An American obsession is attracting investments in baseball fields, volleyball courts and football camps, intensifying the gap between families with means and those without.
Josh Harris, a founder of the private equity firm Apollo Global Management, and a partner have been assembling one of the largest collections of youth sports properties in the country.
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.
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.
“Private equity” just means small groups of rich vampires. They suck value out of your effort. They deserve garlic.
Say goodbye to youth sports. Private equity will destroy it in its never ending “do whatever it takes” to make money.
Just because there’s some average expenditure on “sports” per child doesn’t mean there’s some kind of “market”. It’s mostly shit like gear which is already sold by companies.
My kid did a discount trial of Taekwondo and they pushed all kinds of shit on us hard like special tournaments, extra classes, and of course gear which all came with added costs. It was really weird and I couldn’t take this middle aged white man seriously in his Gi as he tried to sell us expensive packages. The parents who did drink the kool-aid had those same creepy blank stares that fundamentalist Christians do and I wanted no part of any of it.
Im sure your traditional stuff like football and basketball also come with training classes, travel, tournaments, and whatever else they can use to grift parents in addition to the gear.
