Grand slam champion Serena Williams signed up to join Martin Broughton’s proposal to buy Premier League club soccer club Chelsea.
Williams is already part of a majority woman-founded group that owns Angel City FC in the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL).
Williams’s early-stage venture capital firm, Serena Ventures, has raised an inaugural fund of $111 million. Williams is already an active angel investor with a portfolio of 60 companies, including SendWave, MasterClass and Daily Harvest.
According to Forbes, she has a net worth of $240 million.
In an interview, Williams shared that it was her love of the business world that created the first connection with her now-husband, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian.
“One of our first conversations was investing, because I’ve been investing for over nine years now,” Williams told CNBC’s “Squawk Box.” “We try to keep business separate. Obviously, there are things that come up, where we talk about business at home — but we try to keep our businesses as separate as they can be.”
Formula One star Lewis Hamilton also signed up.
“It’s a move away from what they’re investing in traditionally, [by] investing in a club’s franchise, especially a club the size of Chelsea. [Sportspeople are] typically seen as investing in consumer brands, early stage businesses that clearly have relevance to their sporting career, but also kind of that move into the wider business world,” Ben Peppi, sports commercial expert at JMW Solicitors, told CNN Sport.
“This, to me, looks more like a traditional investment play. Clearly, it’s a financial return. It’s not going to be acting as brand ambassadors for Chelsea Football Club in a traditional way that they might with other consumer brands,” he added.
