Utah Royals Women

On November 16, 2017, Real Salt Lake of Major League Soccer announced that it had acquired a franchise in the National Women's Soccer League. On November 20, 2017, the league announced that FC Kansas City of the National Women's Soccer League would fold their club, and the team's player contracts, draft picks, and other rights would be transferred to the new Salt Lake City club. As of August 2017^[update], Utah's six NCAA Division I women's soccer teams outnumbered the men's, a seventh women's soccer school moved from Division II to Division I in 2020, and the state has the highest rate of girls' high school soccer players recruited by Division I colleges. Attendance at Division I women's soccer games in Utah is among the highest in the NCAA. The decision to bring a NWSL team to Utah was based on the established interest in men's soccer in the state as well as Dell Loy Hansen's gut feeling and longtime interest in a team.

The new Salt Lake City team announced its hiring of former Seattle Reign FC coach Laura Harvey as its inaugural head coach on November 27, 2017.

Gunnhildur Yrsa Jónsdóttir scored the first goal in franchise history on March 24, 2018 in the third minute of the club's inaugural match against Orlando Pride in Orlando. 18,500 tickets were sold ahead of their first home match (with only club seats and standing-only tickets remaining). Official attendance the day of the match, in which they played the Chicago Red Stars, was reported as 19,023.

In August 2020, Dell Loy Hansen announced plans to sell Utah Soccer LLC—the parent company of the Royals, Real Salt Lake, and Real Monarchs—following reports and allegations of racist and sexist behavior by staff across the properties. Utah Royals FC were officially dissolved on December 7, 2020. The club's parent company, Utah Soccer LLC, sold the team's NWSL player contracts and franchise rights to Chris and Angie Long and Brittany Mahomes, who founded a new team provisionally named Kansas City NWSL and later renamed Kansas City Current.

The sale of the Royals included a provision that any entity that purchased Real Salt Lake would be granted the option to launch an expansion team using the Utah Royals FC identity no sooner than the 2023 National Women's Soccer League season.

On March 11, 2023, Ryan Smith and David Blitzer—whose groups had jointly purchased ownership of Real Salt Lake—announced that they would exercise their option to launch an NWSL team alongside investment from a group known as 42 Futbol Group composed of Jessica Gelman, Daryl Morey, and Amy Reinhard. The new expansion team would begin play in the 2024 National Women's Soccer League season, joining alongside fellow expansion team Bay FC in San Jose, California. The agreement reportedly allowed the Royals to enter the league at a considerably lower expansion fee of $2–$5 million, compared to around $50 million for Bay FC.

The new ownership group named Michelle Hyncik as club president. Hyncik hired former Utah Royals FC and United States women's national soccer team forward Amy Rodriguez, then serving as an assistant coach for the USC Trojans women's soccer team, as the team's inaugural head coach. Hyncik and Rodriguez had been teammates in high school.