Two-time World Cup winner and Olympic champion Alex Morgan is the latest minority investor in San Diego Wave FC.
Morgan completed her decade-plus skilled and worldwide profession with San Diego, who she led to the NWSL Protect in 2023.
“San Diego is the place I’ve constructed my house, the place I’m elevating my kids, and located a goal past my enjoying profession,” Morgan mentioned in an announcement.
“I believed in Wave FC earlier than a single match was performed, and I nonetheless consider this membership has the facility to vary the way forward for girls’s sports activities.
“I am proud to put money into that future and never simply as a participant, however now as an investor.”
Morgan, 35, resides within the San Diego space together with her household and simply gave start to her second baby.
Morgan was one of many first gamers signed by the Wave, which performed its first season in 2022.
Her finest season as knowledgeable participant got here that yr, when she scored 16 objectives and received the Golden Boot.
That NWSL marketing campaign reinvigorated her United States girls’s nationwide crew profession forward of the 2023 World Cup.
She retired because the USWNT’s fifth-highest scorer in historical past with 123 objectives in 224 appearances.
When she retired, Morgan mentioned she deliberate to speculate extra in girls’s sports activities.
She is already an investor in Unequalled, the 3-on-3 girls’s skilled basketball league that debuted earlier this yr.
On Wednesday, she mentioned that conversations about investing within the Wave started final yr.
“I’ve all the time appeared forward,” Morgan mentioned in an interview launched by the crew. “Even once I was enjoying, I used to be all the time what I used to be going to do subsequent, what I may do extra on high of what I used to be already doing, and the way I may begin constructing issues earlier than it was actually too late.
“That was once I began to place into place turning into an investor within the San Diego Wave and wanting to do that instantly after I hung up the boots.”
Morgan joins the Wave’s controlling homeowners, the Leichtman-Levine household, who purchased the membership final yr in a two-part deal that valued the membership between $113 million and $120 million, which was briefly an NWSL report.
The Wave joined the league for roughly $2 million. A Wave spokesperson declined to reveal the quantity of fairness Morgan has within the crew.
The Wave additionally declined to reveal the crew’s different minority buyers.
Monarch Collective, a personal fairness agency led by Kara Nortman, invests within the Wave along with fellow NWSL golf equipment Angel Metropolis FC and Boston Legacy FC.
“Alex has all the time fought to positively impression this recreation past the pitch,” Lauren Leichtman, controlling proprietor of San Diego Wave FC, mentioned in an announcement. “She used her platform to guide, to advocate, and to construct one thing significant in San Diego.
“Her resolution to speculate shouldn’t be solely a continuation of her management but in addition a mirrored image of her perception in what we’re constructing.”
Morgan was a fierce advocate for participant security and, within the later years of her enjoying profession, used her world platform to assist shield her colleagues.
Final yr, she publicly expressed that she was “disenchanted” to listen to allegations made by former Wave workers that the membership created a poisonous work setting.
“I need to be pleased with what we’re constructing on the Wave however it’s clear that there’s a lot work to be carried out,” she wrote in a social media put up final July.
The Wave and the NWSL are at the moment being sued by six former workers for allegations together with sexual harassment, retaliation, and wrongful termination.
“I need this membership to be recognized for being extraordinarily profitable,” Morgan mentioned on Wednesday. “I need gamers to see this membership as a spot that they search out, that they need to play in. I need the followers to have a look at this as an thrilling setting, and as a company and a crew that they need to proceed to get behind and keep behind.
“And I need this membership to be a mirrored image of the neighborhood that we reside in and that we characterize.”
Morgan joins a rising record of former gamers investing within the league.
Lauren Vacation, who was Morgan’s USWNT teammate on the 2012 Olympic gold medal-winning crew and the 2015 World Cup-winning crew, not too long ago invested within the North Carolina Braveness.
