Recently, I saw a video that explained how private equity has helped turn youth sports into big business.  Youth sports in the United States now generates approximately $40 billion annually, more than the NFL and NBA combined.

The model that private equity firms follow finds them buying companies not traded publicly to increase profits, often by cutting costs, raising prices, and assuming debt, all in the name of a business decision to adapt to a changing landscape.  This model helped sink chains like Payless, Sears, Toys “R” Us, and Red Lobster.  They didn’t disappear because customers vanished; they disappeared because a decision was made, whether innocent or nefarious, to prioritize short-term profit over long-term investment.

Private equity has also played a major role in the housing crisis, both in the United States and abroad.  Corporate investors have purchased massive numbers of single-family homes and apartment complexes.  In many cities, these firms now rank among the largest landlords, giving them a monopoly to drive up prices.

In other words, private equity views everyday institutions as financial assets.

Over the past decade, private equity firms have been buying up youth sports clubs, tournament operators, training facilities, recruiting platforms, and equipment and uniform companies.  One of the biggest entities is Unrivaled Sports, launched in 2024 by Josh Harris and David Blitzer, two veteran private investors who also own the New Jersey Devils, Philadelphia 76ers, Washington Commanders, and Crystal Palace FC.  Another major player is 3StepSports, which owns hundreds of club teams across the country.  Between them, these firms now control clubs, athletic complexes, youth leagues, camps, uniform manufacturers, scheduling platforms, and media outlets.

It’s easy to see where this is heading.  Consider some of these new factors:

-Families with kids on travel teams are now forced into “stay-to-play” arrangements, requiring them to book hotels at rates 30-50% higher than normal because of an agreement or relationship between the hotels and the teams/leagues/tournaments.  Those who try to stay elsewhere often face hotel “breakage fees” ranging from $300 to $1000.

-Groups such as Black Bear Sports Group, owned by private equity firm Blackstreet Capital (the largest owner of ice rinks in the US), have banned parents from recording their own children playing hockey at its facilities.  Instead, if parents want to review film either to help their child improve their craft or simply keep memories, they now must pay $25-$50 per month for a streaming service for the privilege.

The message to parents is clear:  pay up, or your kid gets left behind.  In the process, some of the most important lessons sports should teach, such as teamwork, sportsmanship, discipline, fitness, and fun, are being left for dead.

The financial consequences are staggering.  The average American family now spends over $1000 per year on a single primary sport for their child, a 46% increase since 2019, far outpacing inflation.  Travel teams, specialized training, and equipment push that number much higher.  For many families, youth sports now feel like a second mortgage.

This shift has cultural consequences as well.  Kids are being pushed into early sports specialization at younger ages, despite strong evidence that young athletes benefit from playing more than one sport.  This increases the likelihood of burnout, stress, and overuse injuries.

The bad news is that those looking to profit off parents’ hopes for their kids aren’t going away.  The good news is that we still have the power to protect what makes youth sports special.

We can start by supporting community-based leagues and programs.  Municipal parks and recreation leagues, school teams, and nonprofit clubs typically prioritize sportsmanship, development, and fun over profit.  When economically feasible, school boards and town councils need to hear how important it is to responsibly invest in facilities.  Public funding can help make youth sports more accessible.

Perhaps we should try to reject the pressure narrative.  Ten-year-olds usually do not need to be on three travel teams to succeed.  They rarely need year-round private coaching or early specialization.  When parents focus on their kids’ enjoyment and growth rather than chasing athletic scholarships or professional careers, it can lead to better sportsmanship in the stands as well.

We must also reject the “one-path-to-success” myth.  Fewer than 7% of high school athletes go on to play a sport in college.  An even smaller fraction will play professionally.  For most kids, sports are not about compiling a highlight reel for college recruiters or pro teams; they’re about having fun, making friends, and learning lessons they’ll take into adulthood.

Parents should make the decision not to sit idly by and allow youth sports to become even more entrenched as big business.  Otherwise, we risk losing the spirit of the game and denying countless children the opportunity to learn the life lessons that only sports can teach.

In the spring of 2024, a colleague handed me a book entitled “Good Sports,” published about ten years before the turn of the century and written by the late Rick Wolff, a sports psychologist who many in the greater New York area would recognize from his radio program on WFAN.  While reading the book, Wolff referenced Mel Narol, an attorney from Princeton, NJ, whose specialty was representing sports officials who were assaulted on the field.  Seeing how OSIP’s home is just outside Princeton, I took it upon myself to learn more about Narol.
 
Unfortunately, I learned that Narol passed away in 2002 at the age of 51 from a heart attack.  He is buried in a cemetery in my hometown.  I tried to reach out to his daughter who is around my age and attended a private school near my public high school, but the lead went cold.  I had hoped to interview his daughter or some of his colleagues on our podcast to learn more about him.
 
Narol championed a large list of professional accomplishments.  He officiated basketball and served as legal counsel to collegiate athletic conferences while also teaching collegiate law.  He was highly involved with the National Associated of Sports Officials and wrote for Referee Magazine.
 
The law firm where Narol worked was a local one that had sponsored teams in my youth baseball league when I was young.  At the time, the name of that team was just a passing sound of names that happened to represent a company of lawyers who appeared no differently than all the other lawyers in the area.  Little did I know years later that I had been in the presence of the name of the firm that employed a man who would be so crucial to my desire to see aid given to assault victims who simply wanted to officiate an athletic competition.
 
Why did Narol do what he did?  And why was it so important for him to do so?  I began to ask myself these questions and pretend that I could answer them on his behalf.  I started with the obvious:  if you’re a lawyer, you’re probably practicing law in some capacity to earn a living.  But a man who has such a love of sports and officiating probably saw an opportunity to combine his passions and make an immense difference, especially when innocent people are wronged by the physical assaults of others stemming from a youth athletic contest.  From there, word of mouth and a media presence probably accelerated things, turning Narol into the go-to for these victims.  It may not be a glamorous rise to stardom, but it is a path to becoming a respected professional and important member of society.
 
There’s something trite about the archetype of a mystery where an investigator digs deep into the past of someone deceased looking for information or answers about why something occurred.  I felt like I was living that plot while constantly searching for information about Narol, but I knew I wasn’t trying to solve a mystery.  Instead, I just wanted to learn more about him and his work, like a student who becomes obsessed with a historical figure.
 
There was no ‘whodunnit’ payoff on this journey.  Rather, by the time I composed this post, I was left with an emptiness of regret that the opportunity to know this man had passed many years prior.  I wondered if the people I sought wanted privacy, as if I had opened an old wound; the possibility of that left me with guilt, as it was not my intention to do so.  I wondered if those people didn’t take me seriously, like the work of our organization was not a battle worth fighting anymore.  It was more than likely that life just got busy for these people.  Even so, however, I was left with questions, not answers…and many of those questions lacked the ability to even be formed.
 
I’m not sure it’s appropriate to call the words of this submission an obituary or a eulogy.  I’m also not sure that anything I can say here does this man or his work justice.  I just wish Mel was still with us so I could learn more about who he was, what he did, and why he did it.  He would have made an excellent member of our board of directors.

Our connected world makes it a wonderful time to be a sports fan.  Information at our fingertips allows us to follow nearly whichever sport we like from the comfort of wherever we might have an internet connection for our smartphone.  Accordingly, fanbases can be developed anywhere in the world, not just in the communities in which sports teams operate.  Under the circumstances where a team can theoretically be financially sustained by outsiders, what moral duty do franchises owe the surrounding community? 
 
Fans are observing a case study in real time as the Oakland Athletics face backlash with their intent to leave the Bay Area for Las Vegas.  This is not to say that the citizens of Nevada do not deserve the highest level of baseball:  the Vegas fanbase is one of the most passionate as witnessed by teams such as the NHL’s Vegas Golden Knights, the WNBA’s Las Vegas Aces, and the NFL’s Las Vegas Raiders (the latter of which also came from Oakland).  But the A’s seem to be almost treating Bay Area residents with contempt, serving up a horribly noncompetitive squad and dismissing fans’ attempts at “reverse boycotting,” defined as filling stands with fans to make their displeasure with ownership (and their support for the franchise) known. 
 
At the same time, while sports can be accessed worldwide with the help of apps, the live product seems anecdotally more inaccessible to the average fan in the United States.  Tickets to games are outrageously expensive, and price-gouging is running amuck with the food and beverage choices.  Taking the entire family to a game is a once-per-season event at most.  Promotions for inexpensive tickets to weeknight games have been relegated to last-minute ticket resale platforms in recent years. 
 
While recognizing that professional sports are businesses run for profit, is there a point at which this pursuit becomes counterproductive because local fans become alienated?  Does this also cause new fans (like young people or families) to not be created?  If we agree that sports have the power to shape young lives for the better by imparting concepts like sportsmanship and fair play, is it good for professional sports to become ever more inaccessible or for franchises to pull up stakes and move at the expense of long-suffering but loyal fans?  Expecting corporations to cut profit margins voluntarily in the name of accessibility is perhaps naïve at best, but it may behoove them to do more to make their product accessible to the local community of fans from which they draw their goodwill and, ultimately, their value.

It is now widely accepted that sports, at least on the professional level (and collegiate level in the United States), is hyper-commercialized and considered to be big business.  Tune into any professional sporting event and you’ll get a glimpse of millionaire athletes who get their checks signed by billionaire owners.  You’ll also see advertisements galore, including the numerous television commercials, the large billboards around the stadiums, and, in some cases, advertisements on players’ uniforms.  As cynical as it might sound, the sports we love have turned into massive profit-making operations.
 
This monetization of sports on a massive level has opened the door for large sums of money to be poured into sportswashing, the term used to describe individuals, corporations, or governments using sports to rehabilitate their public image.  It is one of the most common forms of reputation laundering.  For example, the 1936 Olympic Games, held in Berlin, Germany, is considered an early example of sportswashing.  Among other reasons, the games were used to portray the image of Nazi Germany as a forward-thinking and orderly society.  Similarly, in the modern day, 2022 was branded “The Year of Sportswashing” after the Beijing Olympics, the emergence of the Saudi government-backed LIV Golf Tour, and the FIFA World Cup held in Qatar.
 
Ultimately, sportswashing is a gamble that claims one will overlook human rights abuses and conveniently forget about other larger issues in favor of the glory of sport.  Here’s the thing, though:  it works.
 
For example, soccer (or football, depending on where you live in the world) has become a juicy target for individuals and governments in need of a public relations campaign to clean up their image. The FIFA World Cup, soccer’s showcase event and the most watched sporting event in the world, has been hosted on numerous occasions by countries with repressive governments. These include the 1934 World Cup hosted by Mussolini’s Italy, the 1978 World Cup held in Argentina under a military dictatorship that was responsible for the disappearance of anywhere from 9,000 to 30,000 political opponents, and the 2022 World Cup held in Qatar, which was held in venues built by migrant workers forced to work in inhumane conditions, causing the deaths of an estimated 6,500 of said workers.  The intrinsic glory of a country’s athletic pursuit of excellence and the national pride associated with it can easily outweigh and overshadow other issues that might have more importance than entertainment.
 
State ownership of soccer teams is another sportswashing tool.  Once upon a time, Manchester City were a team that was average at best.  They were dwarfed in every conceivable way by their crosstown rival, Manchester United.  Since being taken over in 2008 by the royal family of the United Arab Emirates, an authoritarian theocracy which operates in a similar manner to Qatar, Man City have won six English Premier League titles and one European Champions’ League title.  The attention paid to what is happening on the pitch dwarfs the attention paid to what issues might be plaguing the people of the UAE.
 
The end goal of sportswashing is to get ordinary people to defend, excuse, or refuse to acknowledge the actions of individuals who crave nothing more than money and power, usually to the detriment of others.  (One might submit that it becomes a corollary of the “fanboy phenomenon” discussed previously in OSIP’s publications.)
           
What can one do to combat sportswashing?  Specific victories have come through the coordinated organization of larger groups of people.  Earlier this year, FIFA dropped Visit Saudi, the Saudi Arabian government’s official tourism board, as an official sponsor of the Women’s World Cup after an outcry from soccer players taking part in the tournament. 
 
However, such a victory may not give off the feeling that the fans have made a dent in this conflict.  The fact of the matter is that we must accept that sportswashing isn’t going away anytime soon, but that doesn’t mean that we need to boycott or refuse to watch our favorite sports.  Simply acknowledging that it exists can be the first step to a better understanding and consciousness as we lobby for a culture with better sportsmanship.  We can appreciate the glory of our favorite sports and root for our favorite teams while also acknowledging the shortcomings of those in power who cause this phenomenon to occur.
 
Further, we can use sporting events to shine a light on issues that some would like to be swept under the rug.  For example, in Germany, fans of the soccer club Bayern Munich have been particularly critical of their club’s relationship with Qatar due to the team’s annual midseason trips since 2011.  Because the fans spoke up, that relationship was not renewed earlier this year.
 
Although money and power will always talk, people can rise above it.  The intangibles of sports such as the pursuit of excellence and the association with winning do not have to direct the narrative away from facts; in fact, both can exist simultaneously.  The power to send a message exists even with the conscious awareness of the truth.

During Week 4 of the 2018 NFL season, Seattle Seahawks safety Earl Thomas suffered a broken leg on the play that ended his season.  As he was being carted off the field, he gave the middle finger...to his own bench.

Read that again.

Why would a player do that?

Simple:  money.

You see, Thomas was holding out for a better contract prior to the start of the season and didn't get it.  Therefore, when his season was cut short due to this injury, he no longer had any leverage in trying to earn additional money.  Further, who knows if his career has taken a hit based on the nature of the injury?  Some teams may not want to shell out money for his contract knowing he suffered such an injury.

The "hold out" for better contracts in the NFL is an interesting topic because it doesn't happen in certain other sports for a variety of reasons.  In fact, it doesn't happen much else in life.  If you sign a contract, you are obligated to fulfill your responsibilities assigned with that contract unless the other party or parties breach or violate the contract.  Just ask any judge.

But in the NFL, there are some factors that make you begin to understand why players might hold out.

First, take a look at the career length of football players.  It's very short.  The physical nature of the sport does not bode well for people to wish to last long in the league.  You're more likely to end your career due to an injury than to choose when it's time to retire.

Now, here's the big one.  Unlike other sports, the money owed to NFL players is not guaranteed unless it specifically says so in the contract.  So if you are cut from a team, the money stops.  That's not how it works in a sport such as Major League Baseball:  if a team releases you, they are obligated to pay you the remainder of the contract (with the possibility of a slight reduction in cost if another team signs you).

Therefore, NFL players hold out for better contracts in order to help guarantee that they will be financially secure if something happens to them physically and cannot work.  Think of it as a form of insurance.

None of this excuses Thomas.  His gesture, although understood, was probably not the best idea.  And perhaps he should have taken the smart route and continued to hold out.  But it focuses a light on something else:  the system that governs the payroll structure of football players contains a flaw based on the ability to hold out, and it has consequences on multiple sides.

Imagine if your NFL team went from being a playoff contender to a hopeless pretender because your best player decides he wants more money.  Would you immediately blame him?

The point here is that there is no clear cut answer.  There are no heroes.  This is more about debunking certain myths and asking people to take a step back and consider the bigger picture, which is one of the staples at understanding sportsmanship.

Most of the time, when I read anything from the Sporting News, it's garbage.  But this article actually had some merit to it.

Ryan Davis did an article back in August about the human side of trading players mid-season.  He caught up with Sean Doolittle as he was being traded from the Oakland Athletics to the Washington Nationals, which is a pretty big jump when you consider the distance traveled in both residences and playoff standings.

Doolittle and his fiance both discussed the challenges they faced in relocating, specifically citing the attachments to their former lifestyles in Oakland.  However, credit was given to the people involved in the process, such as the clubhouse attendants who did things like make sure their car was shipped as they hopped a flight, or that the lease on their place was assumed by another player.

It's easy for the fans to forget that the guys in our favorite uniforms are more than just assets being utilized for competition.  These are people with families and feelings.  The wave of emotions that can sweep through a person when he is traded is immense, ranging from anxiety to depression.

One of the most common feelings a traded player may experience is, "So my old team didn't want me anymore?  They thought I wasn't any good?"  Thankfully, this isn't usually the case in most trades, but it's a common human reaction.

In Doolittle's case, the A's traded him because the Nats wanted him, not because the A's didn't.  They needed arms in the bullpen who were competent and could help them in their playoff push.  The A's weren't going anywhere that season, and the opportunity to receive younger talent with a chance for success in the future was worth more to them than to covet an asset in his prime during a time when a championship was not in the realm of possibilities.

By contrast, consider the trade made between the Yankees and White Sox around the same time.  One player who might have felt this emotion was Tyler Clippard.  Clippard struggled for two months prior to the trade, so when the Yankees acquired David Robertson and Tommy Kahnle to upgrade their bullpen, Clippard was the pitcher who had to go based on his performance.  The White Sox took Clippard back in the trade, which turned out to be smart on their part because they were able to flip him to the Houston Astros later to acquire more potential assets.

The fact of the matter is that we, as fans, owe it to the sport and the players to keep our fandom in check insomuch as it concerns remembering the human element the players face in these situations.  If you ever had to pick up and move because a parent got a new job out of state, perhaps you can relate to what these players experience.  Although, the massive salaries probably ease that burden...