“My ultimate thesis of everything is that the path to gender equity is through women’s sports,” says Heather Millstone.
Millstone puts her money where her mouth is as co-owner (with her sister, Jessica Millstone) of their family office, Millstone Investments. They are minority investors in the Portland Thorns of the National Women’s Soccer League, and they have invested in the Calgary Wild, part of a new Canadian women’s soccer league.
“Sports can create change: Little girls learn how to play, develop confidence, and learn not only how to work within a team, but how to be a star within a team. These experiences inform them when they go on with their life, whether or not they’re in sports,” Millstone says. “I also think it’s really important for little boys to see women who are strong professional athletes. The more that is normalized, the more the misogyny will be chipped away as they grow up.”
Millstone’s first investment in a sports team was not the slow, careful testing of the waters she had envisioned. As she started to become interested in investment possibilities, she made a series of connections with women who were already investing. One led her to Revitate, a fund for minority investors in the Portland Thorns.
“Very quickly, I basically had to go to Jessica and say, ‘We have this opportunity to invest in the Portland Thorns. It’s more money than we’ve ever invested in anything before. But trust me when I say this is the last train leaving the station,’” Millstone says. She pointed out the networking opportunities that would come with the investment, as well as the financial upside. “Jessica really saw my vision, and she saw how we were going to raise the funds to do it.”
A pivotal moment
The timing felt right.
“It was definitely a moment in time — early 2024 — when the NWSL was just about to blow up,” Millstone says.
Living in Los Angeles, she saw how Angel City, the local NWSL [(National Women’s Soccer League)] club, “was really changing the dynamics,” Millstone says. “It showed that women’s sports could be profitable — that this was something we could start building a portfolio around.”
The investment in the Portland Thorns led to more connections with investors, which led to more opportunities. The family office then invested in the Calgary Wild, as well as in Crux Football, a holding company that invests in multiple teams, including Rosengard in Sweden and Montpelier in France.
“Crux’s premise is to buy the women’s teams from the men’s so that by cleaving them, the women’s team can be its sole focus,” Millstone says. “What I liked about Crux in particular is that they identified the issues that particularly have limited growth in the European women’s game.”
Millstone says investing in more recently formed women’s sports leagues is different from investing in longstanding men’s leagues.
“Men’s sports — from the historic football clubs in Europe to baseball, American football and basketball — have had in some cases over 100 years to develop and become a critical social norm for entertainment,” Millstone says. “The expectation is that a women’s team has to hit those same metrics within its first years of existence, otherwise it’s a failure. And the old trope that ‘Nobody watches women’s sports’ sits in a collective consciousness and makes the challenge of breaking through that noise that much harder.”
A good fit for family offices
Despite the challenges, Millstone says family offices — known for their long-term thinking when making investments — are good candidates for investing in women’s sports.
“Family offices have access to the capital required to really make this kind of change and also to make money at it, because there will be exit opportunities that aren’t always available with other traditional sports teams,” Millstone says.
And there is money to be made, she says. Average valuations for NWSL teams, for example, have surged in the past several years.
“The price point for women’s sports is remarkably low for huge potential financial gains,” Millstone says. “Only a few sectors get to experience this kind of boom, and while there will be an eventual plateau in excitement when it just becomes an accepted part of the landscape, it will still fit into one of the last places that humans won’t be replaced by AI, an activity that we all get to share in the collective humanity: the Davids and Goliaths, the tears of joy and pain, wonderment, and also aspiration.”
There are also often real estate opportunities — another potentially fruitful area for family office investment.
“Real estate has always been the other part of sports investing: the economy that revolves around building a stadium and the other entertainment zones that are built up around that,” Millstone says. “Why aren’t we building more women’s stadiums? I would love to see dying malls become women’s stadiums — that would be a win-win for reimagining land use for entertainment and shopping.”
Marketing opportunities
Millstone says smart marketing is key to developing the women’s sports market. She finds it frustrating, for example, to see marketing for women’s sports focus on 12-year-old girls to the exclusion of other audiences.
“When you project that your product is only attractive to a young market, you are infantilizing the entire ecosystem,” Millstone says. “Its existence is to only be aspirational versus being a product that is entertaining far beyond what traditional sports fans are generalized as: testosterone-fueled, beer-drinking, truck-driving, fast-food-eating men. The audience for women’s sports is far more inclusive — not just because it’s family-friendly or less aggressive, but many people watch women’s sports because it happens to be more technical, mental, skill-driven.”
When it comes to selling merchandise, Millstone would like to see teams move away from the idea that “only men watch sports, so we’re going to tailor all of our gear toward men, and women can have a smaller size of something that’s pink — they should be creative in creating merch that appeals to wider audiences.”
Women’s soccer appeals to a demographic that men’s sports could only dream of accessing, Millstone says.
“An Angel City match is an amazing cross-section of people: old, young, gay, straight, multinational, families, single people,” Millstone says.
Purposeful investing
For Millstone, investing in women’s sports teams is an investment with a purpose — but it is “definitely not a charity,” she says. (Separately, she makes philanthropic donations centered on providing sports opportunities for children in underrepresented areas.)
“This is the highest growth opportunity with the greatest amount of societal impact for people who are trying to do ethical investing. You’re investing, basically, in the future of your society,” Millstone says.
In addition to her own investments, she hopes to persuade others to make these investments.
“I just want to see it done,” Millstone says. “I don’t have to do it myself, but I will jump up and down and scream from the rooftops that there are so many opportunities.”