How private equity is ruining children's sports.Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here to get The Daily Prospect Monday through Friday. [link removed]

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**FEBRUARY 5, 2026**

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How is it that the average American soccer mom spends $1,200 a head [link removed] each year for their kids to play a sport predominantly played on county-owned fields and staffed by parent volunteers? As with most bad things the short answer is “private equity.” But what drew me into the weird saga [link removed] of the collapse of the New England youth sports empire Legacy Global Sports was a more nuanced narrative, in which a private equity-installed CEO attempted to save the company from the tsunami of frauds, grifts, and abusive practices that ultimately caused its downfall. Most shockingly, he discovered the company was engaged in a massive labor trafficking scheme that imported hundreds of foreign coaches under false pretenses, then rented them out to camps and clubs for $75 an hour while paying them as little as $3. In many more ways, the business of youth sports has truly turned into an abusive microcosm of all the worst traits of finance capital. Even finance guys are starting to get creeped out by it.

**–Maureen Tkacik, investigations editor**

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Cristian Mera for The American Prospect

The Roots of the Youth Sports Gold Rush [link removed]

“Hand in the cookie jar” syndrome has long beset youth sports; most leagues are still tax-exempt nonprofits, though that requires far more public disclosure than private equity. Every few weeks, a youth sports league official in some county or another is arrested for embezzling from angry parents; in 2019, a travel baseball team official in New Jersey was arrested for robbing a bank [link removed] to repay $6,500 he’d stolen from his team. 

But as money and financial expertise has flooded the sector, the scams have gotten bigger and harder to prosecute. Last fall,

**USA Today** documented a complex scheme [link removed] uncovered by a volunteer hockey mom whereby Colorado youth hockey authorities were allegedly siphoning money into shell companies owned by the board chairman. USA Hockey eventually pushed the chairman and an associate out of their positions; the chairman was later found liable for civil theft, unjust enrichment, conversion, and breach of fiduciary duty, though that’s currently under appeal.

Such amateurism is an important part of private equity’s thesis of investment in youth sports properties. “The thing about fancy sports complexes is that they are exactly like stadiums: No matter how successful they are, they never seem to generate enough cash to cover the cost of building and maintaining them,” said Steve Griffin, a consultant whose odyssy through the youth sports is chronicled in this story. So the institutions involved in developing or controlling them need to get some sucker—ultimately, you and me—to shoulder that expense.

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