Angie and Chris Lengthy ushered in a brand new period of the Nationwide Ladies’s Soccer League final 12 months when, as major homeowners of the Kansas Metropolis Present, they opened the league’s first purpose-built stadium. Now, the Longs are increasing their empire.
The Longs, by way of their household funding firm Ballard Capital, have bought Danish membership HB Køge, they’ve revealed completely to ESPN. Chris Lengthy known as HB Køge “the precedent transaction” within the Lengthy’s quest to create a world community of golf equipment.
“We’re not stopping right here,” Chris Lengthy advised ESPN. “Once we assume multi membership, we really feel like we have got a blueprint with the Kansas Metropolis Present. We really feel like we are able to take that very same blueprint, use it right here — though I believe there’s some positively completely different elements, community-wise — after which we have now another conversations ongoing to increase it additional.”
The Longs are the most recent homeowners to hitch the development of constructing a world multi-club community. Fellow NWSL proprietor Michele Kang owns three groups and counting, and Sixth Road, the bulk proprietor of the NWSL’s Bay FC, lately introduced plans to accumulate extra golf equipment and set up a world community.
The Longs will personal 100% of the HB Køge’s girls’s crew after separating the enterprise from the boys’s facet. They stated they may keep the crew’s present identification. They declined to share the acquisition value of HB Køge, who gained three straight Danish league titles from 2021-23, main to a few consecutive UEFA Champions League berths.
The Longs stated that in HB Køge — situated about 30 south of Copenhagen — they noticed a powerful pipeline of expertise improvement they usually fell in love with a group that Chris Lengthy in comparison with Kansas Metropolis’s “Midwest values.” They had been embraced from their first go to to Denmark by mayor Køge mayor Marie Stærke and the ladies’s crew’s solely devoted sponsor, Danish financial institution Spar Nord.
“We have been this for some time and seemed throughout lots of completely different international locations and areas, and we’re tremendous enthusiastic about this chance in Denmark,” Angie Lengthy advised ESPN. “If we take a look at our pillars as a membership, this chance strains up a lot. It is a spot to the place we predict we are able to actually entice and develop expertise on the participant facet, additionally on the workers facet.”
The Longs’ expectat to make HB Køge a perennial champion in Denmark and constant UEFA Champions League participant. Chris Lengthy stated an alternate of gamers and workers is feasible, though he famous the power of Denmark’s league and its potential to draw high gamers.
What made HB Køge stand out to the Longs was the enterprise potential. They see a big alternative to raised commercialize a membership that was not pulling “so many income levers,” Chris Lengthy stated — quite a bit just like the alternatives they noticed once they joined the NWSL in late 2020.
Chris Lengthy stated they may instantly double funding into HB Køge’s academy with the purpose of creating it “the most effective academy in Scandinavia,” a area traditionally wealthy with expertise. They’ve additionally introduced again Walid Khoury, co-founder of Southern California youth powerhouse membership Slammers FC, to turn into the CEO of HB Køge’s girls’s crew. Khoury was the crew’s basic supervisor throughout its most up-to-date qualification for the UEFA Champions League.
The Longs goal to extend sponsorship for the membership. Via their travels and analysis, they’ve noticed what number of girls’s groups are sometimes handled as ad-ons to sponsorship offers major offered for males’s groups, a apply that inherently devalues the ladies’s product and artificially limits its enterprise potential.
Among the industrial fixes are easy: Chris Lengthy stated HB Køge’s girls’s crew doesn’t at the moment promote merchandise, an enormous alternative misplaced for income.
HB Køge’s males’s crew will proceed to be owned by George Altirs and his American sportswear model Capelli Sport. Separating the companies of the boys’s and ladies’s groups has been “a studying curve,” Chris Lengthy stated, however it’s a mandatory step that the Longs anticipate to take once more with future golf equipment.
The Longs have already displayed what their long-term imaginative and prescient appears like with the Present. They’re in the midst of developing a $1 billion Kansas Metropolis riverfront revitalization anchored round CPKC Stadium. They anticipate to their influence to increase into the group in Denmark, too.
The place the Longs broaden to subsequent will rely upon a number of components.
There are ample world alternatives to take over a membership and enhance its enterprise, Chris Lengthy stated, however there are fewer alternatives amongst those who have the precise group assist and soccer operations. HB Køge checked all three packing containers for the Longs.
They nonetheless have their eyes on including extra golf equipment — however they’re nonetheless in search of one other proper group and crew.
“The enterprise facet, it is vast open,” Chris Lengthy stated. “There’s simply so little give attention to what the ladies’s facet can really be from a enterprise perspective that we all know that is going to be on the market. It is the primary two [pillars] which might be those that we’re actually striving for.”
