The Interview: Victoire Cogevina Reynal
The Miami- and London-Based Founder and CEO of Gloria on Being at the Camp Nou for Barcelona Femení's 91,000-Plus Crowd, Announcing a €10 Million Commitment to the Spanish Women's League and More
Big things are happening in women’s soccer, and a lot of them are connected to Victoire Cogevina Reynal, the founder and CEO of the soon-to-be-released Gloria soccer community app. When I continue to see someone pop up in interesting things connected to the sport, one of my first thoughts is that I want to interview that person. So when I saw Vicky at a panel I was moderating at the recent Soccerex conference in Miami Beach, I went ahead and asked her. We spoke on April 7 when she was in Barcelona, and that conversation is below.
The entirety of the written interview below is reserved for paid subscribers. As always, you can still get the entire free audio version of my podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to go for your pods.
Grant Wahl:
Our guest now is Victoire Cogevina Reynal. She's the Miami- and London-based founder and CEO of Gloria, a soon-to-be-released soccer community app. She's also a UN Ambassador for Gender Equality in Football and a Board Member of WIST, a nonprofit for Women in Sports Tech. She was at the stadium for the Barcelona women's team's recent record crowd of more than 91,000 fans. And the next day Gloria announced a €10 million commitment for the naming rights of the Spanish women's pro league. Vicky, congratulations on that news and thanks for coming on the show.
Victoire Cogevina Reynal:
Thank you very much for having me. I've been a big fan of this show for a long time.
Grant Wahl:
Thank you. I really appreciate that. We have a lot to talk about here, but first off I just want to ask, what was it like to be in the stadium for 91,000 fans at a Barcelona-Real Madrid women's Champions League game? What did you see? What did you feel?
Victoire Cogevina Reynal:
It's very hard to put those feelings into words. I've been processing now for a week. It's been a week, and it's very, very hard. I'll start by saying that I never thought this moment would come this fast, even though I was bullish about this moment happening. That's definitely the first thing I'll say. Barcelona is also my team. So it felt even closer to home to see a team that I've been cheering for so many years on the men's side do justice to the women's side of things. That's the second thing. I've been in that same stadium, Camp Nou, cheering for Messi so loudly, and now I was there cheering for Alexia and the incredible success that they've had so far. And hearing everyone else join me in that was an incredible experience.
And then the last thing I'll say, even though I could speak about this for hours and hours, I've been having conversations with every taxi driver here in Barcelona about this incredible moment, because they're so used to having a very big team here, but it's always about the men and never about the women. But the audience was very much a family-oriented audience. There were a lot of little girls, there were a lot of mothers, and it felt like they took that opportunity to show them what the future could look like for them. And to me that's the most important thing that happened last Wednesday for every woman on this planet and men too, that have mothers and daughters and wives, it meant much more than just a crowded football game. It was a world where women really are treated the same way as men.
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Grant Wahl:
It really was a huge moment. And I was in Barcelona last month to report a story on their women's team knowing that this was going to happen, and they're going to do it again for the semifinal. They already sold out in a very short amount of time the tickets for that game against Wolfsburg in leg one. But I did want to get your perspective on what are the factors in your opinion about what's caused this change in Spain, in Barcelona, and obviously the success of their team, their women's team, has to be part of that because they're the current European champion, their record is incredible and they play amazing soccer, but this team only became professionalized in 2015. And so a lot has happened in a short amount of time. What do you think has happened this year to cause this big change around attendance at these games?
Victoire Cogevina Reynal:
So speaking specifically about Barcelona, I believe that the contrast between the women's team and the [struggling] men's team and the timing of everything that has happened has been a big factor as well in looking at the women's team with different eyes. Actually, Heineken did an incredible campaign here locally that I don't think anyone saw, but whoever is walking the streets of Barcelona that says “We congratulate Barcelona for making the semifinals of the Champions League.” And in their whole message, they never mentioned it's the men's team or the women's team, they just say Barcelona, clearly because the Barcelona men's team didn't make it into anything. Then we're in the Champions League, then it kind of was a nice wink. But I do believe that has had a lot to do.
And even more specifically, I mean the rise of Alexia Putellas as the best footballer in the world with all the awards that she won across several competitions as well as individual awards, made her into a superstar. I actually was invited to the birthday of one of the players and also was used as a celebration for their win on Saturday last week. And after having been an agent for men and having seen how they treat male footballers, and how they could protect them from the press, and how whenever there's any types of parties it's done in a very private way, and all those things, I saw that they were doing the same with the women's team. Which was incredible to watch, because to me that was yet another inflection point in not only the success of women's football and the specific success of teams but as well as the footballers themselves. And I do believe that again, we're at the very beginning of all of this, and there's no going back from here.
Grant Wahl:
So before we get into Gloria's commitment to the league, I wanted to just ask you straight up so we can make it clear for our listeners. What is Gloria?
Victoire Cogevina Reynal:
What is Gloria? Gloria is a vertical community for all football fans. It's a place that if you want to watch a game and you're alone, you can come and connect with other people that are like-minded to you, whether because they follow your same team or because they love the same footballer and you have that in common. And we're building technology and a product essentially that can foster that sense of belonging and sense of community. So that's in short what Gloria is, and we're going to be launching very soon so you all get to check it out on your own.
Grant Wahl:
And to be clear, this is for the women's game and the men's game. Right?
Victoire Cogevina Reynal:
I said football very thoughtfully. It is for both. It's one sport. It's just a lot of different people play it and a lot of different people support it as well. Because I think that's another big piece that we're trying to solve for is that historically offline communities of football have been very common. I mean, it's just going to watch a game with your family and your friends, going to a sports bar, going to a stadium are very common offline behaviors. And then when the internet came along, football very organically started trying to find its place. And it did build communities on pretty much any platform that exists out there in terms of social media. So you'll find big Twitter football communities and big Instagram football communities, and same on TikTok, and Reddit, and so many different platforms, and that's as well because of the scope of football fans. There's billions of them, and you can see that online.
But until now we haven't had one company, one product, that builds thoughtfully and consciously for football alone and really verticalizing that specific community. And in the process of doing that, really understanding that football fans are literally in every single country in this world. And they're both men and women, and they're both young and older. And that you have to think about this when you're building a product to make sure it's inclusive for everyone, from a branding standpoint all the way to how the product is built and the functionality it has to make it that inclusive. And safe as well, obviously.
Grant Wahl:
So how did the announcement of Gloria's €10 million naming-rights commitment in the Spanish league, this new Spanish women's league, how did that come about?
Victoire Cogevina Reynal:
I think it's a result of my many years in the sport and being also in the right place at the right time. I've been an advocate for women's football for a long time now, and I think it's been an incredible journey so far. I do know that a big part of my mission in this life is to help as much as I can. This incredible new thing that is happening to all football fans, right? Because it's probably the most exciting thing that has happened in the sport in the last hundred years, for sure.
And through my involvement in women's football, advocating for it, and having very loud opinions around it, I built an incredible network of like-minded colleagues. And now I can call them friends. And this is what happened. Spain, as we said at the beginning of this conversation, is set to have a new professional league here that is going to be independent from the federation, which means that there's also open room to have a new president, a new vice president and a new structure that will essentially inform the future of football in this country.
A couple of months ago two good friends of mine, two lawyers, one that worked directly with FIFA and is also the founder of the first congress around women and leadership in the sport, as well as an ex-board member of Barcelona FC that has also had an incredible impact in what Barcelona Femení is today, both called me and told me we're running for this presidency and we're going to be independent. These are our plans. We want to treat players differently. We want to treat clubs differently. We want to do all these things that sound very innovative, obviously from a football standpoint, and someone like myself that comes from the men's side of things. And I immediately gave them my support. I said I am not Spanish, so my endorsement won't mean much, but in the background I'm happy to do whatever you guys need. And what do you need?
And one of the things that any project needs is always capital. So I connected them to a few of our investors, and one of them, Muse Capital, and Assia Grazioli, who's been one of my earliest investors and advisors of Gloria, pledged €40 million to them, which is an incredible amount of capital and I think one of the smartest moves as well, just because it's such a good investment because of the growth of it and obviously many other factors. And through that relationship we ended up speaking about what the league would look like and what the league would be named. And that's where it all started. Let's say Gloria being a great name for a women's league, of course. And then I made the offer and I suggested that if they won, then I would want to acquire the naming rights. And I set the price for almost 10 times what my predecessor, which is a gas company here in Spain, had done back in 2016.
And I still do believe that the price might be, a few years from now, something very low. So this is really what happened. It was something that we documented as much as we could because we knew it was historic. And the most historic piece of it, which is what happened really behind closed doors, is that for the first time I think you had four women negotiating and sitting across the table from each other doing deals in a historically men-dominated space. And I think that alone was already very exciting.
Grant Wahl:
No, that's very cool. And the contingency for your commitment is that the two lawyers you're referring to would be running the league. How likely is that to happen? When will we find out?
Victoire Cogevina Reynal:
This is where we get into the politics of Spanish football that is very similar to Argentinian football. And that's why I felt comfortable getting involved because I do understand the dynamics. But again, it is the Spanish dynamics, and they need to do what they need to do to figure out how it's going to be run. They do need the endorsement of four of the 16 clubs to be in the running, and after that there's going to be elections. The timelines are not very clear, and there's a political reason behind that, which is not great, but we're doing as much as we can to help. And I do believe that it sends a very strong signal to the clubs that these women have already secured €50 million essentially without even winning the league, and that's money that's all going to go back to the clubs. Right? And to the development of the sport in this country.
So to answer short, it's unclear when and how it's going to happen, but I am bullish that it will, and that it will definitely mark a before and after in women's football in Europe. Because I do believe that they have the chance to become the best women's football league in the world in a very short amount of time. And I'm saying this being an American person and working in the United States. But there's reasons for me to believe that, and I'm very happy that Gloria can be at this inflection point and to support brands. And I've been saying this for a long time. I just never thought my brand would be it, but brands hold the power today because they bring the capital, and then they can actually effect a lot more change than they think.
I mean, even look at the Nike and the Adidases of this world. Until very recently, women were playing with men's kits. Very recently, we're talking three years ago. Like this was 40 years ago, 50 years ago. And by virtue of them investing into that, then women got the kits, the necessary proper equipment that they need to play the game at a professional level. So I tried to do my best from the brand standpoint and hopefully also inspire more. I'm waiting to hear an offer up, someone tell me that they want to pay €15 million.
Grant Wahl:
So I know that you have Argentine roots, you have Greek roots, you are American, you were born in the U.S.. Your mother is a sports agent. You were a sports agent in the past. When people ask you, what's your story? What do you tell them?
Victoire Cogevina Reynal:
That's a great question. I will always say that I'm Greek-Argentinian. I'm half-half. I was born in the U.S.. I do currently live in the U.S. as well and have for a few years. And football has become my common denominator in my life. My father was an ambassador. We lived in 11 different cities, moved a lot. I learned four languages as a consequence and was always the new girl, was always starting the first day at a new school. And all of that really affected how I developed as a human being, obviously.
Thankfully, my brother, when I was very young, we're speaking five, six years old, introduced me to football. He used to be a hooligan, not anymore. Now he has kids and is a professional person, but he used to be a hooligan and had this enormous passion for football. And didn't have a little brother, he had a little sister. So I ended up as a consequence going with him to the rowdiest part of football in South America. And in the stadium at Racing in Avellaneda, in the popular, which you probably know very well what it is.
Grant Wahl:
Yep.
Victoire Cogevina Reynal:
But for those that don't know, it's the place in the stadium. There's no seats. And there's literal metal structures called para avalancha to stop people from crashing into each other when there's a goal. And my brother would put me in front of those metal structures to essentially not lose my life. I used to have this, and I think that still at a very like physical level when there's goals, I still feel this life-or-death kind of feeling inside of me where it's like, you don't know what’s going to happen. But I did grow up from a very young age being a very passionate football fan.
I never played the sport because my parents never thought that was something that a little girl should do. I wish I was in the United States at that point because I would've probably played soccer then, but I didn't. And all of those things really informed my identity and who I am today. Football saved my life. When I was young, I was very bullied in school unfortunately and I was going through my parents' divorce and through very tough moments in my life as a 12, 13, 14-year-old. And football gave me that community. Every Sunday I'd step in that stadium, I'll see people that I've met before. Men, mostly men, that otherwise I would've never met. And we all had something bigger to celebrate or to worry about that wasn't our own lives but was this team Racing that had a long history of losing. So yeah, that's really my story. I'm a passionate football fan that wants to bring that same feeling of belonging, that same feeling of being seen by others, through football, and I'm using technology because that's the best vehicle that we have today.
Grant Wahl:
I've spent a fair amount of time with hardcore soccer fans, football fans in Argentina, over the years, going back to the ‘90s, traveled with Boca Juniors fans. I actually went to a Racing game in 2001 and sat in the populares.
Victoire Cogevina Reynal:
When they won.
Grant Wahl:
You might have been there. I don't know.
Victoire Cogevina Reynal:
Well, I mean, that was the year Racing won their championship for the first time after 35 years.
Grant Wahl:
Yes.
Victoire Cogevina Reynal:
And I was actually there. I was, yes. I was 10 years old, by the way. Now you can figure out that I'm a 30-year-old woman. But yeah, it was an incredible year for Racing. Thirty-five years we hadn't seen them lift the trophy. So I'm glad that was the year that you went.
Grant Wahl:
But what I remember, and this was always the case in the populares, is just how few women there were. And so you had to have been one of the only women in there, much less kids, young girls.
Victoire Cogevina Reynal:
Yes. However, I will say that in Racing and some other stadiums in Argentina, there's a section of the audience in the bleachers that it's only for women.
Grant Wahl:
Oh really? Okay.
Victoire Cogevina Reynal:
It's a very small section, very small, on the left of la popular. So it's not really like the nice seats or la popular. It's somewhere in the middle, and there's only women there. So you'll see like a lot of the wives of the same men that are in la popular, or little girls. But it was always we're talking representative of 1% of the amount of people that were in that stadium. And thankfully, I always remember looking at it, and I'm so thankful that my brother never thought that this was the place I should go hang out because it wasn't as fun as where we were at. I think that, and obviously, my mother being the very strong person she is, my gender never felt like it was an issue in this sport.
Grant Wahl:
Was it unusual in any way that your mom as a woman was a sports agent, a soccer agent? Like, I've never come across too many Argentine women who are sports agents in the past.
Victoire Cogevina Reynal:
No, it was very unusual, especially when we started the agency together about eight years ago now. At that point, the only women representing players were women that were directly related to the player in question, right? Either they were their mother or their aunt or their wives. When Wanda Nara with [Mauro] Icardi, one of the most famous kind of women managing a player's career. But two professional women that had decided to do this independently was unheard of.
Actually, FIFA recognized us in 2018 as the first women to ever start a sports agency for this sport. So it was not usual. It was not common. And for a long time, everyone made fun of us and kind of laughed us out of the room in the sense that, how do you think that a man is going to give you their career? And I think that what they hadn't seen at that point is that firstly, my mother was a wealth manager before she was an agent, and she had worked with these players at really managing their wealth.
And I do believe that an athlete, most athletes in many sports, there is a trust component. If they trust you with their money, which could be argued as one of the most sensitive things to give to someone else, then they'll trust you with a lot more, and that's what happened. And really what the beginning of SR ALL STARS was, which is a few players that really trusted my mother and her negotiation skills after she did a lot of great stuff. I mean, she renegotiated deals and got players two to three million dollars more in their contracts in the MLS, which obviously these are numbers that in the MLS, it makes a big difference. And also understanding that there was this incredible opportunity to connect the Latin American talent to the MLS because a lot of these players wanted to come and play in the United States.
But because the league is different and it's structured differently and more similar to other big American sports, the rest of the world was always, even until today, they're confused about what's actually going on in the MLS and how things work and what is a salary cap, what is a designated player, and all these rules that also consistently change. So I think that that's really where she found the niche and was like, I'll be a cultural translator, and I've worked with both sides of the equation. Culturally, she was very comfortable in the United States, as well as in South America, and that's really building a very specific path into football.
Grant Wahl:
Interesting. Just a couple more questions here. Appreciate you taking the time. We've had on the show before as interview guests Alexis Ohanian, Melissa Ortiz, and they obviously are connected to what you're doing. Can you share what they're doing with your stuff?
Victoire Cogevina Reynal:
I'm very proudly going to say that they're both my investors and that they've been supporting the Gloria project from its inception. Alexis has led my last two fundraising rounds. And as I always like to remind him and others, I was his OG football investment before Angel City, before Sorare. And it was the virtue from him realizing that women's football and football in general was this market that nobody was investing in, especially in Silicon Valley.
So yes, and honestly I always said this, he's pretty much the very best investor that we could have ever hoped for. And he's someone that has done a lot of bets very early on, which has built the incredible career that he has today, and it was incredible that it happened with us as well. He saw that football was a good vertical to invest in, also because of the audience, right? The audience of football is larger arguably than the audience of music, for example, or if not, at the same level. So at that point where he needed to have like a long view beyond things, and I think he did.
Then Melissa is one of the few female investors that we have, and that's something I say with not a lot of pride and actually sadness, but she is someone that has built a career on social media and understands the power of a product like Gloria and has been with us from the beginning. So yes they are. They're two reasons why Gloria exists today, by the way. So not minor.
Grant Wahl:
You know, the women's transfer market is becoming bigger as well as the sport grows, which I guess isn't all that surprising. But I remember at the end of the women's World Cup in 2019, I did a lot of interviews and wrote a story just because I was curious to see what the market was for top women's club players in European leagues, different countries, how it compared to the United States, and the fact that we are starting to see transfer fees, significant ones in some cases, in the women's game. Where do you think we are on that right now? Where are we going with the women's transfer market?
Victoire Cogevina Reynal:
I've said this multiple times, I do believe that women's football will be as big as men's football, and it's going to be that in less than 20 years. That's my vision on things and how bullish I am, but it's not that hard to imagine anymore when you're seeing everything that has been happening, especially in the last two weeks. And obviously, as the sport grows, everything grows with it, and transfer fees will be one of those things that will become even bigger. And to me today, when I try to explain to others about this hockey-stick growth that we're seeing, I usually will use a benchmark of salaries and how in the last three years alone, we're seeing like 100 percent increases in those numbers. Where the average salary for a woman playing in Europe would be €30,000 per season, we're now having players that are making half a million euros per season. And that is in the span of three years.
I will add to this something that is separate, but Gloria has a very good community on Instagram. We have almost, I think already surpassed 350,000 followers on the platform. And we are super thoughtful about how we present women's content and how can we get football fans interested in this product, and it's a big part of our content plans, etc, etc. And one of the things that we started doing is transfer rumors.
Grant Wahl:
Yeah.
Victoire Cogevina Reynal:
Which is something that we've done historically for men quite a lot. There are posts that actually get a lot of engagements, and it's kind of a special niche in football. A lot of people love it, it’s not that niche. And the other day we posted our first transfer rumor about a female player, a PSG player going to Barcelona, and it got incredible engagement. So I think that you already can see from a very simplistic kind of view, right? But on Instagram and what content is getting people's attention. And this is one of the best strikers in the world, going from an incredible team like PSG to another incredible team like Barcelona.
Grant Wahl:
I'm looking forward to more of that. I've done a little bit of that myself from time to time, just because there's interest in the women's game here in the U.S. and it keeps growing and growing. I guess one question I do have for you, though, is when you see how much the European women's club game is growing, can the NWSL here in the United States keep up with the growth that's happening in European women's football?
Victoire Cogevina Reynal:
There's this saying in English, I'm going to butcher it. I'm sorry, guys. We're going to say sorry from the beginning. When the tide rises, the boat rises with...
Grant Wahl:
Yes. A rising tide lifts all boats.
Victoire Cogevina Reynal:
There you go! [laughs] So I do believe that's really what's going to happen. So as the European leagues experience this incredible growth, it's going to 100% affect the growth of the sport in the United States. The United States, like the MLS, has a specific structure that is very specific to the United States. Which in my humble opinion will cap the growth of any league here, especially as we continue to see the development of the league where we'll have a second division and that will create very intense competitions and all of that. And I've always been a big advocate of working together and having this collaboration between the United States and Europe, and also the rest of the world and learning how we can keep growing the game. But even though we're seeing crazy numbers here in the U.S., it's happening as well. I mean, Angel City and San Diego Wave, two newbies, have already broken records of viewership on not a friendly match, but not even a league match.
Grant Wahl:
Right, right.
Victoire Cogevina Reynal:
The league hasn't even started. Angel City has almost $40 million worth of sponsorship and they haven't played a game in the league. You know, you have a lot of these kind of data points that are showing that there's enormous growth to come from it. And from someone that has worked, I guess, in the United States and in football for a long time, I would love to see the NWSL kind of take the lead as well and show the rest of the world there's a women’s league that is much more, I don't want to say successful, because it doesn't take away one from the other.
Men and women can be successful at the same time. But showing the world that this is a product, a property, that people want to consume, and Americans historically have had great success at commercializing sports assets. And this is one other opportunity for sure. So that's really my opinion. It's not a competition. It really is not.
Grant Wahl:
Victoire Cogevina Reynal is the founder and CEO of Gloria, a soon to be released soccer community app. Congratulations on everything you're doing, and thanks for coming on the show.
Victoire Cogevina Reynal:
Thank you very much for having me.
