Sweet baby Jesus. It’s not enough that they’ve recklessly inflated the national housing market, private equity firms are now buying up kids’ sports teams and even locking down the rights of parents to record games — instead, offering their own expensive recording and streaming service. Via The Lever:
There’s an ironclad truism in youth sports: Every parent turns into an ESPN 30 for 30 documentarian as soon as they have a video recording device in hand and their kid is in the game.
Some record the games and post them online so family members and friends who can’t attend in person can watch their kids play. Sometimes they do so to attract the attention of college scouts or help players hone their craft. Some people just want to preserve the memories.
But in the world of corporatized youth sports, even this simple pleasure is being banned and monetized by Wall Street to extract as much profit as possible from players and parents, no matter how many kids get sidelined because they can’t afford the sport’s rising costs.
As the $40 billion youth sports industry comes under private equity control, corporate-owned facilities and leagues — from hockey rinks to cheerleading arenas — have begun prohibiting parents from recording their own kids’ sports games.
