How private equity ate youth sports

Everything is more expensive these days, but many American parents will know that signing a kid up to play sports has gotten wildly expensive. Youth sports, it turns out, are big business. It is now estimated to be bringing in about 40 billion dollars a year in revenue. That's about twice as much as the NFL. The tipping point came during the pandemic when the low-key, low-stress, cheap wreck leagues shut down, parks shut down, and park and recreation budgets were cut. The private sector and private leagues and club teams and travel teams, they were able to get back up and running much quicker. The private teams that filled the gap are sometimes owned by big private equity firms like Bane Capital, whose chief goal is making a profit. So now American families are buckling under the cost of uniforms and hotels and flights and apps and coaching. Is money-recking youth sports that's coming up on today explained from Box? 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New customer offer for initial plan term only greater than 50 gigabytes. Me slow when network is busy. See terms. Kaitlyn Moskettello is a journalist and a contributor to New York magazine. She recently wrote for NY Mag the pay to play childhood. It's this big piece about why youth sports have become so expensive, costing sometimes tens of thousands of dollars. It turns out the big money started with big money and private equity firms like KKR and Bane Capital buying up youth leaks. It was a little over a decade ago that you really start to see this influx of big money coming into the youth sports sector. And what you start to see right before and then certainly after COVID is investors using what's called a roll up strategy where they own or have a financial stake in different touch points that families would have in the sport that their child's playing. I shouldn't have to be freaking having to take out a loan to pay for my kids to play sports. One thing we can all agree upon is that youth sports participating in youth sports is expensive. Bali ball monthly is $400. Who is doing that? So for instance they might have a stake in the league itself but also the apparel company where families are required to buy the uniforms from and the software or the app that families need to go on to look at the team schedule and in some cases you know look at updated stats and standings. There can be a hotel partner so then even though there's a less expensive hotel down the street they're required to stay at the specific hotel. And there's also money to be made even on what's being called the media side of all this. Parents describe to me you know not being able to record video at their child's game but then being sold a package of photos and videos which again is just another financial touch point. How much are parents spending on sports? Rough average. So the average spend is a little over a thousand dollars a year but many of the families that I spoke with especially in the you know this travel private club sector. I mean they can spend anywhere from three thousand a season it can be five or ten thousand a season depending on the sport where you are the level of play. So there's a lot of factors there. I spoke with numerous families who were spending $25,000 or more a year. So there was one mother that I spoke with she's a single mom. You know she was pet sitting on the side in addition to her full-time job to help offset the cost of her son's $25,000 a year hockey program. And in fact I also came across a lot of GoFundMe's for families who were trying to get their six-year-old or their seven-year-old or their eight-year-old made the travel you know fill in the blank soccer baseball team and they're fundraising to make that happen. And for your $25,000 or more a year or your 3,000 or your 5,000 what are you getting? Well so what are you getting? It's a loaded question. I mean part of what's drawing families to this in some areas is that they really feel like they have no other choice. And so wreck programs are sparse. They also don't extend as long as they used to. So I'm sort of an elder millennial I guess I would say. Same and you know back in as with many of the parents I spoke with for the piece. And you know back in the 90s it was still very much that you could play a wreck sport through eighth grade and then if you chose to go on and play in high school. And what's happening is that wreck programs now are ending much earlier in some places it can be difficult to find a wreck program especially after I mean again this all varies but like after maybe third fourth grade and these programs are also getting diluted because the private leagues are incentivized to attract families earlier and earlier. So now you start to see travel teams and even tryouts for kindergartners first graders second graders. And what I was hearing from parents over and over again was that there was this fear of missing out like if well this isn't something I would necessarily choose for my kid but there was a feeling like if we don't get in on the ground floor the elevator is gonna go up without us and we're never gonna catch up and my kid won't be able to play and everyone around me seems to be doing this now so we're gonna do it too. What this does to the wreck programs is that it dilutes them really early and in a couple of ways so one it just brings the level of play down when kids start leaving in the first and second grade by third grade I mean the level of play it it is a bit lower and it also there just aren't as many kids. And then the other factors that kids and parents both notice that these other leagues exist. And so another thing that I kept hearing was well the wreck program sort of felt second rate and we're looking across the field there is this one father he's a lacrosse coach and he has two children who now play travel across and he's like it's kind of hard when you look across the field and you see the kids with their shiny helmets and their fancy uniforms and their professional coach. As you looked into what this is doing to kids physically psychologically emotionally what did you find all this money in youth sports is doing to the youths playing the sports. So the benefits of sports have been really well established kids who play sports have anything from higher levels of academic achievement to higher self esteem better long term health outcomes but ultimately in their quest to do something good for their kids the way the sports ecosystem has changed and it's continuing to change can potentially set them up for long term harm. It can be psychological so they're seeing stress and anxiety burn out but also physical they're sort of a surge of overuse injuries now in young athletes especially because the private programs are incentivized again to get kids playing as much as possible and so what's happening now is that you have young children playing in this hyper competitive year round environment and so instead of playing the the medical advice has said oh well kids should play all different sports use different muscles you know learn different skills and that that's what's appropriate for young developing bodies not playing one sport 10 to 12 months a year tournaments on the weekend six games four games practices three four times a week where then you see these overuse injuries because kids are just doing that same motion over and over again. I read your story and I thought there could be a way out of this and that is to say more parents just say we are not going to do this we're going back to the right league and there will be enough kids enough of us decide we ain't gonna do it anymore and I wonder um am I being naive is there any movement among parents to stop this to say this is gone too far let's not do it anymore - So this is a collective action problem, right? If more parents stayed in the rec programs, then we would have a more robust rec system. More kids play, it's more accessible, it's more affordable, it's also local and fun. I don't wanna be so naive and think, oh, things could go back to the way they were in the 90s. I think in a way you kind of can't put like the toothpaste back in the tube entirely. But the good news is that we do have a model for a pathway forward. Minnesota Ice Hockey is a nonprofit youth sports program, the core of which is 250 public ranks. The cost to play is about $200 to $400. Coaches are volunteers, but they are trained through USA Hockey. And these kids play more in that rec model, where they play with other kids from their community. And this is showing like real results. And you look at this program, and there's 60,000 kids who play Minnesota Ice Hockey. And Minnesota produces more D1 men's and women's ice hockey players than any other state in the country. And really what this comes down to then is, it's accessible to everyone. And so it's more of a meritocracy, right? Everyone gets to play and everyone gets to have fun. And then the kids who really do eventually show, you know, a high level of ability, they still get to play at that really competitive level because it's not diluted. And that has shown that it can produce like really amazing hockey players, but also while giving all these kids a good experience. New York Magazine's Caitlin Muscatelow coming up, private equity has a stake in way more areas of American life than you might realize. 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But it may very well own your dentist's office, your children's preschool, your kids' hockey league. Private equity is increasingly involved in overseeing road management, bridges, municipal water systems. It's really there once you start turning over the stones. What is private equity? How does it work? So private equity is a system of financing that combines borrowed money with outside investor money to buy companies. So often when people talk about private equity, what they're talking about is called leveraged buyouts, which means that about 70% or 80% of the total deal price is just straight borrowed money. None of that is the investor money. [MUSIC PLAYING] The trick with private equity is that that 70% or 80%, the amount that is loans, the debt is applied not to the private equity firm that made the decision to take out those loans, but only to the portfolio company. So I can buy your company, NOL, borrow a million dollars to do it, and only you are going to be responsible for paying that million dollars back, not me. So what you end up with is this weird split and incentives where what's good for me as the private equity owner is not necessarily what's good for you as my portfolio company. Every few months, it feels like there's a new industry where private equity has popped up and all of a sudden become really, really big. I wrote about retail in my book, which private equity, for the most part, is not even really in retail anymore. But you can see in the retail story, I wrote about Toys R Us, which was a previous story that really captured the public's imagination. And what you can see through that story is private equity firms sort of setting the stage, creating the playbook, essentially, that they would later apply in all of these other industries. Tell me what happened with Toys R Us? So Toys R Us was bought in 2005 by two private equity firms and a real estate investment trust. And they really used some classic private equity firms strategies. So for example, Toys R Us had always owned most of its own real estate underneath its stores. The private equity firms came in and sold off all of its real estate and then started charging the company rent for the exact same plots of land they once owned. So now Toys R Us is saddled under about $5 billion worth of debt, plus they are also paying all of these rent payments for all of their stores. Toys R Us says 1,600 locations will remain open for business despite filing for bankruptcy. A company spokesperson insisting to us, this is a balance sheet issue, not a business issue. So then Amazon comes along and the conventional wisdom about Toys R Us has always been that Amazon killed it, which is not entirely untrue. Many real tailors had a tough time keeping up once Amazon became totally dominant. But what complicates the picture-- is that Toys R Us no longer had the financial wiggle room to attempt to compete. The end of an era, one of the most recognizable names in American retail, is closing its doors today. The end will mean the loss of 30,000 jobs nationwide and gift cards that will only be good for the next 30 days. It's an ending many hoped would never come. In the case of Toys R Us, how did the private equity firm end up making money? The basic private equity payment structure is known as 2 in 20. The 20 is you get 20% of all profits. But the 2% means 2% of the total value of the deal every single year just as a management fee. So even if you're in the process of driving the company into the ground, which is not an uncommon scenario, you're getting that 2%, 2% of a $6 billion deal is pretty good. There was a good analysis when Toys R Us liquidated saying that it was clear that Bane Capital and KKR, who were the two private equity owners of Toys R Us, did make money over the life of that deal. The risk is only there for the workers and the customers who depend on whatever the business is. Who are the investors? Is this something where I could be an investor and I don't actually know it? Historically, the investors were sovereign wealth funds, public pension funds, ultra wealthy individuals, credited investors. Just last year, the Trump administration modified the rules such that now 401K money can be invested in private equity. So pretty soon, it will be entirely possible that if you have a 401K, your money might be invested in private equity. And you don't even know it because who is paying close attention to exactly what the split of their 401K balance is. So there is a trend generally toward more and more openness to getting regular people's money involved in private equity. Whereas historically, this was thought to be more risky, right? And so historically, there was a thought that regular people needed some protection from that. Now that is starting to change and I think you will see more ways in which ordinary Americans money is tied up in private equity. You mentioned what I think of as a lot of rich people, people who have the money to invest in private equity. But you also said pension funds are invested in private equity. My mom, for example, has a pension. She certainly isn't a rich person. Why would pension funds invest in private equity? And how does it benefit people on pensions? Public pension funds have been one of the most reliable sources of capital for private equity for decades. And the research is really mixed as to whether they get better returns from private equity than they would out of just going with mutual funds, right? There is research that says, yes, private equity is absolutely a good deal for public pension funds. There is research that says, no, it's terrible. What's interesting to me about public pension funds is that even if we assume the best case scenario and all of those teachers and nurses and firefighters who serve their communities are getting the retirement that we all think they deserve as a direct result of private equity. What that does is it turns capitalism into this sort of zero sum game where in order for those folks to get the retirement they deserve. There's actually an obligation to undercut the workers for whatever the private equity owned company is. I think people will hear you and they'll think this is capitalism run a mock, which in 2026 it's a fair observation to make, but I do wonder what happened here. Why has private equity become so big? Why is this a way that investors seek to make money if so many of the knock on effects are just unpleasant or downright bad? So private equity really never had any never had serious regulations affecting it and the thing about not having regulations as your system grows up is it's much easier to sort of play defense and make sure they're never applied than it is to get regulations lifted. And so the result was private equity just sort of grew up without having too many restrictions on how they could operate. Some Democrats in Congress have introduced a bill that seeks to ban private equity from youth sports leagues that would take care of the problem that we addressed in the first half of our show. Not clear if it's going to make any progress, but I wonder given all of the downsides of what you reported in your book, is there any push in Congress to make private equity illegal or to regulate it more or to regulate it differently or to say. If private equity buys all the dentists and the dentists are less good, that's less good for Americans, let's do something about it. There are a couple of different sort of schools of thought on this. One is the let's fundamentally regulate it. Elizabeth Warren has proposed a bill she calls the Stop All Street Looting Act. So the Warren bill would fundamentally undermine the way in which the private equity industry is set up. It would dramatically limit the ways in which private equity firms can operate. Enough of Wall Street ripping off and looting our businesses and leaving our employees behind. But there's just nowhere to go on that. You know, there's just no world in which she gets anything like the support she needs to make a real dent there. So then the other school of thought has been essentially let's take this sort of piecemeal approach. Let's ban private equity from youth sports. It tends to correlate with the types of private equity stories that are getting the most public attention rather than the types of private equity acquisitions that are actually the most dangerous. And so I think what you will continue to see is this sort of very piecemeal approach that will probably result in some bills that make a meaningful difference in people's lives. But they're certainly not changing the fundamental conditions. And they're not even organized by which types of interventions could make the biggest difference in people's lives. Megan Greenwell, her book "Bad Company, Private Equity, and the Death of the American Dream" is about the effect of private equity on workers and communities. Danielle Hewitt produced today's show in Miranda Kennedy Edited, Honeywag, Decheck the Facts, David Tatashore, and Bridger Dunnigan Engineer. I'm Noel King. It's today Explained. [ Music ] Support for the show comes from Delta Airlines. Every athlete at the top of her game knows that greatness isn't just a destination. It's a grueling life-long journey. It's built on early mornings, silent sacrifices, and an unwavering drive to outclimb the achievements of yesterday. 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