Gina Prodan Kelly, Cleveland Pro Soccer Women’s Team Co-Founder: Most Interesting People 2026

Starting a professional women’s soccer team in Cleveland is a task in itself.

But a whole league? 

“It is a big effort,” says Gina Prodan Kelly, who became involved with Cleveland Pro Soccer during an attempt to bring a National Women’s Soccer League expansion team to Cleveland.  

That particular effort was unsuccessful, but it demonstrated the commitment Clevelanders are willing to give to pro soccer. 

“They said they needed 10,000 season ticket pledges,” she recalls. “We ended up with 16,000, and a really great campaign for NWSL. And it was during that time, I had to think about if this was the direction I wanted to go.” 

A Euclid native, Kelly grew up playing soccer, at Euclid High School and then on a club team at John Carroll University. In fact, she still plays soccer. “I grew up in the ’80s. Everyone played soccer.” 

“I grew up in a Croatian family,” she continues, “so I was required to love soccer. It went right into my bloodstream.” 

It was a heady time for soccer locally. The Richfield Coliseum was filled to the rafters as fans cheered on the Cleveland Force, and then the Crunch. 

“That’s how I got into the sport,” Kelly says. “I was born into it, and it’s never left me. And now, I want more of it.” 

She’s not alone. Major League Soccer has completed its 30th season. It has expanded from 10 teams in its inaugural season of 1996 to 30 today. Watching soccer on television is easier than ever, and Gen Z and Gen Alpha kids — like her sons, Jack, 12, and Charlie, 10 — are interacting with the sport in myriad ways, following players and watching game clips on social media. 

“Seeing how kids engage in media and seeing how prevalent soccer is — and not just watching soccer but having it be part of their lifestyle — I feel like soccer to them now is what Saturday morning cartoons were to us,” she says. “It was a ritual.” 

Pro leagues are proliferating around the country as well, but it’s thus far eluded Cleveland. 

"I think we’re a horribly overlooked and undervalued market,” Kelly says. “We tend to be overlooked by people who are unfamiliar or haven’t done the work to understand the market.” 

Kelly has. She’s worked in web development and marketing around the city, including at Union Home Mortgage, which taught her about sports sponsorship. (The company is now a sponsor for the Cleveland Guardians as well as the Cleveland Marathon.) 

“The company didn’t do any advertising like that at the time,” she says. “It was a slow process. It went from spending 100 bucks a month to ‘Let’s buy the outfield at Progressive Field.’ It was an interesting scale up. I left in 2019, and it’s been wild to see how much they’ve taken on.” 

She’s also a big booster of her hometown. In past years, Kelly once ran a blog called Unmiserable Cleveland — a project inspired by Forbes’ 2010 article which named Cleveland the most miserable city in the United States. 

Kelly also worked with local institutions like the Cleveland Flea and Harness Cycle. (Her office is in the Vitrolite Building on Detroit Avenue, in no small part because Harness Cycle is there.) 

“I love when we do things here that are unique,” she says. 

Two years after Michael Murphy and Noel Gallagher founded Cleveland Pro Soccer in 2021, Kelly met with the duo and ended up signing a letter of intent for a team in the Women’s Premier Soccer League Pro. The new league that is scheduled to start play in 2027, optimally with 16 to 20 total teams. 

The as-yet unnamed Cleveland team will play in a new 10,000-seat South Gateway Stadium, not far from Progressive Field and the Western Reserve Fire Museum. (The stadium will have the ability to increase capacity to 20,000.) Cleveland Pro Soccer is working with the Cleveland Metroparks on that project. 

Kelly envisions the teams and the stadium having a community impact and continuing to encourage the growth of the game, both on the amateur and professional level. Her lifelong passion is expanding across the city in new, profound ways. 

“We wanted to be the example of not only building a fan base and creating two strong and high-performing teams, but we wanted to help people use the power of soccer for great,” she says. “Our mission is to be the north star of soccer in Northeast Ohio.” 

Meet the rest of the 2026 class of Most Interesting People >>

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