Monarch Collective, the investment fund focused on women's sports, is reportedly in talks to take a minority stake in the women's team of English top-tier club West Ham United.
According to The Guardian, Monarch Collective – which has interests in two teams from North America's National Women's Soccer League (NWSL) – is keen on buying up to 49% of the West Ham women's team, with that side finishing ninth in the 12-team English Women's Super League (WSL) last season.
Go deeper with GlobalData
Discover B2B Marketing That Performs
Combine business intelligence and editorial excellence to reach engaged professionals across 36 leading media platforms.
The proposed agreement would value the West Ham women's side, in total, at £55 million ($74.4 million), The Guardian has reported.
A minority stake sale would keep West Ham's current owners – David Sullivan and the family of David Gold, as well as Czech billionaire businessman Daniel Kretinsky – as controlling owners of the women's team.
That women's side currently plays its home games at the Chigwell Construction Stadium – it has not played any matches recently at the London Stadium, where the men's outfit plays, with West Ham currently engaged in a dispute with that venue's landlord over staging WSL fixtures.
Monarch Collective, meanwhile, was launched by investor Kara Nortman in March 2023 and raised a $150 million fund to invest in women's sports leagues and clubs nearly two years ago.
US Tariffs are shifting - will you react or anticipate?
Don’t let policy changes catch you off guard. Stay proactive with real-time data and expert analysis.
By GlobalDataCurrently, the group holds stakes in the San Diego Wave NWSL side, as well as in Boston Legacy, the expansion team that will join that women's soccer league in 2026.
In March, Monarch Collective raised an additional $100 million to invest further in women's competitions.
With the fresh cash injection, the firm’s fund has reached $250 million.
The latest funding round featured investment firm Pivotal Ventures, alongside individuals from Hello Sunshine, EY, and the Rockefeller Foundation.
The firm suggested earlier this year that it expected to make two to three more investments in 2025, potentially outside of soccer for the first time.
Nortman is specifically eyeing women’s soccer in Europe, as well as women's basketball, with the latter sport having enjoyed a massive surge in popularity in the US in the last two years or so.
In terms of top-tier English soccer clubs selling stakes in their women's teams, meanwhile, heavyweights Chelsea sold 10% in their (hugely successful) women's side to Alexis Ohanian (the co-founder of prominent internet social media and forum site Reddit) in May, for a reported fee of £20 million.
Fellow English side Aston Villa, meanwhile, are also reportedly in talks with US investors over selling a small stake in their women's team – the vast majority has now been sold off to the club's own parent company, V Sports, to work around Profit and Sustainability Regulations (PSR) covering the men's Premier League. Villa would likely have breached PSR limits without that sale and the generation of theoretical profit off the back of it.
Villa are following in the footsteps of Chelsea through this move, with the latter club having sold its women's team to a parent company run by its owners, BlueCo, in a deal that went through last June and which helped the London club avoid a PSR breach for the 2023-24 season.
