This is Michele Kang’s powerful women’s soccer empire

In just one year, Michele Kang took possession of NWSL’s Washington Spirit, French powerhouse Olympique de Lyon and the English London City Lionesses, who created Kynisca Sports, the first international women’s football group.

The name Kynisca is a tribute to the Spartan princess Cinisca, the first woman to win the Olympic Games in ancient Greece. Quite a declaration of intent from Kang (South Korea, 1959), founder of Cognosante, a health information technology company.

Its goal is for “women’s soccer to become a sport followed around the world, at the level of support that men’s soccer receives,” according to statements reported in The Washington Post. But most of all it seeks to change the status of female athletes.

To this end, he considers that the creation of a group like Kynisca Sports is “almost a necessity.”

“Our female players, whether in France, England or the United States, are the best. They are world champions and Olympic gold medalists, but their playing and training environments are inferior to their male counterparts . That’s not good,” Kang said.

“And I think,” he added, “that’s really what I want to address. To do that, you have to build a unified organization that can devote all the necessary attention and focus and create that scale.”

In conjunction with the Olympic Games in Paris, Kang announced the launch of the Kynisca Innovation Hub (KIH), an organization whose mission is to revolutionize training methods for women to unleash their athletic potential.

According to KIH data, only 6% of current sports science research focuses on female athletes, a figure Kang aims to change.

“The level of research we can do now, because we have multiple teams and can pool resources, is something that would not be possible if we only had Spirit,” he said.

3 clubs in just 1 year

In 2022, Kang is involved in a battle to buy the Spirit with its former owner. In the end, he bought the team, which had just become NWSL champions the previous season, for $35 million, a record at the time for the American league.

Just one year later, the businesswoman announced the creation of a group (still unnamed) taking over Olympique Lyon, the most successful women’s football club in the world, eight-time Champions League champion.

A few months later, Kang bought the London City Lionesses of the English second division, a women’s club founded in 2019 as a spin-off from Millwall FC due to the lack of financial resources received by the operation.

“If you think about where the center of gravity is for women’s sports, and women’s soccer, it’s obviously in the United States and in many of the major European countries, and England is definitely one of them,” Kang said afterward this latest purchase. .

“So I always knew we had to be in London, in England,” he added.

In fact, Kang chose the city of London as the headquarters of Kynisca Sports, although the Spirit remains a pillar of its business model because “the United States has the most advanced economy in women’s soccer.”

Convince Giraldez

Although on an institutional level, Kang’s arrival was a breath of fresh air for the Washington Spirit, sportingly the club entered a crisis of results after winning its first title.

Ready to make Spirit her flagship, at the beginning of the year the businesswoman knocked on the door of Jonatan Giráldez, a rising star on the bench and fresh off winning the Champions League with Fútbol Club Barcelona.

Kang convinced Giráldez to leave Barça and embark on an adventure in America, although before that the Galician coach had won his second Champions League with the Catalan club, certainly against Olympique Lyon.

After only a few months in the federal capital, Giráldez filled the project with enthusiasm: he has the Spirit in the NWSL semifinals, which will be played this coming weekend against the current league champion, NJ/NY Gotham.