With tickets for FIFA World Cup matches selling at exorbitant prices — and NJ Transit planning to charge US$150 for a round-trip train ticket to games at MetLife Stadium — it’s clear that attending football games is expensive. A new report claims that playing football is too.
The report, prepared by the Aspen Institute, points to a “fragmented system” in which access to playing fields often depends on geography and cost.
“We know that just as there are food deserts, there are football deserts,” said Laurie M. Tisch, the philanthropist whose foundation commissioned the report. The document states that “soccer deserts” in parts of the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens neighborhoods in New York City — as well as in Newark, New Jersey — leave “underserved neighborhoods without places to practice football.”
To compound the existing shortage, the report points to a huge demand for football that has outstripped the supply of spaces for children and teenagers, inspired by teams like Real Madrid, Barcelona or New York City FC, now that their games are available via streaming.
The report states that the shortage of fields in the city has been exacerbated by black market permit trading, although it says the Parks and Recreation Department has revoked permits and changed rules to make it more difficult to sell time slots to teams or groups.
The report also found gender disparities: Girls make up just 38% of high school players in New York City and 42% in northern New Jersey. The national average is 45%.
Tisch, whose family co-owns the New York Giants — “I knew football,” she told me — said those numbers were worrying. She said she started paying attention to soccer after meeting Jessica Berman, commissioner of the National Women’s Soccer League, and after her daughter, Carolyn Tisch Blodgett, became the principal owner of Gotham FC. The team won the league championship in 2023 and again last year.
Who plays?
The report says that 250,000 children play football in the New York and northern New Jersey region, and another 150,000 children and teenagers are interested in playing. In Brooklyn alone, the report states, 110,000 children and teenagers have played games or expressed interest in gambling in the past 12 months, the most of any borough, followed by Queens with 85,000 and the Bronx with 63,000.
“One of the keys to encouraging more kids to play sports — especially football — is having the opportunity to play right in their neighborhoods,” said Jon Solomon, research director for the Sports and Society Program at the Aspen Institute.
Tisch said his foundation, in partnership with another nonprofit, Street Soccer USA, is building a soccer field in Queens that will open in a few weeks.
The parks department said that in 2024, to address what a spokesperson called “permit misuse,” it strengthened the language of its online application system to “help reduce opportunities for misuse.”
Park enforcement officers and permit coordinators also conduct inspections “to confirm that the group that received the permit is the one using the space,” she said.
Cost awareness
Solomon said there is a “direct or indirect pressure that children feel” due to costs. It said families spent 46% more on a child’s primary sport in 2024 than in 2019, double the rate of inflation over that period.
“Kids are not naive about what’s going on,” he said. Research for the report revealed that when asked what they liked least about playing football, 32% of young players responded that it was “too expensive”. Concern about costs was by far the most common response.
The report says that access to the game is often determined by car ownership, itself an economic threshold: around 86% of high-income players are driven to training, while just 21% of low-income players are. At the same time, there was a decline in matches that do not involve travel — the naked ones.
“The irony is that football is one of the easiest sports to play, right?” Solomon said. “All you really need is a football and find a space. It could be a small patch of grass or even dirt, and then create some makeshift goalposts.”
But, he added, “we have lost the ability to allow, to encourage, children to play football spontaneously, without programming, on their own.”
