Where the Money Goes

Two numbers. What a family pays for one player, and what the club takes in to develop her. Both are public. Neither shows whether any of it is making the game more affordable, or just more expensive.

On Tuesday I wrote that in this country "academy" is a word any club is free to use, because no one audits a standard. This is the other half of that. When no one audits the standard, no one audits the money either.

Start with the bill.

A competitive club team costs roughly $2,000 to $8,000 per year in dues alone depending on the club and the level. Dues do not cover the rest. Travel, tournaments, hotels, uniforms, and private training push a single season to $6,000 to $15,000. Run that every year from U13 through U18 and funding one player costs a family somewhere between $40,000 and $100,000.

None of this is an argument against paying to play. Families pay to play in most countries. The argument is about affordability — whether the cost of the game is being brought down as it grows, whether the pathway is simple enough to navigate, and whether a talented player who cannot afford the bill is subsidized instead of shut out.

Now the clubs.

Most youth clubs in this country are nonprofits. That is a mission-driven tax status, not a description of their ability to generate revenue. A nonprofit is even allowed to earn a surplus. It is NOT allowed to hand that surplus to owners or executives the way a company pays dividends, profit-sharing, or commissions. It is required to put the money back into the mission. That is the deal the tax-exempt status makes.

For a youth club, the mission is the players. Reinvestment is supposed to make the game more affordable and more accessible for the players who come next, not more expensive every year.

The work is professional, and it should be paid. Good coaching is expensive to produce, and a high-level license can cost tens of thousands of dollars to earn. A coach who runs a team part-time, or a sporting department as a career, deserves a professional's pay. The question is not whether they should earn a living. It is how much of the surplus goes back to the players, and how much simply becomes next year's salaries.

Because these are nonprofits, every club files a public return. Line them up and the pattern is hard to miss.

Community clubs

• ~$600,000 in revenue → top staff paid ~$78,000

• ~$972,000 in revenue → top staff paid ~$84,000

The biggest clubs in the Philadelphia region

• ~$4.2 million → executive director ~$170,000

• ~$6.6 million → general manager ~$238,000

• ~$7.1 million → director ~$195,000

The pattern holds at every level: the bigger the club, the bigger the number at the top. That is not the problem. The problem is that nothing here shows whether any of this money is making the game more affordable for the families paying in.

None of that is hidden. And the record shows more than salaries. A 990 form reports what a club took in and what it spent, so the surplus is right there to be read.

The largest brought in about $7.1 million and spent about $6.8 million — roughly a $300,000 profit that year.

What the record does not show is where that $300,000 surplus went.

The tax status requires it to go back into the mission. The form does not say whether it lowered participation fees, funded a scholarship, or was put into a facility development fund. You can see that the surplus exists. You cannot see where it went, or whether it made playing any more affordable.

England answers this differently, and the difference is not the tax status. English academies are for-profit corporate entities. They sit inside professional clubs run as businesses. On the men's side, an independent body — the Professional Game Audit Company — audits every academy in the Premier League and EFL against a licensed standard, and the license is tied to money and status. Meet it and you hold your category. Fall short and you lose it. Oversight is what sends the money where it is supposed to go.

The United States took the opposite trade. It kept the mission-driven tax status and skipped the oversight.

And England did not skip its girls. The women's game there runs on the same licensed-academy model. The FA licenses girls' academies by category, ties the license to funding and standards a club has to meet, and awards it only after a rigorous review. The top clubs in the women's league system are expected to run one. It is a real standard with a license behind it, built for girls specifically. We have no equivalent here.

There is a second component the public record hides: what a club spends on its boys' side versus its girls' side. Not coaching salaries, not license levels, not field time, not equipment. I have coached inside that gap and seen the obvious inequities in every club. That gap needs to be transparent to those funding it. A family pays the same dues for a daughter as for a son at the same age and level. The club spends more on the son — higher-licensed coaches, more field, better equipment. The girls pay full price for less, and the difference funds the boys. Boys' programs are, more often than not, subsidized by girls.

Title IX is a law enacted in 1972 that mandates gender equity within federally funded educational institutions. It does not apply to private organizations, including youth soccer clubs in this case. However, an academy standard could. It could require transparency in how a club spends its money and invests in its players. And families footing the bill would notice.

This is where an audited academy standard does more than fix a word. The same audit that would finally make "academy" mean something could make the money mean something too. It could check not only how a club trains its players, but whether its surplus goes back to them, whether the girls' side is resourced like the boys', and what, exactly, a family is paying for. Right now a parent cannot see any of that. A standard with an audit behind it is how they finally could. That is the next thing this series builds.