Why Do We Even Play Soccer?

It costs a lot of money and the USA never wins

My nine-year-old did not want to try out for travel soccer. He loved his current coach and team and besides, he explained, “I don’t like change.” (He’s self-aware like that.) We urged him to try out anyway. 

“Don’t you want to see what the competition is like?” I asked, “and don’t you want to push yourself to be as good as you can be?”

“No,” he replied, “I just like winning.”

Nevertheless, he agreed to try out, and we agreed that he would make the final choice. I didn’t want to force it. I had heard that travel soccer is a big time and money commitment, and I didn’t want to take him out of a good situation.

He aced the tryout and was selected for an “Elite” (upper division) team. But the catch was that we had 36 hours to decide whether to join the team or not. Such pressure! The trainer for the travel soccer club explained gravely that every year that my son wasn’t in travel, he would fall further behind. There have never been any three words designed to more acutely trigger parents’ anxieties than “child” and “fall behind.”

The next 35 hours were a whirlwind of phone calls and Googlings, gathering information about whether the benefits of travel sports outweighed the (considerable) costs. But we kept coming back to the basic question:

“Why are we even doing this?” That is, what is the goal? (Please excuse the pun.)

In case you forgot, this is not a parenting blog. It’s an economics blog. Economics is the study of how people make choices among competing priorities. One thing that choice-makers and even professional economists often forget to do is to clearly define what our goals are when we’re faced with a choice. If I have a choice, and one of the possible outcomes is my child falling behind, I need to tell my anxieties to sit down and take a rest break from their customary task of tormenting my parently mind while I think about and define what the ultimate goal of the choice is. 

Philosophers have been commenting on the value of sports for centuries. Their opinions tend to be good one-line summaries of what their society values. From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

• The Greeks Plato and Aristotle saw sports as part of the harmony of mind and body, leading to human flourishing.

• The Roman Virgil described the value of sports for training for war. 

• Thomas Aquinas saw sports as a way to cultivate body and soul.

• The Victorians saw sports as part of building good character.

• The Encyclopedia seems to have been unable to find any philosophers who thought that sports are good for fun.

What I wanted for my son was excellence, something like what the Greeks would advocate. 

Soccer might be the activity for which humans have achieved the highest level of excellence. (The coolest activity invented by humans is skateboarding; that’s a post for another day.) When it’s at its best, it’s truly the Beautiful Game. Several billion people obsess over soccer as a national pastime. Kids play it constantly in the streets. Freakish size is not needed to be the best in the world–not something that can be said of traditional American sports. Agents for professional soccer clubs prowl the globe, searching for raw talent to cultivate and bring to the highest levels. If a small team signs a future star, they can sell his contract to a larger club, thus making a profit. This creates an incentive for coaches to develop talent in young kids, even at the expense of winning games.

(Americans are suspicious of soccer. Sure, it’s OK for kids. But do they really have a future in this low-scoring sport? And will some fancy European coach in a fancy travel soccer club teach them to writhe on the ground at the slightest bump like they’ve been tazed?)

Agents for pro clubs are largely absent from the United States. Our youth clubs are not allowed to sell player contracts and therefore their incentive is not to develop talent, but to get more families paying into the system. Here, families “pay to play,” making soccer a rich kid game and stunting talent development. Critics constantly bemoan the U.S. talent development system, saying that we should “end pay to play.” The problem with this idea is that the money needs to come from somewhere, and there just isn’t enough money in soccer in the United States. Not enough local pro teams, not enough eyeballs on screens, and hence not enough big investors. Excellence requires investment. 

Other U.S. sports attract lower-income players than soccer does. Other countries don’t have this issue. Source: Sports & Fitness Industry Association

Such were the thoughts that tormented my mind during those 35 hours leading up to The Decision. And then I remembered that it wasn’t my decision. My wife and I had told my son that he got to make the choice. I had to let go.

He chose to stay with his old team. He had clear goals: fun and relationships, goals that I had undervalued. He liked his coach, his teammates, and his games. I think he made the right choice. He kept his eye on his values, and in the end it was an easy choice for him, even if my fevered brain thought it was difficult. His skill is developing rapidly, and his coach really cares about the kids. And it costs less.

The first steps in economic choice-making are defining the goal(s) and identifying who is making the choice. Being clear about these can save people a lot of brain-turbulence. 

Got a story about competitive sports? Share it in the comments.

Teachers, if you want a good lesson plan on this approach to decision-making, check out my lesson entitled “Is Efficiency Ethical?” See also “How Can You Apply Ethics and Economics to Any Issue?” by Jamie Wagner. These are part of the Ethics, Economics, and Social Issues curriculum from www.EconEdLink.org