Photograph Credit score: Kelvin Kuo-USA TODAY Sports activities

There’s a very telling second in “Angel Metropolis,” the HBO docuseries about Angel Metropolis FC’s 2022 debut season within the Nationwide Ladies’s Soccer League.

A couple of hours earlier than the gates open at BMO Stadium for the season’s residence opener, co-founder and crew president Julie Uhrman is frantically working from one space of the stadium to a different, imploring her employees to be sure that Angel Metropolis branding is all around the partitions and signage. She wished followers and attendees to see the area not as a girls’s soccer crew in a males’s soccer stadium, however relatively a girls’s soccer crew in its residence.

It sounds good on its face, and it has delivered important enterprise success. Nevertheless it additionally speaks to what Uhrman and fellow founding house owners — 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 basic 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 in reality 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 potential high quality to be issued straight by the commissioner — however the prices are usually not remoted. Fairly, they reveal the core of Angel Metropolis’s organizational philosophy: promote the picture of success even on the potential danger of constructing a fantastic crew. Meaning getting old veterans with excessive Q rankings and even increased wage calls for have been prioritized — wage cap laws be damned, because it turned out.