where I wanted to play. That’s where I thought it could work.”
He couldn’t, and said the league would not let him move the team to Minneapolis. So he sold, and the team was moved to Salt Lake City.
Three years later, Kansas City’s NWSL reboot is ahead in the two most important ways — it’s planning to play in a professional stadium, and it has local owners who’ve demonstrated long-term commitment to the club and city.
A different approach
Here’s an amazing thing that Angie and Chris Long are doing: They’re pledging that 10 percent of their team’s sponsorship revenue will be given back to various community causes.
The specific organization will depend on the specific sponsor, but Angie mentioned education, equality and youth sports as causes that are particularly important to her and Chris.
Can you imagine the good that would be done if Kansas City’s other pro teams did the same?
“It just makes so much sense,” Angie said.
Lisa Baird, the NWSL’s commissioner, called the Longs “the new generation of ownership” not just for her league but in sports.
They are young. They are active parents, with four kids in school. They built their own business and want to use that success to build more. Baird insinuated the Longs would serve on the NWSL finance committee, giving them influence around the league.
Huw Williams served as general manager for FC Kansas City and is this team’s interim GM and permanent head coach. He described a different level of professionalism and investment.
This is where you can start to see how this thing might work.
“The questions I get this time around, sometimes I’m having a hard time answering because I never had those questions in the past,” Williams said.
The league is different now, too. The NWSL has partnerships with CBS and Twitch, and while the pandemic has wrecked the financials and viewership for most leagues, the TV ratings for the NWSL, and women’s sports in general, are steady or even up.
Angie brings up a good point about the pandemic challenges, too. A year ago, nobody knew that adversity was coming. At least now they can plan for it, and with vaccines on the way we can see an end.
Many around town have expressed frustration with Sporting KC for not partnering with the Longs’ new club, or at least opening Children’s Mercy Park as a site for its games. But Chris Long described Sporting Kansas City’s management as “super collaborative.” And when asked directly about any disappointment about not being able to play at CMP, Angie instead talked about the benefits of the adjacentT-Bones Stadium.
Whatever it’s worth, there are legitimate hurdles for Sporting KC here. The MLS schedule has not been set, and between Sporting and its USL team, the dates will fill quickly. The economic hit of 2020 created furloughs and pay cuts at Sporting, and the financial outlook for 2021 isn’t optimistic.
The Longs’ team will succeed or fail on its own, in other words, and isn’t that how it should be? The Longs said the T-Bones are treating them like equal partners, with facility upgrades that will make their experience tangibly better and more professional than Sporting enjoyed while playing there in 2008-10.
All players from Utah’s team this past season have agreed to come to Kansas City, including former USWNT forward Amy Rodriguez and Canadian national team stalwart Desiree Scott. Williams is busy trying to make further improvements to the club’s roster, too.
So the path toward success is there, despite it all. And this is counter-intuitive, but a week of conversations about this new venture moved the viewpoint on the first questions asked in this column. Because the pandemic has changed everything. Obviously. Changed how we live, changed how businesses operate and changed what sports teams can do and expect.
All of that is true, so what can be said of someone so determined to start a team in that environment?
They are either brainless or brave, halfwits or fully committed, and there is no way the Longs are brainless or halfwits. The pandemic presents added challenges, yes, but it also serves as something like a commitment test for a sports startup.
Women’s soccer in Kansas City has never had owners who would’ve passed that kind of test. And now it does.
This story was originally published December 11, 2020 at 5:00 AM.