There’s a very telling second in “Angel Metropolis,” the HBO docuseries about Angel Metropolis FC’s 2022 debut season within the Nationwide Girls’s Soccer League.
A couple of hours earlier than the gates open at BMO Stadium for the season’s house opener, co-founder and group president Julie Uhrman is frantically working from one space of the stadium to a different, imploring her workers to be sure that Angel Metropolis branding is all around the partitions and signage. She wished followers and attendees to see the house not as a ladies’s soccer group in a males’s soccer stadium, however moderately a ladies’s soccer group in its house.
It sounds good on its face, and it has delivered vital enterprise success. Nevertheless it additionally speaks to what Uhrman and fellow founding homeowners — investor Kara Nortman and actress Natalie Portman — assume the aim of Angel Metropolis is.
Thursday’s information that Angel Metropolis was docked 3 factors within the standings and fined $200,000, along with suspensions for Uhrman and normal supervisor Angela Hucles Mangano, is one other expression of this. To find that Uhrman and Hucles Mangano had brokered off-the-books compensation for 5 totally different (unnamed) gamers, which drove their payroll $50,000 over the wage cap for a four-week interval through the 2024 season, is the truth is their second main violation of the NWSL’s roster guidelines following tampering prices in 2021.
This week’s punishments are historic — the primary factors deduction in league historical past and the utmost doable high-quality to be issued instantly by the commissioner — however the prices aren’t remoted. Slightly, they reveal the core of Angel Metropolis’s organizational philosophy: promote the picture of success even on the potential threat of constructing an incredible group. Which means growing older veterans with excessive Q rankings and even larger wage calls for have been prioritized — wage cap laws be damned, because it turned out.
