The Performance of Caring: How Fake Empathy Is Destroying Youth Sports
No kid left behind!
In the wake of the recent LA protests, one thing has become painfully clear: we’ve forgotten how to listen.
Everywhere you turn today, empathy is manufactured. It’s become performance art. People go through the motions, check the boxes, and use the correct slogans, but rarely do they actually stop to listen to the people they claim to care about. The consequences of this aren’t limited to politics. They trickle down into daily life, into our communities, and disturbingly, into youth sports.
The Illusion of Empathy
In Los Angeles, the streets were filled with protesters claiming to stand with immigrants. They raised signs, chanted slogans, posted hashtags, and declared their solidarity with the vulnerable. They wanted to be seen as allies, as defenders of the community, of everyone, regardless of status.
There’s the contradiction here, though, that nobody seems to want to talk about: When night fell, many of those same protests turned violent. Rioting and looting followed. And the targets of that destruction? Immigrant-owned businesses. Korean grocers. Latino family restaurants. First-generation entrepreneurs who sacrificed everything to build a better life, only to see it burned, smashed, and stolen in one night. Many of them are uninsured or underinsured, losing not just their inventory, but also their future.
The very people these so-called humanitarians claimed to support were the ones paying the price for their "solidarity."
Do legal immigrants matter less than those without documentation? Of course not. A human being is a human being. I’ve never understood how anyone can feel entitled to declare who owns what part of this planet in the first place — but that’s a debate for another time.
Last week, as anger turned toward the National Guard’s deployment, moral posturing reached new heights. People screamed about authoritarianism and oppression while the other side pretended to be acting to defend hard-working Americans, but let’s be honest: neither side cared one jot about the people caught in the middle. The politicians who ordered the deployment weren’t motivated by a desire to protect lives or livelihoods, and the protestors didn’t really care about the immigrants. It was all political theater designed to score points while real people suffered.
Ultimately, no one truly listened. Everyone was trying to shout louder than the other side. Everyone just wanted to "win."
That’s not empathy. That’s branding. That’s performance. That’s a failure of leadership.
The Same Failure Infects Youth Sports
Sadly, the same performative culture infects youth sports, and it’s devastating.
We see it every single day in youth soccer:
Clubs posting polished graphics about diversity, while charging $4,000 a year for "elite access" to an 11-year-old’s soccer season, and that is only the membership fee!
Coaches preaching "player-first development," while flying in ringers to win tournaments, benching paying players along the way.
Leaders publicly embracing inclusion, while privately doing nothing to create meaningful access, representation, or opportunity.
How does a single parent afford $10,000 a year for their child to play? And that’s not hyperbole — with travel, hotels, private training, and tournaments, that’s what many families are now paying. This was once a street game. We’ve now turned it into an exclusive country club.
It’s easy to blame the clubs — and yes, they share some blame. But the system feeds itself. The clubs face inflated expenses from the municipalities at times. Travel raises costs exponentially. The federation could do more to provide financial assistance. Municipalities could partner with clubs to build fields. But we’ve allowed the culture to normalize something that has no business being normal.
What Are We Chasing?
I recently conducted a survey asking coaches, parents, and players whether they’d prefer to play locally until high school. The answer was overwhelming from the parents and kids: 97% said yes. The coaches? They were split.
Why? For many coaches, their self-worth has become tied to their status within the "elite" ecosystem. The higher the travel level, the more important they perceive it to be.
In my previous role, I observed coaches so consumed by their identity as "high-level coaches" that their entire sense of value hinged on each weekend's result. Because they carried that pressure, the kids carried it too. Suddenly, 10-year-olds playing for fun became 10-year-olds crushed under the weight of adult expectations. It sucks the fun right out of the sport.
We’ve lost sight of what elite sport means. In truth, very few kids are truly elite. If you're in an MLS academy or representing your state, you’re playing at an elite level. Everyone else? They're developing. They're learning. They're kids.
Instead, we’ve convinced every parent that their child is one travel team away from a scholarship. We’ve created an arms race where tactics become more complicated than the kids' skill level can handle, and where coaches lose patience when 12-year-olds struggle to execute advanced patterns designed for professionals. Frustration builds. The joy disappears. And all for what?
We’ve stolen the escape that sport once provided. The place where kids laughed, competed, and forgot about life’s stresses for a few hours. We replaced it with anxiety and dollar signs. We’ve robbed an entire generation of the unfiltered joy that made us love the game in the first place.
The Real Cost of Pretending
Just like politics, the pattern in youth sports is the same:
We use people’s struggles as props.
We use immigrant communities and minorities to score political points.
We use youth athletes to validate a club’s reputation.
We use “empathy” as a marketing tool, but not as a leadership strategy.
What should we do?
The formula isn’t complicated, but we need to come together to achieve progress. I need to hear from others, and we need to share our experiences to get it right going forward.
Listen first. Don’t assume you know what players, families, or communities need. Ask, and listen to understand instead of just to reply. I’ve made this mistake myself, and it’s a constant discipline to keep listening.
Make hard decisions. Stand up when it's unpopular. Pull teams from toxic leagues. Re-examine your fee structures. Push back on the loudest voices that prioritize wins over kids.
Stay consistent. Empathy that only shows up when it’s convenient isn’t empathy — it’s PR.
Act. Build the system you say you believe in.
Above all, look at every decision through the eyes of the kids you're making it for.
I was lucky to play on some great teams growing up. We won county medals in football, provincial medals in rugby, and civic honors in soccer. Sadly, the truth is that if today’s American system had existed back then in Ireland, most of us couldn’t have afforded to play at all. And you know what? The medals are sitting somewhere in a plastic bag back home in Ireland. They're not important. The memories of laughter, friendships, and adventures - they live forever.
That’s what sport should be. That’s what we owe to the next generation.