Everything Wrong With Kids’ Soccer and Why We Keep Doing It
Children’s sports have grown more toxic and unaffordable over the past few decades. Are the benefits really worth the time, costs, and headaches?
We’re so excited to welcome Lindsay Fickas to The Pomegranate’s writing team!
Every group chat has their antagonists. Former friends, vindictive exes, nosey co-workers, and the relatives we have no choice but to keep around. For a period of time with my friends, it was a guy named Travis.1 Travis was a twenty-something-year-old who had been tasked with leading my son’s competitive soccer team. Working with him had quickly become a nightmare. He never responded to the parents’ questions and ignored every email. He missed at least one game and waited so long to tell us about the players’ fees, all the parents owed a fine. It felt like a small miracle one day when the entire team received a notification that Travis would no longer be working with our kids. He was now the problem of recreational league seven-year-olds. The Lord had heard our prayer.
My three kids have been playing soccer since 2022 and have been involved with several different clubs. For the most part, the overall experience has been great. My younger two have stayed with their same team since the very beginning. These kids have grown together and found their place, first running the field as an untamed pack before distinguishing themselves into forwards, goalies, and non-committed centers mostly just there for the vibes. But sports are tricky. The more you see how it’s supposed to work, the clearer you see potential dysfunction.
For every few great coaches you’ll encounter, there is one who has the potential to completely derail your life. Before the advent of Travis, my oldest was a part of a rec team coached by a grouch of a dad who stepped up solely because no one else would. Throughout practice, he would scream at the kids for an hour before walking away in a huff. My son didn’t learn a thing from him throughout his tenure. It wasn’t until we pulled him out and switched to a pricier league that we realized our kid was actually a pretty skilled soccer player.
And then came the parents. With my oldest son’s former rec team in particular, it was rough. They would pull out cans of beer at morning games, drinking and yelling until they were ejected from the fields. As we would walk back to the car afterward, they would stop us and ask if we at least won. The answer was always no.
The drinking parents were far from the worst. Aggressive sports parents have been a trope for decades now, getting satirized in everything from Will Ferrell movies to episodes of Bob’s Burgers. Nearly every field now has signs reminding parents that, believe it or not, the referees are human. Yet things are more toxic now than ever. One recent weekend, my sister left a baseball game for her kid and texted us horrified. Things had come to a head when one dad started yelling that he was going to bring a gun to the parking lot and threatened to call ICE on another parent. The middle-school players just watched in horror.
These actions from the parents undoubtedly bleed into their kids with trash-talking starting well before they can even play with full-sized goals. This past year, my kindergartener told me after a game that the other team kept calling them losers, taunting them as they chased the ball down the field. It was a dark transition from their normal, friendly games where even getting the ball into the right goal felt like a major accomplishment. We had a problem with another former team where one kid could not stop getting ejected from games. All of nine years old, he would hurl insults at the referees until he was removed. If he did manage to last the entire hour, he would aim his ire at his teammates. Every time they would lose, my son would sit quietly in the backseat in such a foul mood, nothing could cheer him up.
Much of the toxicity both on and off the field comes from a sense of entitlement. The fact is that these parents see sports as an investment. They want to raise the next Lionel Messi, and some of them have the means to do it. And let me tell you, it takes a lot of means. You could sign your child up for a rec team that will cost you $150 for the season. At this stage, your child will likely be on a team coached by a parent volunteer and refed by a mix of teenagers and retirees. Any growth potential to take your child from a participatory player to a great one will come with additional time and money.
If your child does fall in love, they are going to move up to competitive teams. This is where the cost of playing is going to quickly move into the four digits. Here in my LCOL city of St. Louis, one of our primary clubs costs over $2,000 per season. The price will cover your entry fees and game fees, uniforms and alternative uniforms made of such a cheap polyester, they will tear from even the slightest bit of tension. At this point, the experience becomes remarkably better with full-time coaches, elevated turf fields, and refs who bring some knowledge to the sport. Things like gear, specialized position camps, and tournaments will cost extra.
Excelling at sports is something that is simply out of reach for most working families. We all love hearing about that kid who came from nothing and bought his hard-working mom a house once he hit it big. In reality, kids in lower income households are at an instant disadvantage because they don’t have access to the targeted development needed to hone their skills. The most raw talent likely rests in kids with no means to express it, practicing in backyards and on cracked pavement while scholarship-bound athletes are halfway across town driving to practice in their parents’ Lexus.
That cost, of course, doesn’t take a family’s time into consideration. During soccer season, we have three practices on weekend evenings on top of a once-a-month Friday training. Because I am lucky enough to work freelance from home, it’s doable even if it is stressful. Then come the weekend games where we spend at least one day driving across town, living in a lawn chair, and eating lunches made up of concession stand hot dogs and stale coffee. We duck beneath pavilions on the hot days, try to thaw our hands in the car on the rainy, cold ones, and miss major plays because we have to run one of the kids to the bathroom four fields away. We can’t agree to plans with friends or extended family without first saying, “let me check to see what time we have games.” To be a sports parent means replacing some of your community with the people hurling insults at their third-grader as they walk off toward the car. It is isolating at best.
Don’t get me wrong. We are lucky that we get the chance to let our kids pursue something that they love. There is nothing better than watching their confidence take root as they find a breakaway or block a corner kick. At the end of the day, it remains one of the best activities to build up their social skills while pulling them away from screens. But sometimes, when I’m hunting down missing shin guard sleeves or planning out another week of 30-minute dinner recipes, I start to resent it all. Why do we have to spend another night convincing our kid that yes, he really does need to go to practice? Why do we have to put our entire lives on hold for seven months out of every year? Why do we have to deal with bad coaches and angry parents and parking lots filled with post-2024 Teslas and endless laundry piles and so-called Mother’s Day tournaments I swear were planned by men unwilling to actually do anything for their wives?
The day I started to work on this essay, my kids and I wound up in a teensy Italian market after a game so we could get ingredients for dinner. I stood in line exhausted, entertaining the younger two while my oldest walked around in his cleats. After I had finished putting in my order, a man ahead of us turned around and looked at my son’s uniform. “Did you have a game today?” he asked.
My son paused the music in his headphones to say he did.
“Well, did you have fun?”
It wasn’t a question if he had won or lost. If his team was good. If he was good. It was as simple as that. Did you have fun?
“Yeah,” my son said, his eyes lighting up. “I scored a goal.”
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Names have been changed to protect the perpetually unorganized.