Stephanie Rudnick
Head of PR and Communications
Angel City Football Club, MKTG Sports + Entertainment, The Yellow Brick Collective
Education: USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, B.A., journalism/PR
Family: Children, Charlie (14) and Tilly (12)
Why she’s a Game Changer:
Rudnick is shaping the narratives behind some of sports’ most ambitious launches, from Angel City FC to World Sevens Football, proving communications can drive franchise value, cultural relevance and global growth.
Stephanie Rudnick was Angel City FC’s first hire in 2020. Team co-founder Julie Uhrman understood that if her new NWSL franchise was going to cut through in a crowded Los Angeles sports market, it needed to tell the right story, and Rudnick was the ideal messenger.
“We were allowed to be really vulnerable and take a lot of chances,” Rudnick told the “Missing Perspectives” YouTube channel in 2025. Uhrman told her: “Fall on your face. Who cares? We’ve got to try.”
Four years after those early Zoom calls (they took place in 2020 with the pandemic at its height), the club was valued at $250 million when Willow Bay and Bob Iger gained a controlling stake. It made Angel City the most valuable property in women’s sports.
The “secret sauce,” as Rudnick herself put it, is “community.” She told the Women’s Sports Summit in 2022: “We started the team with three pillars; education, equality and impact, where everything we did was laddering up to that.”
Angel City shares 10% of its sponsorship money with the local community, whether providing internships in sports business to aspiring girls, running coach development programs with Gatorade or helping DoorDash deliver meals to the vulnerable. “Sponsors love that because they get what your purpose is,” she added, “and that’s why we have the highest sponsorship revenue of any [women’s soccer] team in the world, because we don’t just logo slap — we actually go to each one and figure out what that 10% purpose is, which gives us a lot of different ways to talk about the club.”
Rudnick lives in Sydney, where she continues to fulfill her Angel City duties while working for a range of organizations across the globe.
