Angel City FC’s eponymous HBO documentary is drenched in sunlight. It’s full of gorgeous slow-motion shots of players mid-game, bringing you in close to the action, trying to fill you up with the roaring crowd sounds. That’s why it’s so jarring to go back to actual NWSL broadcast footage, where the visual and audio quality is often variable, swinging between “fine” and “yikes.”
That’s an encapsulation of the overall Angel City experience vis-a-vis NWSL: ACFC likes to put out a comparatively lavish affair in a league that is just now starting to find stronger financial footing. This documentary is no different, finally dipping a toe into the extremely fruitful waters of sports documentaries, which we’ve seen deliver audience growth for other sports and leagues, like the WNBA’s Sports Emmy-nominated “144” about playing a season in the Wubble, the NFL’s Hard Knocks, and of course, F1’s Drive to Survive, which is frequently credited with boosting the popularity of F1 in the United States.
Directed by longtime cinematographer Arlene Nelson, and produced in part by ACFC co-owner Natalie Portman’s MountainA, alongside Little Monster Films and O’Malley Creadon Productions, this documentary aims to mine some of that sports documentary success not just for Angel City, but for the league and for women’s soccer as a whole in the United States.
You only have to see the massive jump in NWSL team valuations from roughly $5M to $50M over the last few years to get a sense of the money that is starting to pour into women’s soccer in this country. And this documentary is a good place to pause and reflect on where audiences want this growth to go. What stories should we tell, how do we tell them, and why? Narratives matter in their ability to shape perception and drive overall goals, and for the most part, “Angel City” is a perfectly fine entry into the sports doc pantheon.
A glimpse behind the curtain
“Angel City” covers a lot of ground, starting with the team in preseason as it’s explained how the investor group came together and entered the league, all the way through the end of their inaugural 2022 season. If you’re thinking that’s a lot to cram into three episodes, then you’re right. (HBO provided The Athletic with screeners of all three episodes before the release of the doc on May 16.)
Nelson told The Athletic in a call to promote the doc that her crew had assembled over 90 hours of footage, even though HBO’s series order was only for three episodes. So they had to get extremely judicious about how to cut things into a tight three hours.
That does mean that some things get left by the wayside, and that the doc sometimes feels like it’s trying to be too many things to too many people. They’re trying to set up the audience to understand the basics of soccer — at one point Uhrman uses the word “kit” and the definition appears on screen — but also giving juicy insider glimpses to fans who have more context, like the recurring clash between original general manager Eni Aluko and current head coach Freya Coombe. Their disagreements wind through the episodes, starting as early as the team’s preseason Challenge Cup games.
There’s also Didi Haracic and Paige Nielsen, both openly queer, having a short but emotionally charged conversation about former teammate Katie Cousins’ Instagram story sharing an MLB player’s quotes about deciding not to wear an LGBTQ+ pride rainbow jersey. And there’s a quick attempt to address reports of the team originally hiring Sean Nahas, then deciding on Coombe after fan backlash. Any of these issues could have been teased out into its own half an episode or even full hour, but they’re all given just a few minutes before the story has to move on.
Portman told The Athletic that she’s interested in trying to tell more stories around Angel City and the NWSL, but couldn’t say yet if that meant a season two, a new documentary, or something else. But for her, producing this season was a combination of wanting to take advantage of the audience interest that good sports documentaries drive, while also coming from a place of naturally being a storyteller, as she’s been for most of her life.
“I realized how unusual this story was,” she said, describing the early decision to film the process of getting the club off the ground, given the timing of securing distribution and hiring crews. “We haven’t seen a female majority ownership group start a soccer team from scratch. It’s a pretty wild ride, so I also saw the potential just as pure storytelling.”
Portman is not a distant observer, either as an owner or as a presence in the narrative. She is asked often for her perspective, and while her star power will certainly help drive viewership, it’s also interesting to hear the reactions of a former soccer outsider, such as when she, Uhrman, and co-founder Kara Nortman were repeatedly being told “no” during the investor search.
“I think the surprise of it was that people could overlook greed and self interest, because of their bias that they had, this bias that it couldn’t be popular,” Portman said. “It overlooked all of the data, all of the information about, like, these women are already huge stars. Soccer is the most popular sport in the world. These women are the best players in the world and have huge fan bases…. They just couldn’t wrap their heads around all of these kind of data points that were so clear that it was going to be a huge success for us.”
Visually, the doc brings the production value that has eluded NWSL for a long time. While filming cinematically for a documentary is very different from filming for a live game, the principle is the same: make it look good, and more people will want to watch. Nelson said that for games she sometimes had up to eight filming crews running simultaneously in order to film the locker room, the supporters, the staff, and the gameplay all at once. She brought in sports specific cinematographers, as well — people experienced in understanding the beats of a game and where and when to focus.
Portman also included plenty of women in the film crew. “It was incredible to have the female gaze from the producers, from the director, and also so much of the crew,” she said. “I think it helps us understand why seeing female athletes thrive is so kind of primal, and I think it helps us understand that connection of being able to see yourself represented in an incredible athlete.”
As professionals working in a visual medium, Nelson and Portman agreed that the league needs a production upgrade. In fact, in one of the episodes, Portman has a (polite) conversation with NWSL commissioner Jessica Berman about how hard it is to find games, and how the current broadcast setup isn’t sustainable.
“The camera operators are amazing. They’re incredible at what they do, they just need better gear,” said Nelson. “And the quality also of how they send it over the airwaves also needs to improve.”
She would watch game footage and note how it would go from looking like 1080p resolution, then down to HD, then back up again, making for a product that can feel rough on the eye. Sound is another issue; Nelson pointed out that sound is often underestimated for its ability to provide audience immersion and to provide an experience that feels more visceral.
Whose story are they telling?
Jasmyne Spencer and team president Julie Uhrman also spoke to The Athletic about the filming of “Angel City,” and the common thread between what they said, as well as Portman and Nelson, was an understanding that story and packaging matter just as much as putting a good product on the field.
One of Uhrman’s frequent talking points in the doc is that the club has to make fans want to come back regardless of results — perhaps an unintentional darkly comic statement, given how the doc also lays out the team’s struggles to win, and to find healthy players and keep them healthy throughout the season. But she’s not wrong, and Angel City’s 19,000-plus average attendance in their first season, one in which they didn’t make the playoffs, is a firm testament to that mindset.
“(The players) were also adamant about being a part of it and giving as much access as we could,” said Spencer. “Because people don’t know our stories individually, or the collective, in and around this league in particular. And I think it was coming at a time where all the news around the league was pretty negative, given the history. And so we felt like it was super important to tell some positive stories of growth and where the sport can lead to and what we envision it can be in this country.”
There was some discussion within the team about drawing the line between access and privacy. They had a code word they could use to signal the crew to stop recording (“papaya,” according to Uhrman), and some attitudes shifted over the course of the season.
“Some of my teammates who were like, ‘This is amazing, we’re going to be on screen.’ By the end, they were like, ‘Okay, I’ve already committed, how can I say no’, and it is a hard line,” said Spencer.
“Until we started playing games, and then not seeing results (during Challenge Cup), no one really understood how difficult that time was going to be. We’re trying to come together as a team but at the same time, this is such a big part of the story. And it’s like, do we let them in the locker room? Do we let them in on the bus when we’re having difficult conversations with one another, with the staff, and trying to figure out our identity on the field and build culture? It’s such a private and important moment for the foundation of the club. And yeah, at times, we were like, ‘No, you can’t come in.’ But at other times, we kind of just ate it. And we were like, this is really important for people to see and understand what it takes to build a club from scratch.”
Spencer, who has played in the NWSL since its first season in 2013, is particularly aware of the power of stories to sell a product. She just wants audiences and future productions to stay focused on what makes that product so compelling: the players.
“You think we’re all just amazing athletes who, you know, we just magically got here, that’s not the case,” she said.
If production companies are going to pour dollars into telling women’s soccer stories, she wants them to get to the dirt and grit of how hard it still is to be a pro female soccer player and not just show the glamorous, sold-out games and star-studded investor lineups.
“The hard stuff I think still needs to be told, especially when you talk about women’s sports, because the opportunity is far and few between compared to men,” she said.
Woso’s Drive to Survive era?
Also available to stream at the moment is a six-episode docuseries on Disney+ about the Australia women’s national team, “Matildas: World At Our Feet.” It covers an even longer time period than “Angel City,” going all the way back to June 2020, when Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand were announced as co-hosts for the 2023 World Cup.
Both docs are expensive and glossy affairs attached to huge media platforms, clearly in anticipation of a big surge of interest around the 2023 World Cup. Both of them are clearly trying to grow audiences and boost a team’s popularity, which by necessity means that both sometimes fall into more of a rah-rah cheerleading mode rather than pure documentary.
Those decisions do feel like an artifact of the days when women’s soccer was seen more as an inspirational cause for little girls rather than a business, and butt up against blunt declarations like Christen Press saying in episode one, “We’re not doing it just so your daughters can have a role model.” And to be fair to “Angel City,” their particular strain of rah-rah is heavily focused on the success of the club as a women-led financial endeavor.
Perhaps the fact that HBO only took on three episodes points to the necessity of “Angel City” in the first place. With such a short run of episodes, it feels a bit like HBO is hedging their bets instead of committing fully to telling a story about women’s soccer. There’s so much to cover, so many great stories, so many compelling players, and so much progress yet to make.
Uhrman said that one of the biggest things the league board of directors will need to decide on soon is the value and length of their next broadcast deal.
“I think we have enough data points to show the momentum of this league,” she said. “I think what you’re seeing in the Euros, what you’re seeing in the Champions League, what you’re hearing from FIFA about demanding the value the (World Cup) deserves, is only going to help us with these negotiations. Because there is a real audience here. And we’re not going to settle for something less than what we believe we deserve.”
(Photo: Ronald Martinez, Kevin Winter / Getty Images; Design: Eamonn Dalton)