This just feels yucky but maybe it's the fact that youth sports are a $40 billion business that is the yucky part.
From the New York Times, July 9:
An American obsession is attracting investments in baseball fields, volleyball courts and football camps, intensifying the gap between families with means and those without.
Like many youth sports fathers, Jon Bash can summon his son’s early baseball career on his phone. There are video clips of Jesse as a boy at summer camps and on a road trip to Cooperstown to play in a tournament in the shadow of the Hall of Fame. They show Jesse’s towering home runs in high school, as well as his many hours in the batting cage.
One of Mr. Bash’s most cherished clips is a video of Aaron Judge’s swing coach extolling Jesse’s work ethic to his own social media followers. His son has averaged 70 games a year over the past decade between school and travel teams. To keep playing, Jesse, 19, took a postgraduate year at a Florida sports academy.
The costs of all the training sessions, tournaments and equipment have added up for Mr. Bash, but he has no regrets spending money chasing his son’s baseball dreams.
“He’s my only child, and like most parents, you want to do anything you can for your kid,” said Mr. Bash, who runs a diner on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.It’s no wonder that sports dads like Mr. Bash have caught the attention of Wall Street investors.
The private equity titans Josh Harris and David Blitzer are among those who see a big opportunity. Over the past three years, Mr. Harris and Mr. Blitzer used money from their family foundations to start Unrivaled Sports, which has been buying baseball camps, flag football fields and youth leagues to assemble one of the largest collections of youth sports properties in the country. One of their acquisitions is a baseball complex in Cooperstown where 12-year-old ball players flock every summer, as a sort of rite of passage.
“We’re in the early innings,” Mr. Harris and Mr. Blitzer said in a statement. “Our ambition is to build the most trusted, expansive and impactful youth sports platform in the country.” Mr. Harris, one of the founders of Apollo Global Management, and Mr. Blitzer, who is a senior executive at Blackstone, also own professional sports teams like the Philadelphia 76ers.
The youth sports industry, according to the Aspen Institute, generates about $40 billion in annual revenue, dwarfing other forms of entertainment. Last year, for example, the domestic movie box office grossed about $8.7 billion.
About 60 million children play sports, and the average U.S. sports family spent $1,016 on its child’s primary sport in 2024, a 46 percent increase since 2019, according to the Aspen Institute’s latest parent survey in partnership with Utah State University and Louisiana Tech University.
That’s a far cry from the days when youth sports were dominated by locally run offshoots of nonprofit organizations like the Catholic Youth Organization, Pop Warner and Little League Baseball.
But over the years, youth sports have become more national in scope. Parents watched the emergence of Tiger Woods, whose father, Earl, pushed him to play golf as a toddler, and saw how specializing in a sport was a ticket to admission to a prestigious college, a scholarship or maybe a paycheck.
The entry of big money into youth sports has raised concerns that the cost of playing youth sports could rise further out of reach for many American families. To increase profits for their investors, these firms could raise fees for tournaments, rink time and other assets they’ve acquired.
Unrivaled Sports said that it was mindful of the costs of its offerings and that it provided “free and subsidized opportunities” at its facilities.
For many families, the money they spend on sports is an investment in their child’s future. Roughly two in 10 youth sports parents think their child has the ability to play Division I college sports, and one in 10 thinks his or her child could reach the professional ranks or the Olympics, according to the Aspen Institute survey.
The market has grown to meet these aspirations.
“Money chases money,” said Tom Farrey, founder and executive director of the Aspen Institute’s Sports & Society Program. “There is a great demand for kids to play sports, and parents will spend money they don’t have.”
America’s obsession with youth sports is attracting investments from private equity and other large investors across the world. Last year, KKR bought Varsity Brands, which makes sports uniforms and organizes cheerleading competitions, for $4.5 billion. Waud Capital Partners invested in TeamSnap, a platform that coaches, players and parents use to communicate and schedule games, tournaments and payments....
....MUCH MORE
And why is the Aspen Institute, of all places, the go-to source for much of this story?
Which reminds me, I should tell some Aspen Institute stories.
