Op-ed by Jeff Angus / Three Horizons Group
Every few months, a major publication runs a piece on youth sports being a $40 billion market. The New York Times did so last July. It cited the Aspen Institute, mentioned Josh Harris and David Blitzer assembling one of the largest youth sports property portfolios in the country through Unrivaled Sports, and landed on the front page of the print edition.
Then came the reaction posts, and they have never stopped. Most of what they say is true, but none of it is the interesting part.
We have been working deeply within youth sports, technology and media for the past decade, helping to build brands that matter. It is no longer a question of whether youth sports becomes an institutional asset class. It is a question of who understands what they are actually buying into.
And the clearest recent explanation did not come from a market report, but from a single post.
In April, SPIRE Academy announced it would be the primary sponsor of Kaulig Racing’s No. 16 car, driven by AJ Allmendinger, for the May 31 NASCAR Cup Series race in Nashville. A reply came in from Cory James on X. He is a Kaulig Racing fan. His daughter had just played in a volleyball tournament at SPIRE.
“This is awesome!” he wrote.
That is the youth sports opportunity, captured in two sentences.
Cory may be a motorsports fan, a volleyball dad, or simply someone whose family life moves through the same facilities, events, and weekends that define this market. That is the point. Youth sports is not an abstract category. It is an emotional, high-frequency environment where brands can show up in the flow of real family life. You cannot manufacture that through a media buy. You can only earn it by being present in places that already matter to people.
Full disclosure: we work with SPIRE Academy, the elite sports boarding school and prep academy in Geneva, Ohio. Earlier this year, SPIRE announced a five-year, $6 million partnership with Vensure Employer Solutions, among the largest corporate partnerships in youth sports history. The NASCAR activation with Kaulig Racing in Nashville was the first major brand moment to flow from it. When the race ran on May 31, the SPIRE Academy car won the opening stage and put the brand out front on national television. These are not isolated tactics but connected moves, and Cory’s post is what it looks like when the strategy starts to reach the real world.
How big is the opportunity?
The $40 billion figure has become the easy citation, the TAM of the pitch deck. It is big, memorable, and directionally useful. It also comes from the Aspen Institute and describes U.S. spending alone. Broader market estimates put the global youth sports economy closer to $60 billion and growing at nearly 10 percent a year, and even that leaves out plenty of what families actually pay for: travel, lodging, gear, coaching, facilities, and registration. The number everyone cites is the floor, not the ceiling.
The Aspen Institute’s own survey data points in the same direction. The average U.S. sports family spent $1,016 on their child’s primary sport in 2024, a 46 percent increase since 2019. That’s not a market growing incrementally, but one repricing itself quickly, driven by parents who have decided this spending is not optional.
But the industry often makes its case with the wrong evidence.
Participation rates matter. Household spending matters. Private equity dollars matter. But none of that fully explains why youth sports behaves the way it does. The customer is not only buying games, training, facilities, or exposure. The customer is buying belief. And, as brand marketers, this is where we are focusing our time and attention.
Tom Farrey, who founded and directs the Aspen Institute’s Sports & Society Program, has put this dynamic more plainly: parents will spend just about anything on their children, and no income level is untouched. That is not rational consumer behavior in the traditional sense. It is identity spending, closer in some ways to a luxury brand. It is tied to aspiration, community, family sacrifice, and the belief that sports can shape a child’s future. The Aspen survey quantified part of that: roughly one in five youth sports parents thinks their child has the ability to play Division I college sports. One in ten thinks their child could reach the professional ranks or the Olympics. Those beliefs are not always accurate, but they are deeply held, and they drive decisions that may look irrational from the outside and feel like sound strategy from the inside.
That is why youth sports is such a powerful brand platform.
In a world built around attention, sports remain one of the last places where brands can reach people in a meaningful, communal, and emotionally invested way. Youth sports may be even more powerful, because it is less mature as a commercial platform and more deeply embedded in family life. You cannot skip your kid’s tournament. You cannot scroll past Saturday morning at the gym or rink. That attention is still early enough that thoughtful brands can build real advantage. The ones that will are the ones that understand the parent, the athlete, the facility, the community, and the emotional context around the spend.
They will also need to acknowledge the hard parts. The access gap is real. Research from Ohio State and Oregon State found that 70 percent of 10th graders from high-income families play high school sports, compared with 43 percent from low-income families. Private capital can help close that gap or widen it, depending on how fee structures, scholarships, and programming evolve. Anyone making a bullish case for youth sports without addressing access is telling an incomplete story.
The $40 billion number will keep getting cited. Unfortunately, the LinkedIn posts will keep coming. And somewhere in a volleyball gym in Geneva, Ohio, or a baseball complex on a Thursday night, or a hockey rink on a Saturday morning, a parent is there. For hours. Interacting with brands in ways they wouldn’t in any other part of their lives, in a context where their guard is down and their attention is real. Cory James already made the connection. Youth sports made the introduction.
The only question is which brands will show up to meet them.
Jeff Angus is the founder of Three Horizons Group (threehorizonsgroup.com), a brand strategy and PR firm that has spent the past decade helping sports and tech brands punch above their weight. He contributes to Sports Business Journal, lives in North Vancouver, and is just beginning his own youth sports parent career as assistant (to the) head coach of his kids’ t-ball team.
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