A data investigation
Everyone "knows" travel sports costs are exploding, and the favorite villain is private equity. This page tests that story against the actual price data, sport by sport — in constant dollars, with the acquisition dates drawn on the charts so you can judge for yourself.
Survey average, all kids & all levels — 2019
Per child, primary sport. Blends mostly-rec kids with travel families [src]
Increase 2019 → 2024
vs — CPI — about — in real terms
The travel-tier reality
Typical annual all-in for travel-sports families; 21% top $5,000/yr [src]
Why the averages look low: only about 17% of kids play travel/club as their primary setting [src] — the survey average blends a $50 town-league season with a $12,000 AAA hockey year. The club-level fee dataset at the top of the page shows what the travel tier actually costs; the averages are the only numbers with a real trend line, so they drive the trend chart below.
Every multi-year survey series that exists, indexed to 100 at 2019 (nominal), against overall CPI and recreation-services CPI. Anything above the red CPI line grew faster than inflation — and everything did. Click a sport to highlight it; open markers are the 2022 wave, which used a different sample.
One card per sport. Where multiple comparable survey waves exist (soccer, baseball), the chart is the spending trend — nominal (light) and constant 2025 dollars (dark), with vertical ticks marking private-equity events. Where the survey record is a single point, pretending there's a trend would be dishonest — so those cards chart today's published fee ranges from the club dataset above (rec vs club tiers), with the lone survey point and the gaps stated in the text. Badges rate how much data actually exists — the loudest claims often rest on the thinnest series.