Sometimes, when Rebbeca Gomez has a morsel of downtime back home in Los Angeles, she’ll throw on a pair of cleats and play pickup soccer with her family. Meaning, when she’s not headbanging at BTS’ long-awaited reunion show in South Korea, belting her Oscar-nominated song at the Academy Awards, or bringing up Mexican music artists like Peso Pluma to join her main stage Coachella performance, she’ll step onto the pitch, like she did as a kid, and give the ball her best thwack.
Gomez, a former youth soccer player, is now known in pop music parlance as Becky G. She’s got a strategy for those casual family games: She plays the first half on one side of the field and the second on the other. Her reason is twofold: The first, by Gomez’s own admission, is that she is not the greatest player. “I suck, to be honest,” she chortled, speaking from her office on an unseasonably balmy March afternoon. “So they’re gonna have to carry the dead weight on one side.”
The other reason is more cautious than it is strategic: Gomez’s self-proclaimed lack of skill does not tamp down her tenacity on the field, which tends to worry her loved ones. “Every time I play anything with my family, I’m like the precious cargo that nobody wants to drop,” she said. “My uncles will be, like, bodyguarding me because they don’t want me to take the ball with my face.” Gomez understands their concerns — “people get scared playing sports with me because they’re like, ‘I don’t want to be responsible for her not making it to her next music video because she has a sprained ankle,’” she said. Playing for both sides means she shares the load equally, as she doesn’t ever lace up her boots with the intention of playing demurely. “I want to get dirty!” she added.
Outside of family games, the 29-year-old musician officially stopped playing soccer two decades ago because, as she explained, “pop star duties called.” For two decades, Gomez has been working as an actor, singer and model –– and started supporting her family financially well before she could drive a car.
Over the last few years, the Latin Grammy–nominated musician has added another entry into her multi-hyphenate career: a co-founding investor of Los Angeles’ first all-women’s soccer team since 2010, Angel City FC.
The team’s arrival couldn’t have come at a more fortuitous time for the city. In the four years since the LA club had its opening season, Angel City FC has gone from struggling to attract funding to becoming the most-valuable women’s sports franchise in the world. In 2024, the team changed hands for $250 million. Last year’s National Women’s Soccer League championship saw a 22% increase in viewership from 2024, and, more broadly, soccer recently lapped baseball to become America’s third-favorite sport (behind football and basketball, respectively.) Gomez recognized the potential for a women’s team in Los Angeles. Joining Hollywood luminaries like Eva Longoria, Gabrielle Union, Natalie Portman, America Ferrera and Uzo Aduba, she invested early on.
Growing up in Inglewood, California, Gomez was steeped in soccer fandom. Her grandparents were diehard fans of El Tri, Mexico’s national team, and she relished watching indefatigable players like Guillermo Ochoa. When the World Cup rolled around every few years, her family would go all in. Every World Cup game was an event that involved going to different family member’s homes for watch parties — a tradition she likens to “the Posadas around Christmas,” a Latin American holiday staple that involves rotating nightly gatherings, with ample food and songs sung in unison, in the nine days leading up to Christmas.
Those World Cup parties were a sensory headrush. “We got the carne asada, the grill’s going on outside,” she said. “We have multiple TVs, one that has all the dads with their beers, and then the one inside where me and the primos and everybody’s sitting around.” When the games got tense, everyone would converge inside to white-knuckle the moments together. “There’s iconic moments of, like, ‘No era penal! Era penal!’” she remembered, flexing her best soccer announcer voice. The gestalt stuck with her: “Everybody’s screaming. Everybody’s sad. Whatever the outcome may be, it’s this united experience.”
When she was old enough, Gomez joined a youth soccer league, taking up the attacking midfielder position. “There’s no strategy in these games. You just got all these little kids running towards the ball, like, scoring on the wrong goal,” she said. Becoming part of this collective organism impacted her regardless. She remembered taking so much pride in choosing her jersey number, her forever lucky number: three. But Gomez also started exhibiting precocious performing abilities in those days — singing and dancing at family gatherings, and, once, charismatically singing a cut from the Disney Channel film The Cheetah Girls at a Universal CityWalk talent show. She decided to hang up her boots at age 10, going headlong into a show business career.
Although Gomez never aspired to play soccer professionally, her mind inevitably wandered to thoughts of how her path may have diverged had more robust options for women in soccer existed back in the early 2000s. “Not that my AYSO soccer playing career was going to go anywhere, but I think I would have played a hell of a lot differently if I knew that there was a pro league that I could play for one day in my city,” she said, speculating that the visibility may have transformed her mentality. “I think I would have been able to go to a stadium and watch them play — that would have been mind-blowing. I would have had…maybe posters of the girls like the same way I did all the Tiger Beat and J-14 and all those teen bop magazines. The culture around it would have been a lot more present for women in soccer, versus it just being like, ‘Okay, is it Chivas or [Club] América?’”
Gomez did not attend a professional soccer match until adulthood. By then, music was often her entry ticket. “A lot of them were opportunities through being a musician, not as a fan,” she said. “Because I didn’t have time after I started working, and as a kid we wouldn’t go to games because it wasn’t really an option.” She was invited to a World Cup qualifying game at the Rose Bowl in 2015, and the following year she was invited by Pitbull — whom she calls one of her “padrinos” of music, along with will.i.am — to collaborate on a song for Copa America that year, called “Superstar.” Gomez kept attending games, often as an artist, after that. “Music brought me back to [soccer], which is actually really crazy,” she said, pausing before gazing for a moment into the middle distance. “I don’t think I’ve ever put that together.”
Gomez is aware that her foray into women’s soccer might seem like a swerve to those who primarily know her as a Billboard chart hitmaker. “Technically, I am a pop star. What am I doing in the soccer world?” she said. “But it checks out when you think about it.” Gomez often speaks about the long road to eventually embracing her identity as a “200 percenter” — as in, she flexes her Mexican heritage and American upbringing with equal aplomb rather than diminishing one part of herself to give way to another, as third-culture kids are often pressured to do. Similarly, soccer and music represent two entwined forces in Gomez’s life. One fuels the other and vice versa, an evolving conversation that continues to shape her trajectory in her career and as a person. “I can’t play professionally, but if I can play a part in building out more opportunities and more spaces for young girls who grew up the way that I did, to have that chance to go pro?” she said. “I have to be a part of it.”
As Gomez sees it, music and soccer are not entirely dissimilar callings. There’s a throughline within the dogged discipline that’s required to perform at that elite level, of course, and approaching her own career as an athlete became a breakthrough for Gomez. “There came a moment in how I started to approach my career with this mentality of wanting to have longevity instead of just the serendipitous, like, ‘Let’s just see what happens when I run onstage without warming up,’ and the rock star mentality. Like, no,” she deadpanned. “It takes a lot of preparation. It takes recovery, it takes rest, it takes training, it takes all these things to make this a really sustainable career in life.”
Then there’s the parallel between the sports world’s cruel realities and that of the music industry. “Athletes and artists, for whatever reason, we have this expiration date written on our foreheads that our industry is trying to put on us,” she said. That’s why Gomez believes that, at this point in her career, she’s well-positioned to advocate for players and artists alike. “It’s not that there’s a lack of talent or a lack of incredible individuals who are willing to put in the work — it’s that there’s a lack of opportunities and very outdated systems,” she said. In particular, she’s hell-bent on fighting for pay equity. “It’s a really shitty feeling when you get booked for a festival and your male counterpart gets all the bells and whistles in production, and they have, like, 20 dancers,” she said. “I remember early on in my career, that’s what I was up against: It was like, okay, I can only afford for my four dancers and my DJ — who’s my cousin, by the way, giving me the homeboy discount — [to] put on the best show on the same exact stage, in front of the same audience, and we are with our male counterparts, like, toe-to-toe on the charts.
“I’m a woman navigating an industry that, like I said, has a lot of work to do as far as supporting women,” she continued. “Have we come far? Absolutely. Everyone knows that we could still be so much better, and I think that the same applies to women in soccer.”
When Gomez first heard whispers about Angel City, still in its infancy, she knew she had to be involved. “We didn’t even know what the name of the club was…it was full-blown whispers,” she said. “I remember calling my business manager and being like, ‘I will do whatever. I will be a sports equipment manager. I will be a cheer choreographer. I will be a post-game host for post-game interviews, a water girl. For little Becky, I need to be a part of this.’” Gomez then joined an early round of investing in Angel City.
Last summer, when Angel City was already well known and drawing big audiences in LA, it was suddenly catapulted to the world stage for a totally different reason. During a June home game at BMO Stadium, the team did its warm-up in unsanctioned T-shirts that read “Immigrant City FC” — at the peak of ICE’s increasingly ruthless immigration raids throughout LA County. From the field, Gomez, donning the same black and white tee, addressed the crowd that afternoon with a clear message: “Football does not exist without immigrants. This club does not exist without immigrants.”
Gomez, the granddaughter of immigrants from Jalisco, Mexico, said that standing up against ICE’s actions was second nature to her. “It’s just who I am — these are my values,” she said. “Everybody can decide for themselves how they want to use their platforms, and this is just how I decided to use mine. Soccer has been such a sacred and safe place for our people, that to see those things be threatened now is just…enraging, to be honest. It feels like a waste of energy to be angry about it and not do anything about it.”
The specter of ICE decamping to the World Cup, a high-stakes tournament that will have a huge impact in Los Angeles this summer, concerns Gomez. “We don’t want any presence there that is of threat or of harm to our community — and if it’s there, you definitely got a problem with me,” she said. “Those who can go should go and use that opportunity to speak up for those who cannot be there. Soccer is ours. Don’t let anybody take it away.”
For all the club’s success in being at the forefront of a US soccer surge, and standing up to this most recent immigration crackdown, its own record has been mixed. Angel City has qualified for the playoffs only once in its history, which it’s hoping to reverse going into its fifth season. But early prospects look promising, notably where public interest is concerned: “Not to throw any shade to our roommates over at LAFC,” Gomez said slyly, “but our season ticket holder sign-up is very impressive. Our fans are there, win or lose — they stand by us. We are not just a trend.”
