The Product We Forgot

I was sitting in a conference room in Boston at the Aspen Institute's Project Play Summit when something happened that caught me completely off guard. One of the speakers represented a private equity firm that had recently begun investing in youth sports. He seemed like a nice enough guy, but before he had much of a chance to explain why he was there, the room turned on him. It wasn't subtle. It wasn't even particularly polite. The anger felt almost immediate, as if he had walked into the room carrying everything these people feared youth sports were becoming. They weren't reacting to him. They were reacting to what he represented.

What struck me wasn't the reaction itself. It was who was reacting. The room wasn't filled with anti-business activists or people hostile to capitalism. It was filled with coaches, recreation professionals, nonprofit leaders and administrators who had devoted their careers to getting kids to play sports. These were people who spent every day trying to convince one more child to join a team, one more family to participate and one more community to invest in recreation. Almost instinctively, they rejected what this man represented.

At first, I assumed they simply hated private equity. The more I thought about it, the less convincing that explanation became. Most of the people in that room understood money. They understood budgets, fundraising, sponsorships and the constant miserable struggle to keep programs alive. Many of them probably spent half their lives begging people with money to give them some. Investment itself wasn't the enemy. Something else was bothering them.

The same conference produced another moment I couldn't shake. The founder of an AI company talked about the software company he founded, the software analyzed athletic performance, tracked development and generated personalized training plans. It was pretty cool technology, but his customers were the parents of eight, nine, ten and eleven year old kids.

Another panelist finally said what at least some of us were thinking. Maybe we should be careful introducing this kind of technology to children this young. These weren't professional athletes or even college athletes. They were kids, some of them eight years old, and I left Boston thinking we had somehow skipped childhood altogether. Before a kid had even fallen in love with the game, we were already trying to optimize him for it.

For the last several months, I've been writing about sports and belonging. I've written about why some athletes become inseparable from a city while others, despite greater accomplishments, remain admired from a distance. I've written about gambling and what happens when fans begin to question the integrity of competition. I've written about relatability and why we form emotional attachments to certain teams while remaining completely indifferent to others. For a while, I thought I was writing about different things, but I wasn't. I kept circling the same question: what happens when the economics of sports begin pulling in a different direction than the humanity of sports?

Once you see that tension, you can't stop seeing it. Youth sports have become an industry. Parents spend enormous amounts of money chasing elite travel teams, private instruction, showcase tournaments and recruiting opportunities. College athletics has become a labor market where athletes, understandably, pursue the best financial opportunities available. Professional athletes have become global brands with production companies, investment portfolios, podcasts, endorsement deals and media companies. Everybody is maximizing something.

I remember talking with our nanny in Ohio as she wrestled with this problem. Her son is an exceptional baseball player already playing on two travel teams. Then came an invitation to compete with USA Baseball at the youth level. That's the call every sports parent thinks they want until the bill arrives. It was an incredible honor and another significant financial commitment, so what do you do? Your kid has worked his ass off. Very few children get this opportunity. Saying no means lying awake wondering whether you just closed the door on your kid's dream. Saying yes means lying awake wondering how the hell you're going to pay for it.

Of course you find the money, and the system knows it. I don't mean that some evil bastard is sitting in a dark room intentionally exploiting parents. The coaches believe in the opportunity. The organization believes in its program. The parents want to support their son. Everybody involved may have the best intentions in the world, yet the system keeps asking for another commitment, another tournament, another flight, another hotel room and another check.

The machine doesn't need a villain. It only needs incentives. Parents are trying to create opportunities for their children. Investors pursue growing markets. Universities compete for talent. Professional careers are brutally short, so athletes maximize their earning potential. None of this is particularly irrational, and that's what makes the problem so difficult. Almost everyone is doing exactly what the system encourages them to do.

This is also where I need to be clear about something. I am not anti-business. I have spent most of my career in and around the business of sports. I believe athletes should make money, investors should earn returns and organizations should build sustainable businesses. Sports do not become more virtuous because everyone involved is broke.

My concern is almost the opposite. Good businesses understand the difference between creating value and extracting it. They build products, develop customers, invest in infrastructure and strengthen relationships because they believe those things will create future economic value. Increasingly, I wonder whether parts of the American sports system are trying to reverse that order.

We may be monetizing the customer before we have finished creating the customer.

When a child first picks up a basketball, he isn't thinking about NIL deals, television contracts, salary caps or private equity. He wants to make the team, wear the jersey and sit with his friends on the bus. Maybe, for the first time in his life, he wants to feel like he belongs somewhere. That feeling is not some sentimental byproduct of sports. I am beginning to think it may be one of the most valuable things sports creates.

Maybe the strangest thing about the American youth sports machine is that much of the rest of the world doesn't operate this way. Many European sports systems are built around local clubs, volunteers and public or institutional support. Parents may still pay fees, but the development system is not always constructed around asking families to write a bigger check every time their child gets better.

Then there is Norway, a country that has something called Children's Rights in Sport. That sounds like the kind of thing Americans would mock at a school board meeting until you look at what Norway has produced. Its system emphasizes safety, friendship, mastery and a child's right to choose what sports they play and how much they participate.

To its credit, the Aspen Institute's Project Play has been pushing many of the same ideas in the United States. Its Children's Bill of Rights in Sports begins with a remarkably simple principle: every child has the right to play sports. More than 500 athletes, organizations and government entities have endorsed the framework.

There is, however, an important structural difference between the American and Norwegian approaches. Project Play is trying to change a massive, fragmented youth sports culture through leadership, research and collective action. Norway embedded children's rights within the governance structure of organized sport, alongside provisions governing how children's sports are actually conducted.

One is working to move an enormous and decentralized system toward a different set of values. The other has those values built into the structure of the system itself.

That distinction is not a criticism of Project Play. If anything, it illustrates the size of the problem they are trying to solve. American youth sports has become a massive commercial market with thousands of independent organizations and increasingly sophisticated investors. Project Play has correctly identified the need to put children back at the center of sports. The harder question is how you make that principle powerful enough to push against an economic system moving rapidly in the other direction.

While we are trying to identify, train and optimize the next great athlete before he hits puberty, Norway seems to be doing something almost radical. They let kids play, and somehow, against all of our sophisticated economic instincts, they keep producing extraordinary athletes.

But maybe the real lesson from Norway isn't how many great athletes the country produces. Maybe it's how many children they invite into the system in the first place. Participation is one of the first doors into belonging. A child joins a team, wears the jersey, finds friends and begins to understand the rituals of a sport. Somewhere along the way, the child who plays may become the fan who watches.

That relationship matters economically. A participant may become a fan. The fan may become a ticket buyer, television viewer and jersey buyer. Eventually, that fan may become a parent who introduces another child to the game. Sports have somehow created relationships with consumers that can last generations, and then we act as though the process that creates those relationships sits outside the business.

Perhaps the biggest mistake professional sports has made is treating youth participation and community impact primarily as philanthropy. Leagues and teams fund clinics, donate equipment, build courts and run community programs, often through foundations and charitable initiatives. All of that is good, but I wonder if we have put it in the wrong column.

Participation is not the product, but it is one way into the product. So is access. So is community connection. So is integrity. So is storytelling. So is the relationship between a player and the people who wear his jersey. These are all ways sports create, strengthen and protect belonging.

Belonging is the asset.

Once I started thinking about it that way, the economics began to look different. Brand equity is an intangible asset. Customer loyalty has economic value. Goodwill has economic value. Businesses invest billions trying to create emotional relationships with consumers because those relationships influence purchasing behavior, retention and lifetime value. Yet sports, which may have created the strongest consumer relationships in the world, often seem to treat the very things that build those relationships as charitable work.

The distinction between philanthropy and investment matters. Philanthropy is money you give away because you believe something is worth supporting. Investment is money you deploy because you believe it will create or protect future value. The same dollar can produce social good and economic value, but how an organization classifies that dollar changes how seriously it treats the work.

If community impact is philanthropy, it becomes a cost center. It gets a foundation, an annual report and a photograph of a player handing a giant check to a group of smiling children. When budgets tighten, it becomes vulnerable. When leadership changes, priorities move. The people running the work often sit far away from the rooms where ticketing, sponsorship, marketing and business strategy are discussed.

But if belonging is an economic asset, community impact starts to look very different. The child meeting a player may be forming a relationship with the team. The family attending a free clinic may begin to think of the local franchise as our team. A basketball court, baseball field or soccer program may be infrastructure for future fan development. The work can still be good for the community. It can still be charitable. It may also be a long-term investment in the business.

Maybe sports have spent too long putting belonging in the wrong column.

This is not a binary choice between making money and protecting the soul of sports. Good businesses make choices about where to invest capital every day. They invest in technology, stadiums, premium hospitality, media production, data and customer acquisition because they believe those investments will produce future returns. Nobody asks a team to stop making money in order to care about belonging.

The question is whether belonging deserves to be part of the same capital allocation conversation.

Right now, the sports business is doing extraordinarily well. Franchise values continue to rise. Media rights are enormous. Owners are making bags of money and players are creating generational wealth. If I walked into an owner's office and told him his business model was failing because the average fan felt increasingly disconnected, he could point to the value of his franchise and quite reasonably tell me to get the fuck out of his office.

I cannot prove the current model is unsustainable. Maybe premium experiences, global audiences, gambling, streaming and wealthy consumers will continue driving the sports economy upward for decades. Maybe sports have figured this out and I'm worrying about a problem that will never arrive.

But businesses insure valuable assets against risks they cannot predict.

The sports economy is increasingly dependent on audience, and an audience is not necessarily a fan base. Gambling can give someone a reason to watch two teams they do not care about. Fantasy sports can do the same. A superstar, a viral moment or a new media platform can create enormous attention. Those are powerful audience engines, but attention and belonging are not the same thing.

The audience may leave when the reason to watch disappears. The fan stays.

That is why I keep coming back to belonging. The old sports economy was built on an enormous foundation of ordinary fans. They played the games, watched the games, bought tickets when they could afford them and passed their irrational attachments to their children. Individually, many of them were not particularly valuable customers. Collectively, they made sports culturally unavoidable.

The modern sports business may be getting extraordinarily good at monetizing the belonging those generations created. Premium seats generate more revenue. Corporate hospitality generates more revenue. Wealthy customers can spend more in one night than an ordinary family might spend in a season. Every individual decision makes economic sense.

I simply wonder whether the industry is investing as aggressively in creating the next generation of belonging as it is in monetizing the belonging that already exists.

That is not a prediction of collapse. It is a question of risk management. You don't buy insurance because you know your house will burn down. You buy insurance because the house is valuable and fire is possible.

If belonging is the intangible asset underneath the sports economy, then participation, access, community connection, authenticity and integrity are not soft, sentimental shit sitting outside the business. They are ways of investing in and protecting the asset.

Looking back, I don't think the room in Boston was rejecting private equity. I think they were reacting to something they could feel but perhaps couldn't quite articulate. Private equity represented another sophisticated machine designed to find value and generate a return. Again, there is nothing inherently wrong with that.

Maybe the fear was that we were bringing the machinery of value extraction into the relationship before we had finished creating the value.

Markets are remarkably good at measuring what something is worth today. They are less capable of measuring the value of a child falling in love with a sport, a family deciding a team belongs to them or a fan passing that relationship to a child twenty years later. Those things are harder to put on a spreadsheet.

Harder to measure does not mean economically worthless.

The sports industry may have spent decades becoming extraordinarily sophisticated at monetizing belonging while remaining surprisingly careless about investing in it. Maybe the product was never the game, the stadium or the media rights.

Maybe the product was the relationship all along.