Abstract
This study explores parents’ views and practices regarding expenses in club-organized youth sport (OYS), inspired by Zelizer's theory of the social meaning of money. Our ambition is twofold: (a) to develop a typology of the meaning of money spent on teenage children's sport participation—from the parents’ point of view, and (b) to examine how the meaning of money (the typology) is anchored in social class and familiarity with sport. Our data material is qualitative interviews with 40 parents of teenagers in organized football and/or cross-country skiing. Through our analyses, we developed a three-fold typology: Blind spending encompasses not knowing the amount spent on their children's sport. The expenses are considered worthwhile irrespective of how much they are. Concerned spending encompasses spending what is considered necessary, but accompanied by some reflections and restrictions on the spending. Painful spending is far from blind and includes struggling to pay expenses. We conclude that the meaning of money in youth sport is both related to class and the available economic resources in the family, as well as the meaning families imbue sport with. Our study contributes to the understanding of social mechanisms behind class differences in sport participation.
The many possible benefits from organized sport participation—improving health, having fun, learning sports and social skills, meeting friends (Espedalen and Seippel, 2025)—are not accessible to all youth (Espedalen and Seippel, 2024; Vandermeerschen et al., 2016). One explanation for differences in sport participation is the increasingly expensive youth sport (Gould, 2019). What is experienced as costly will, however, vary. Some families are simply richer than others, and variations in parenting styles and ascribed values to sport might also contribute to how costs in sport are experienced, but money and the social meaning they are imbued with in sports are rarely addressed together, with a few exceptions (Hjalmarsson, 2023; Thibaut et al., 2020; Wagnsson et al., 2024). To understand how sports appear costly (or not) is therefore important for understanding and handling social inequality in access to sport.
Therefore, in this paper, we study how parents experience expenses in club-organized youth sport (OYS). Our departure point, following Zelizer's (2017) work on the social meaning of money, is that what is expensive to some is a marginal and ignorable cost to others. Although these perceptions are tied to economic resources (Allison-Abunza and Woodburn, 2022; Andersen and Bakken, 2019; Espedalen and Seippel, 2024), following Zelizer (2012, 2017) we assume that they are also tied to the social meaning these economic resources acquire when spent on children's sport participation. To understand how paying for play affects access to OYS, we therefore explore how parents think about and negotiate expenses. We interviewed 40 parents of teenagers in organized football and cross-country skiing—two of the most common sport activities in Norway. Football is traditionally considered a low-threshold organized sport (Strandbu et al., 2017). Cross-country skiing is interwoven with Norwegian national culture but increasingly criticised for excluding youths through cost-intensive demands (Stefansen and Strandbu, 2025).
Our ambition is twofold: (a) to develop a typology of the meaning of money spent on teenage children's sport participation—from the parents’ point of view, and (b) to examine how and why the meaning of money (the typology) varies between different types of family situations and sport experiences. By exploring the meaning of money, we contribute to the understanding of the social mechanisms behind family choices to spend money on youth sports and class differences in sport participation (Andersen and Bakken, 2019; Thibaut et al., 2017; Vandermeerschen and Scheerder, 2017; Vandermeerschen et al., 2015).
We continue with a description of the organization of youth sport in Norway, before introducing Zelizer's understanding of the social meaning of money (Zelizer, 2017). We then present existing research on costs and participation in youth sport and supporting theoretical perspectives (Bourdieu, 1984; Lareau, 2003), before we analyze parents’ experiences of money spent on their children's OYS participation. We end with a discussion of the social meaning of money, related to class and the significance of sport in the family.
Organized sports in Norway
Children's and youth sports in Norway are organized under the Norwegian Olympic and Paralympic Committee and Confederation of Sports (NIF), an umbrella organization for grassroots and elite sports. Ninety-two per cent of teenagers report having participated in sport during their childhood or teenage years (Bakken and Strandbu, 2023). Commercial fitness centers are increasingly popular among youth. Still, club-organised sports hold a solid position among Norwegian youth and is an important arena for exercise and socialization, reflecting sport as a more or less taken-for-granted part of childhood and upbringing. Recent decades have also seen a commercialization of youth sports in the Nordic countries through private academies, sport schools, and other actors (Gammelsæter et al., 2025; Kristiansen and Houlihan, 2017), particularly well-documented empirically in Sweden (Karlsson et al., 2022, 2023; Sjöblom and Fahlén, 2010). The number of private football academies and sport schools increases in Norway as well, potentially providing additional alternatives for parents who are interested and willing to pay for extra training for their children (Gammelsæter et al., 2025; Kristiansen and Houlihan, 2017). It should however, be noted that the voluntary-based club sport in Norway still holds a strong position among youths and their parents. Accordingly, sports clubs rely heavily on voluntary work by parents as coaches and in various organizing positions (Seippel, 2010). Facilitating children's sport participation is considered an essential part of parenting (Stefansen et al., 2018) and, and parents’ youth sport involvement (in their children, not voluntary work) has increased in recent years (Stefansen et al., 2018).
The Ministry of Culture and Equality supports organized sports through the allocation of substantial gaming profits. Despite high participation rates in children's sports, the media discourse and sport policy documents reveal a persistent concern for socioeconomic inequality and expensive sport participation. Youths from families with lower socioeconomic status are less likely to participate in sport compared to their economically and educationally more resourceful counterparts (Andersen and Bakken, 2019; Bakken and Strandbu, 2023) and are more likely to quit because sport became too expensive (Espedalen and Seippel, 2024).
The social meaning of money
Our inspiration for studying the meaning of money in youth sport comes from Zelizer (2017) who points out a weakness in the way money is commonly understood by researchers and lay people alike: It is a powerful ideology of our time that money is a single, interchangeable, absolutely impersonal instrument (…) All meaningful nuances were stamped out [in the modern world] by the new quantitative logic that asked only “how much,” but not “what and how.” (1–2)
Zelizer's work challenges us to explore three questions related to sport expenditure: First, how the social meaning of money depends on whom they are spent by or set aside for—their users. For example, is money for children's sport equipment valued differently than money for parents’ sport equipment? Second, how families earmark money in the household budget—their use. Are, for example, the family's traveling expenses related to a competition considered sport money or family weekend money? Third, where money come from—the sources. Can for example money set aside for birthdays and Christmas be spent on sport equipment and training fees or is sport equipment part of the daily household budget?
The meaning of money in youth sport research
Several studies on class and sport include economy as part of the explanation of the social inequality in access to sport (e.g., Andersen and Bakken, 2019; Vandermeerschen and Scheerder, 2017). However, with a few notable exceptions (e.g., Allison-Abunza and Woodburn, 2022; Thibaut et al., 2020), the details of household expenses in youth sports are less researched. Median expenditure in OYSs are estimated at 2314 € in Canada (Allison-Abunza and Woodburn, 2022) and 557 € in Norway (Deloitte, 2024). The average expenditure is more than 50% higher in both countries, which means that a smaller group of families pay considerably more money for one child in sport than the majority of families. Some sports like figure skating and skiing are considerably more expensive than many other sports (Allison-Abunza and Woodburn, 2022; Deloitte, 2024), and higher-income families on average spend more money on organized sport than lower-income families (Thibaut et al., 2017). In both Canada and Sweden, some of these differences in expenses are also due to possibilities for extra individualized skill-based training from commercial actors (Allison-Abunza and Woodburn, 2022; Wagnsson et al., 2024), but the role of commercialization in expenses in Norwegian organized sport is unclear.
Characteristics of the household, the type of sport and the type of expenses involved in sport are also related to expenses (Thibaut et al., 2017, 2014). Indirect sport expenses are rarely accounted for, such as expenses for family sport holidays and transportation. These costs create large income-dependent variations in expenses, while direct sport expenses such as membership and event fees are less income-dependent. While there is some evidence that a worsening of income is particularly detrimental to sport expenses in low-income families (Hjalmarsson, 2023), a qualitative study of low-income families in Norway also find that social integration, norms and networks create large variations in the amount of money and effort low-income families spend on their children's sport participation (Bakke et al., 2016). Below, we present two explanations that may help elucidate the social meaning of money further in relation to the research above.
One explanation addresses how the available economic resources and class position impact the social meaning of money. To elaborate on this point, we rely on Bourdieu's theory of class, and the related concepts capital, habitus, and social fields (Bourdieu, 1984, 1978). Bourdieu predominantly view class positions as determined by the amount—and relative composition—of economic and cultural capital. Economic capital is the dominant form and comprises fortune, income and material possessions. Cultural capital refers to mastery of the legitimate culture in a society and can be institutionalized as in educational qualifications and embodied in the sense of familiarity with—and easiness in—handling the legitimate culture. This ease is related to the habitus, the embodied dispositions to act in ways largely shaped through class position and upbringing.
Bourdieu's notion of field-specific competences in various sports is further relevant for our study. According to Bourdieu the most distinctive sports are characterized by a social closure due to “hidden entry requirements, such as family tradition and early training, and also the obligatory clothing, bearing and techniques of sociability” (Bourdieu, 1978: 838). One such distinctive sport in the French context is cross-country skiing with its aesthetic quality and lack of physical contact that is described as particularly suited to the habitus of the upper-class (Bourdieu, 1984). Football, where style is toned down and body contact foregrounded, aligns better with a working-class habitus (Bourdieu, 1984). Although not directly transferable to a Norwegian context where cross-country skiing and football traditionally had a broader class composition, Bourdieu's field logics are useful to understand the meaning of money in Norwegian youth sport contexts.
A second explanation, inspired by Bourdieu, emanates from Lareau's (2003) influential work on classed parenting: the underrepresentation of lower-income households in sport stems from different class-based parenting styles. A recent qualitative study from Norway (Eriksen et al., 2024) shows how class-based parental orientations can mould young people's sports- and health-related lifestyles: the upper-class parents in the study have a hands-on and health-focused scaffolding approach aligned with the concerted cultivation that Lareau (2003) describe as the ethos of the middle- and upper-class parenting. These parenting practices lead their children to embody healthy lifestyles, described by the authors as a rigorous health orientation. The working-class parents’ ethos of trust in their children and lesser health focus—akin to what Lareau (2003) describes as the accomplishment of natural growth-logic in the working class—make their children's lifestyles more arbitrary (Eriksen et al., 2024). These findings align with studies from Sweden (Wagnsson et al., 2024) and the UK (Wheeler and Green, 2014). Some studies show that working-class parents also see a high value in their children's sport participation, but more as a means of securing belonging and structuring than the cultivational project of the middle-class parenting (Eriksen and Stefansen, 2022). Parenting styles and class background may affect the type of sport expenses considered worthwhile, and the social meaning of paying for their children's sport participation.
Methodology
Our study is part of the research project Parental involvement in youth sports where we interviewed parents in 52 families. The parents were recruited through sport clubs and contacts in the researchers’ networks, some through snowballing. For the present paper, we analyze the 40 interviews with families who had at least one child between 12 and 19 years old who participated in organized cross-country skiing and/or football regularly. Prior to the interviews the project was evaluated and approved by SIKT–Norwegian Agency for Shared Services in Education and Research (reference number: 566930). All participants gave their voluntary, informed consent to participate in the study and for the interviews to be used in publications in anonymized form.
Twenty-three of the 40 families lived in the larger Oslo-area, the rest were from mid-sized cities in the southern and northern parts of Norway. Many families had more than one child involved in organized sports and several had children participating in more than one sport. Eight of the parents immigrated to Norway from non-Western countries as adults and two from Northern European countries. Most parents lived together except for four sole-providing mothers. We interviewed 24 fathers and 23 mothers in total. Seven of the interviews were with both parents present.
We adhered to a semi-structured interview guide, allowing flexibility to pursue particularly relevant topics. The interviews included three main topics: (a) How should, and how do, parents support their children's sports participation? (b) How much money do parents spend on their children's sports participation, and how do the parents estimate and give meaning to these costs? (c) How do parents value sport for their children, and for themselves? The interview guide included background questions about the parents’ familiarity with sport, income and cultural interests.
At the onset of the interviews the parents filled out a short questionnaire with the estimated costs for their children's participation in organized sport. The questions covered key topics such as diverse and detailed types of equipment, membership and training fees, expenses related to overnight stays, transportation to everyday practice and competitions, fees for competitions, and any possible private actors such as talent academies and private sport lessons. We did not include questions about costs related to treatment of injuries – a topic that might be more relevant in societies without a public health care system.
Data analysis
Overall, we were inspired by abductive analysis (i.e., Tavory and Timmermans, 2014; Timmermans and Tavory, 2012) to promote parallel development of theory and empirical results: We aim to develop a typology of the meaning of money in youth sport and understand the empirical contexts and relations that contribute to these various meanings.
Both authors 1 conducting a share of the interviews enabled us to compare experiences and reflective notes from the interviews along the way, which was the first step in the analysis. In the next step we identified behaviors and norms related to the meaning of money in sport. Through discussions about similarities and dividing lines in the interview data, we constructed a threefold typology of the meaning of money in youth sport.
In the third step of analyses, we looked for distinctive features that could explain differences in the way families imbue money with meaning. Inspired by other studies on parenting from a social class perspective (e.g., Gillies, 2005; Lareau, 2003; Stefansen and Farstad, 2010), we divided the parents in three groups based on information about their income, education and profession. Working-class parents have skilled or unskilled manual work or routine office work without higher education and income below average. Lower middle-class parents have jobs requiring typically 3-year college degrees and with average income, and upper middle-class parents have at least 4 years of higher education and are generally well situated economically.
Results
We begin with a brief presentation of family expenses in cross-country skiing and football followed by parents’ rationales for sport expenditure. Then we present our main contribution; a 3-fold typology of ways to relate to and spend money in youth sports: blind spending, concerned spending, and painful spending.
Estimating spending
We asked parents to estimate yearly expenses for their children's sport participation. A key finding that we will return to later in the analysis is that many parents struggled to estimate expenses in sport. The cost estimates for football varied between approximately 500 € and 5000 € per child. Although expenses were generally higher for older children, one of the most expensive estimates came from the mother of a 12-year-old, estimating expenses at around 5000 € per year. Her son was a skilled athlete selected for regional and national-level programs and enrolled in a private talent academy. The most sober estimates around 400–600 € came from families residing in working-class areas. Expenses in low-cost clubs were typically limited by enrolling in none or few tournaments and clubs deciding to finance tournaments and traveling expenses with a shared pool of club money earned through voluntary work.
Expenses in cross-country skiing were substantially higher. They varied between 1000 € and 6000 € per child. Most estimates were between 3000 and 5000 €. Many children participated in eight to twelve competitions per year and had five or six pairs of skis for different weather and disciplines (“classic” and “skating”) (Stefansen and Strandbu, 2025). The “necessary” expenses were usually understood as buying equally good-quality equipment and participate in the same competitions as “everyone else,” indicating a collective social and competitive pressure that parents adhered to. “Everyone else” often meant people in the club, local community and even nationally when children participated in national competitions. In football, “everyone else” were usually the team members.
For context, 5000 € reflect around 5% of the median “net annual income” (NEI) of a nuclear family household with children, and around 10% of the median NEI of single-parent households (SSB, 2025). Thus, the inroad of expenses in a family budget can be calculated based on 1000 € expense equaling a 1% inroad in a nuclear family household budget and 2% inroad in a single-parent household budget for the remainder of our paper.
Shared reasons to spend money on youth sport
Some of the views on children and sport were shared by most of the parents we interviewed. We begin with the broad picture: All parents in our study viewed their children's organized sport participation as important and part of a parenting project (i.e., Stefansen et al., 2018; Stefansen and Strandbu, 2025). They viewed sport as an arena for their children to develop healthy habits, learning to structure their days, socializing and aiding peers. This is also held among the working-class parents, aligning with Eriksen and Stefansen (2022). Many parents, especially from the middle-class, emphasized a strong spillover effect of these positive qualities into their children's everyday life outside sports: The most important thing is that she has a physical basis that she brings with her into the rest of her life. (…) I think working towards a goal and hopefully experience success is something you learn a lot from. To socialize, help others to succeed (…). I believe you can bring that into your working-life at some point down the road. (Interview 37, father, skiing, upper middle-class)
The quote reflects how many parents valued sport for their children, irrespective of the type of sport.
Parents also often viewed sport as part of a family project: You know, it's a family project. We find it really enjoyable, and the kids find it mighty fun that we have this family project going. (Interview 32, father, skiing, upper middle-class)
The family project was especially, but not only, visible in cross-country skiing (see also Stefansen and Strandbu, 2025). Most of the families’ spare time revolved around practice, preparation of equipment, transport, family skiing trips and traveling together to competitions.
Third, shared cooperation between parents in organizing the club's and their children's sport activity, led to sport being an important social community for many of the parents. One father who is an assistant coach for his son's football team reflects on his relationship with the main coach: We speak at least twice a day. *laughs*. When my wife hears us talking in the evening, she wonders what the deal is. Like, is he my boyfriend or what?! *laughs*. We’ve also emphasized arranging social gatherings for us in the coaching group. (Interview 19, father, football, upper middle-class)
Parents gained meaningful social experiences from being involved in voluntary work in the club, socializing at matches, discussing the sport activity with other parents in the club, and/or through overnight stays at tournaments.
The findings presented so far were common among the parents. In the next sections, guided by Zelizer's theory of the social meaning of money, we present the three main ways of dealing with money: Blind spending, concerned spending, and painful spending. Within each spending pattern, we show how parents justified and imbued money with meaning. We return to class-based differences in the discussion.
Blind spending
Blind spending was a recurring way of handling expenses in our interviews. “I don’t have a complete overview. Because I just buy and am done with it” (Interview 16, mother, football, working-class). The parents did not worry about how much they spent and, in some cases, mentally “shut their eyes” to avoid seeing the expenses. Uses of money in Zelizer's terminology trumped any need to limit expenses. A middle-class mother of a 15-year-old cross-country skier said: I’m not that adept to monitor expenses. I can’t be bothered to think about it *laughs*. I pay whatever it costs. As long as she wants to participate (…). It's not like we’re squandering money. But she gets what she needs and tells us she must have *laughs*. (Interview 9, sole-providing mother, skiing, upper middle-class) It's akin to a job. You need the right tools for the job. But it must be sensible. I’m probably above averagely interested in football, so if he gets an Arsenal-kit and things like that, I think that's neat. (Interview 19, father, football, upper middle-class) It's like ‘need to have, nice to have’ all the time. And we’re likely among those [parents] who buys a bit of the stuff that's ‘nice to have’. (…) I could’ve spent more if that would result in a better experience for the kids. (Interview 11, mother, football, upper middle-class)
The parents who referred to sport as a family project when talking about expenses, struggled to distinguish sport- or non-sport related uses, as in Thibaut et al. (2020). A dad estimated expenses for a football tournament: I’ve simply paid. We’ve spent the holidays to go with them to competitions – the whole family. But isolated expenses, just for the kids, it's difficult to say. I know the total expenses for the whole family. And that competition made an inroad in our budget of about 2100 € with travelling, overnight stay, food and all of that. (Interview 2, father, skiing and football, upper middle-class)
For some of the parents, spending money on their children's sport participation also meant an inherent value for themselves. In cross-country skiing, the social arenas for parents often revolved around a fascination and preoccupation with equipment (for the dads in particular), spending time together on overnight travels, and more generally skiing together while the children went to practice: We [the parents] socialize a lot when travelling, we gather for a glass of wine in the evening. If we’re in a school gymnasium and preparing skis together, we can chitchat and banter into the night. While the kids are fast asleep, we’re prepping skis for dare life. And that's fun! (Interview 7, father, skiing and football, upper middle-class)
An exception was a blind-spending sole-providing mother who did not have the time nor the interest to be involved. Due to already existing relationships with one of the heavily involved mothers, she was assured that her daughter was taken care of. The mother enjoyed the outdoors and did some skiing in her early youth. She could afford the expenses and were a blind spender, but for her the uses were not a family project. The purpose of the money was to provide her daughter with the necessary equipment and opportunities to travel.
The social value for parents in football often arose from partaking in overnight travels in addition to voluntary work. Parents who were able and willing to pay the traveling expenses were able to build relationships with parents in the football team while simultaneously spending more time with their children and sharing fun and valuable experiences together. The children of the parents from the above quote also played football: At a yearly tournament we stay overnight at the school. That's like a season highlight for the team. Many parents also think it's a lot of fun to join. (Interview 7, father, skiing and football, upper middle-class)
Most of the blind spenders were middle- or upper middle-class, with a solid household economy. In addition to spending money on important users—their children—they also valued the uses of money on sport—an activity they considered important for their children's well-being. Most of them were two-income families, and their expenses on sport were closely related to a family project or a valuable shared network for the parents.
Concerned spending
Concerned spending was the second recurring way of relating to expenses. This included spending what was considered necessary, but at the same time reflecting upon—and in some cases trying to restrict—the spending. Some of the blind spenders also adopted a more concerned view of expenses over the course of the interview. In Zelizer's terminology, they became more conscious of the uses of their money. For some parents, providing their children with the necessary opportunities involved considerations of sport participation as an expensive project. A mother criticized the father for spending 330 € on a pair of skis for their daughter: That's madness really. Yeah, the expenses are sky-high. It's equipment for at least 850 € (…), is it because you want your daughter to gain those last few seconds? Ehm, yeah. Through equipment for 850 €. Yeah *laughing* We get our money's worth? Yes, no, I don’t know. But yeah. No guarantee it helps. I guess I had a ‘soft-point’ just when it comes to that [equipment], so then, yeah.
(Interview 26, mother and father, skiing, middle-class)
Sometimes, the mapping of expenses was followed by a more subtle dissonance the parents felt a need to resolve. They struggled, and some even hesitated, to sum up the expenses. A football mum summed up the yearly expenses for her two sons’ participation in a football academy to be around 3000 €. A few minutes later in the interview she added that participation in the academy was not necessary to develop as a football player: By no means do you need to attend the academy to be good at football. You just need to be driven [motivationally]. Then you’ll manage just fine by practicing lots of football on your own out here on the grass. You just need that ball, which you can borrow from here if you need to. And then it's…255 € in training fee, and 130 € to the club I believe. So 385 € in total then. And if you buy second-hand football boots, you’ll easily manage to stay at 430 € per year. (Interview 11, mother, football, upper middle-class) We talk about like… ‘should we have a shame of skiing?’ Some of us dads landed on ‘no, we should not, because we think preparing and buying skis is really fun’. And it's not like we spend insane amounts on it. *brief laughter*. (Interview 32, mother and father, skiing, upper middle-class)
Some of the families were concerned spenders in another sense. They were more concerned about expenses for other families than themselves, grounded in awareness and worries about sport becoming less available for children from poor families. A father with high economic and cultural capital who was the organizer for the son's football team, felt responsible for limiting participation to no-fee tournaments to minimize expenses. He also emphasized possibilities to apply for economic support for families without sufficient means. Asked about the level of expenses in football he explained: They’re sky-high (…). Given the arrangements we have (economic support-arrangements), it's sort of viable. And if you hopefully have a designated team leader with my philosophy, you’ll at least manage to keep the expenses at the best possible minimum. (Interview 1, father, football, upper middle-class)
He used his position to restrict team-related expenses to cater for low-income families. The dad had previously been a social worker and frequently used sole-providing mothers with immigrant background, several children and restricted economic resources as example of the type of family situations he was aware of. We found a similar way of relating to expenses for a designated football team organizer with immigrant background. She was well-aware of financial problems for low-income families and tried her best to cater for them.
Concerned spending and awareness of costs were also grounded in the wealth and socioeconomic situation of sports clubs’ local communities: Many clubs are more ambitious than us *short laughter*. It's sort of like knowing which way the wind blows. Those who live here see the world more realistically perhaps. That many may be excluded if [sports] become too expensive and advanced. (Interview 21, mother, skiing, upper middle-class)
The concerned spenders had a more mixed class background than the blind spenders. Some families had limited economic resources; others restricted their spending based on moral concerns anchored in class-awareness or sport-for-all ideals. While most parents who spent blindly were highly educated, some of the concerned spenders had lower levels of education or occupations where they met people with diverse class or ethnic backgrounds. Especially among the concerned spenders with high education, awareness of variations in socioeconomic status contributed to strategies of cost-reduction for the whole team if the parents possessed influential positions in the club.
Painful spending
Some of the parents we interviewed were the opposite of “blind spenders.” They struggled to pay the expenses and needed to “see” the expenses and deal with them. A football mom restricted dialogue with her daughter—the type and number of overnight travels due to traveling expenses: They arranged the league game as a weekend trip. So they left on Friday, then played the league game on Saturday, and returned on Sunday. (Interview 3, mother, football, working-class)
Another example was a working-class, single, unemployed mother in cross-country skiing. She was a sole provider of her daughter and lacked sufficient resources to keep up with other families’ spending patterns and was critical toward the level and meaning of expenses: You don’t need new equipment all the time. It's viable to buy second-hand. That's what we have done. But then you’re going to travel, and that's not cheap. Then it's been like ‘it's not good enough to stay the night at schools’ for example. So things are marked by an elite logic, and that's hardly inclusive. Then it's like you need to have two parents and a high income to keep up, and that becomes challenging (…) It's very much like you need to take care of your child alone. It's very unsocial in a way. (Interview 5, mother, skiing, working-class) Have you met other parents who feel the same way? No, I haven’t. It's actually the same within orienteering as well. Many highly educated people with money. And they don’t understand, and you don’t speak up yourself when it's like that, you just don’t. So you try to keep up, but sometimes it doesn't work out.
The two interviews with the sole-providing mothers also show how restricting expenses affected the social value of sport for the parents. Compared to many of the blind and concerned spenders who value overnight traveling as a bonding experience between parents, the two mothers experienced traveling as an arena of social exclusion. They were unable to afford the social entry requirements—plane tickets and overnight stays being critical.
In contrast to the interviews above one of the painful spenders acquired extremely meaningful experiences from her son's football participation. She was a painful spender in the sense that she would not have been able to afford her son's football participation had he not had an elite contract covering most expenses. The mother was active in sports in her homeland and was intensively involved in her son's football participation. Despite low income and early retirement due to chronic illness, she was actively involved in finding ways to pay for her son and stood on the sideline “being completely crazy” with enthusiasm. We support as much we can to fulfil his dream. He is 15 and have age-specific contract now (…) so we don’t pay anymore [for training fees, club membership and equipment]. If DANA-cup [multinational tournament], we all join [the family]. Me and my husband and my girl – It's quite expensive on overnight stays and food and everything. Sometimes over 430 € just for us and then comes added expenses for him around 170, 260 € (…) yeah, that's with clothing and everything and beverages and boots. Football boots is the only expenses we have now. Everything [else] he gets from the club since he has contract. Before then, big expensive sum. (Interview 46, mother, football, working-class)
The painful spending patterns were—with one exception—exclusively low-income families, and several of them were ethnic minorities from Africa or Asia. Like the concerned spenders, the painful spenders were aware of class differences in sport and their position in this hierarchy. In addition to the problems of paying the expenses, they also derived less personal meaning from what they paid for, at least apart from providing their children with meaningful and enjoyable sport experiences.
Discussion
In this study, we explored parents’ views and practices regarding expenses in two organized youth sports, football and skiing, inspired by Zelizer's theory of the social meaning of money. We found that skiing is substantially more expensive than football: Equipment was complex and considered more important for performance, and traveling was often more expensive. Parents often traveled to competitions together with their children, and skiing relied more on parental involvement and their in-depth knowledge of the choice and maintenance of equipment, as also described by Stefansen and Strandbu (2025). The required spending in both sports varied according to competitive level, the club's admission fees, the type and number of competitions and tournaments, and the club's financial model of traveling and participation fees in these competitions—aligning with other studies that have measured expenses in sport (Allison-Abaunza and Woodburn, 2022; Deloitte, 2024). However, the current median estimates of expenses in Norwegian cross-country skiing and football (Deloitte, 2024) fall among the more sober estimates from the parents in our study. A possible explanation is the difficulties the parents in our study had in distinguishing differences between sport expenses and family expenses, combined with Deloitte (2024) asking the sports clubs, not the parents.
We were most concerned with the meaning of the expenses, and Zelizer's multiple monetary dimensions helped us see how money acquires value through the users, the uses, and their sources. Most relevant in our case is the question of the users and the uses, where one might argue that parents and their children are users of the household economy. The parents’ overwhelming willingness to spend money on their children's sport participation could be traced back to the cultural shift towards involved parenthood that has taken place in Western countries in recent decades (Coakley, 2006; Stefansen et al., 2018; Wheeler and Green, 2014). Although this form of parenting is most pronounced in the middle class (cf. Eriksen et al., 2024; Lareau, 2003; Wheeler and Green, 2014), parents across social classes see sports as a way to secure the child's wellbeing (Eriksen and Stefansen, 2022).
The view of sport as a positive and central activity in their children's lives made several parents more willing to spend money on sport compared to other commodities like expensive clothes and non-sport-related holidays. Providing their children with the best possible opportunities to learn from, master and enjoy sports and being included among peers influenced the willingness to spend money on their children's sports, as also found in a recent Swedish study (Wagnsson et al., 2024).
A second point to add to the uses of money is sport as a family project. Several parents valued shared interest in sport as strengthening family relationships. For some, the fascination with sporting equipment was an added value—especially for fathers of skiers.
An important finding in the interviews was that many parents did not know how much they spent on their children's sport, as also revealed by Thibaut et al. (2020). They considered expenses worthwhile irrespective of the costs, clearly illustrating that “even estimating the quantity of money requires a social accounting involving more than the purely rational market calculation” (Zelizer, 2017: 19). We named this way of spending blind spending. Another way of dealing with costs in sport was concerned with spending encompassing spending what is considered necessary accompanied by some reflections upon—and in some cases trying to limit—the spending. The restrictions were based on available financial resources, and in some cases, moral concerns like not wanting to contribute to an excessive sport. A third group, painful spenders, was far from blind and struggled to pay the expenses. Several of these families earned a median NEI similar to—or less than—that of a single-parent household (approximately 47,000 €). The ability and willingness to pay among these parents was also related to a personal interest in sport and their level of integration in the sport parent group.
In the next step of our analysis, we explored how ways of spending relate to the family's class positions. We found that the lack of precise knowledge about costs and investments among the blind spenders clearly reflects socio-economic positions. With few exceptions, the blind spenders were situated within the upper echelons of the class structure, with stable, high-paying occupations. Most families were double-income and were generally well off, earning at least the median NEI of approximately 98,000 €. Some had more modest incomes and means, however, but shared a strong sport interest that is also found in other studies of the upper middle-class (Eriksen et al., 2024).
Concerned spenders had a more mixed class background than blind spenders. Some families had limited economic resources; others restricted their spending based on moral concerns because they did not want to contribute to the excesses in sport or wanted to keep sport affordable to all children. The painful spenders were—with one exception—low-income families, and many of them were ethnic minorities from Africa or Asia. This class-anchoring of spending styles shows how economic resources affect the meaning of money.
Finally, we were interested in how the social dynamics within the specific fields of youth sport (football and cross-country skiing) may contribute to distinct class-structured relationships to expenses. We found that expenses, class, and sport-specific knowledge are interlaced: Sport-specific knowledge is a resource that impacts how parents spend money in sport. Even though all parents saw the value of sport for their children and shared the views about sport's contribution to their child's wellbeing and development as also revealed in other studies (Dorsch et al., 2021; Eriksen and Stefansen, 2022; Sjödin and Roman, 2018; Stefansen et al., 2018), the intensity and character of the parents’ involvement varied. Parents with sport knowledge often derived more meaning from their children's sport participation. Sport was an arena where these parents bonded with their children, they developed themselves as sport-specific support personnel, and often slid into the parental peer community. This held irrespective of their social class.
However, sporting experience and knowledge were more common in the upper-class echelons (i.e., Eriksen et al., 2024). Parents in the upper and lower middle-classes usually either had extensive sport experience or knowledge themselves, or they easily acquired it through the network of parents in their child(ren)'s sport club. Among working-class parents, the level of sport experience and knowledge varied, and they struggled to get social access to the sport community. Using Bourdieu's (1984) terminology, both class and sport experience brought social capital within the sport community. The parents spent money on a family project and on extending their own social circle in addition to their children's sport experience. For many of these families, sport became family life and thus most of their spending on sport was not considered solely as spent on sport. For the painful spenders who did not gain the same type of meaningful access through money spent on sport, sport expenses became imbued with ambivalence. On one hand, money bought meaningful sport participation for their children. Simultaneously, insufficient funds led to exclusion and otherness in a community that was not “for them.”
Limitations
Our study does not include parents who can’t afford or are unwilling to have their children in sports. This is a limitation as the parents we interviewed are part of the selected group who have children in youth sports. However, the complex social and monetary negotiations parents face within sport communities might also contribute to understand why some parents are unable or unwilling to pay for expenses related to sport. Another limitation is the lack of information from rural areas, where participating in sport is less expensive (through traveling is more expensive), and other distinctions regarding the meaning of money might occur.
Although we touch upon different levels and meanings of expenses in football and cross-country skiing, we have not done in-depth analyses of the differences between sports. Another article from the same data set has analyzed the ongoing social closure of cross-country skiing (Stefansen and Strandbu, 2025). Hopefully, other studies could explore different field-specific logics of the interplay between money, meaning, and other forms of capital in further detail.
Neither did we study in-depth differences in the meaning of money and other forms of capital between clubs in the same sport. Studies of how cost-driving mechanisms within clubs and sport systems affect the meaning of money in sport are important to further our knowledge of class-based differences in sport participation.
Conclusion
Zelizer's multiple monetary dimensions helped us explore how the meaning of money in youth sport is intertwined with parenting ideals, the role of sport in the family and available economic resources. We found this to be class-based also in a society where equality is highly valued and where the sport-for-all ideal has a high standing. In more explicitly class-divided societies, this perspective might have even stronger relevance.
Societal trends toward increasing inequality (Flemmen et al., 2022) as well as changes in youth sport towards more demanding parental involvement and increasing professionalization and costs (Strandbu et al., 2017) might also make the understanding and measures toward social inclusion more pressing tasks of the sports federation in the future. The most fundamental message from our analyses is that the same amount of money—that is, manageable or hardly noticed for two-income middle-class families—might be overwhelming for less well-off situated parents. Strong interest in sport and knowledge of sport are essential for lower-income families to spend the amounts of money necessary for a meaningful sport engagement for their children and themselves as sport expenses take up a significant portion of their household budget. This awareness should guide the organization of sport if the “sport for all” ideals are to be realized.
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
The authors are grateful for valuable contributions from research professor Kari Stefansen in conducting a share of the interviews and for valuable inputs from professor Ørnulf Seippel at several stages of the manuscript.
Data availability
Anonymized transcriptions from the interviews are not available for public sharing to ensure full confidentiality for the participants, particularly due to sensitive subjects about economy and family life.
Declaration of conflicting interest
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Ethical approval
The project was evaluated and approved by SIKT–Norwegian Agency for Shared Services in Education and Research (reference number: 566930).
Informed consent
All participants gave their voluntary, written, informed consent to participate. The interviews have been anonymized.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by The Norwegian Olympic and Paralympic Committee and Confederation of Sports (NIF), Norwegian Social Research (NOVA).
