The blueprint carries a figure for what a metro-wide pilot would cost per year. A reporter asked where it came from. The answer was that it was a build-up of components that had never been published. Here they are.
A model is not a measurement. The Price Index records what clubs put on their own pages, with a source and a date on every figure. What follows is a projection of what running this in Kansas City would cost, built on the metro's actual population and, where possible, on prices measured here.
The inputs everything scales from
| Input | Value | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Kansas City metro population | 2,254,288 | SOURCED U.S. Census, American Community Survey, via Census Reporter for the Kansas City MO-KS metro area. |
| Youth ages 6 to 17 | ~338,000 | ESTIMATED Roughly 15 percent of population, the national age-share. A Kansas City specific figure would sharpen this and is on the list. |
| Registered youth soccer players in the metro | ~30,000 | ESTIMATED National registration across US Youth Soccer, US Club Soccer and AYSO exceeds 4 million against roughly 49 million U.S. youth ages 6 to 17, giving about 8 to 9 percent. Kansas City is a strong soccer market, so this sits at the upper end of that band. A registry would replace this estimate with a count. |
| Competitive-tier players | ~9,000 | ESTIMATED Roughly 30 percent of registered players. Real registration counts would replace this estimate outright. |
| Elite-tier players, the top 2 percent | ~600 | ESTIMATED Two percent of registered players, matching the blueprint's own definition of the funded elite tier. |
The four cost lines
1. Open tier subsidy · $2.4M
Twenty thousand children at roughly $120 each. The player count ASSUMED targets children currently outside organized soccer plus existing recreational players, which is a policy choice about scope rather than a measured figure. The per-child cost is also ASSUMED and covers field time, equipment, and a share of community coach stipends. Neither number is sourced. For context, Project Play's State of Play 2025 puts average annual spending across youth sports at $1,016 per child, so the open tier is designed to run at roughly a tenth of that.
2. Coaching Corps · $1.8M
Roughly 2,400 licensed coaches across the metro, of whom about 450 receive stipends of roughly $4,000. Both the count and the stipend are ASSUMED. The stipend figure is the one a coaching director could correct in a single conversation, and probably should.
3. Funded elite tier · $2.0M
About 600 players at roughly $3,300 each, delivered free to families. This line is now anchored to measured data. Across 56 elite-platform rows in the Price Index, covering MLS NEXT, ECNL, ECNL Regional League, Girls Academy, National Academy League and Pre-ECNL programs in this metro, the mean published fee is $3,259 and the median is $3,356. MEASURED So the true annual cost of an elite-platform place in Kansas City is not a guess. It is what clubs here publish and families here pay.
4. Network operations, safety, compliance, registry · $1.5M
ASSUMED A planning figure for the staff and systems that run a metro compact: registration and records, background checks and safeguarding, compliance with the all-in price rule, and the player registry. It is not built from a staffing plan. Building one would move this number in either direction.
| Line | Annual |
|---|---|
| Open tier subsidy | $2.4M |
| Coaching Corps | $1.8M |
| Funded elite tier | $2.0M |
| Network operations | $1.5M |
| Gross annual subsidy need | ~$7.7M |
Against what Kansas City families already pay
Roughly 9,000 competitive-tier players at a mean published club fee of $2,681 comes to about $24 million a year.
That $24 million is a floor. It counts club fees only, so uniforms, team fees, tournament entries, travel, and the coaching add-ons several clubs list separately all sit on top of it. It also counts competitive players only, so every recreational family in the metro is outside it entirely. What Kansas City families actually spend on youth soccer is higher than this. The Index measures what clubs publish, and this is the part of the bill that can be seen from the outside.
The $2,681 figure is MEASURED, the mean across 143 verified competitive rows in the Price Index, where published fees run from $1,508 to $4,700. The player count is ESTIMATED and is the soft half of that multiplication.
So the pilot's subsidy need is on the order of a third of what the metro's competitive families are already spending on club fees, and a far smaller fraction once travel is counted. That is the argument in one line: the money is already being spent. It is being spent by families, and a large share of it leaves the metro entirely.
The national question
Scaled across American metros by population, a per-metro figure in this range implies something on the order of a billion dollars a year nationally. That number should be stated rather than avoided, because anyone can do the arithmetic.
American families already spend many multiples of that on youth soccer every year, a large share of it on travel, duplicated administration, and events that exist to sell exposure.
Nothing here requires the whole country at once. It requires one metro to run it and publish what happened. If the numbers hold, the case for the next city is made in public with evidence rather than argument, and a second metro starts from a tested model instead of a proposal. If they do not hold, the plan should not scale, and the measurement is what would show that. Either way the country learns something it does not currently know.
What would change this number
- Real registration counts. Two of the four cost lines and the entire family-spend comparison rest on estimated player counts. A metro registry, or cooperation from the state associations, would replace all of it with a count.
- A staffing plan for operations. Roles and salaries in place of a round number.
- Coaching stipend reality. Any club or coaching director could correct that figure in one email.
- Scope decisions on the open tier. Twenty thousand children is a target, not a finding. A different target moves the largest single line.
Three of the four assumed lines are gatherable rather than permanently unknowable. Field rental rates, which drive the open tier cost, come from municipal rate cards and facility operators. Licensed coach counts and realistic stipends are known to state associations and coaching directors. Operations cost can be benchmarked against comparable organizations' public tax filings. That work is underway and this page will be updated as it lands.
If you run a club, a facility, or a league in Kansas City and one of these numbers is wrong, tell me and I will correct it: jon@americanpyramid.org. Corrections are logged in the open, the same as everywhere else on this site.