What might go down as Aly Wagner’s greatest assist occurred long after she retired as a professional soccer player.
It came in the summer of 2022, when she pitched Charlotte Waxman, the wife of Sixth Street CEO Alan Waxman, on the virtues of a NWSL expansion team in the San Francisco Bay Area. At the time, Wagner was hoping the couple would come on board as individual investors.
“Charlotte comes out of the investment side, she comes out of business, so she asked all the right questions, probably screening me for Alan,” Wagner told ESPN.
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Wagner’s sales pitch was so persuasive that Charlotte told Alan about the idea.
“My wife was like, ‘You’ve got to meet Aly,” Alan Waxman told ESPN. “The more we dug in on the different things that we look for in what makes a good investment, every place we dug it was coming back almost like, this doesn’t make any sense. This seems like the most structurally undervalued sports league opportunity of anything we see in the world, not only in the sports ecosystem, but also just across everything.
“We see literally about 400 deals a month. We see a lot of stuff, not only within only the sports ecosystem, across everything. It just didn’t make sense. But this is what happens across companies and sectors when…
