What started as a side gig teaching preschoolers for a poorly paid pro soccer player has grown into a global network of soccer education programs reflecting both parental and investor interest in youth sports. The idea, Soccer Shots, now grosses more than $100 million a year and, with private equity backing from Susquehanna Growth Equity, is seeking to become a dominant force in global youth sports.
The sales pitch: making things easy for parents and fun for their kids.
“You go out to where the children already are and provide a program that parents elect to have their child participate in,” said Justin Bredeman, CEO of Stronger Youth Brands, the parent of Soccer Shots.
The idea, he said on a video call, “was a masterstroke. We didn’t realize at the time how important the convenience factor was in this.”
Soccer Shots’ concept is simple: The company provides soccer activities at child-care centers, for church groups and at parks for kids ages 2 to 8. For child-care providers, the company provides a welcome option to fill out programming while for parents it offers a screen-free activity that gets their kids moving. For Soccer Shots’ owners, it provides a growing business that already makes millions of dollars in profit annually in rolling its program out to hundreds of franchisees.
The genesis of the company came in the late 1990s, when Jeremy Sorzano, one of Bredeman’s soccer teammates at Pennsylvania’s Messiah University, was a pro for the Charlotte Eagles, a team mired in the third level of the USL. Looking to make some extra money, he started offering soccer lessons to preschools, lugging the balls, cones and pinnies himself for midday activities. It did well enough that a year later Sorzano looped in Jason Webb, a teammate on both the Eagles and at Messiah, to expand the business.
Bredeman was at the time working for ubiquitous mall pretzel franchiser Auntie Anne’s, which led the trio to formulate the idea of franchising Soccer Shots.
Two decades later the idea is pretty much the same. Franchise owners go and pitch Soccer Shots to providers, often offering a free demo for kids who then go home with pamphlets to get parental permission to pay and sign up for a multiweek session.
“Once a kid can stand up and walk, they can kind of kick a soccer ball,” Bredeman said. “We’re able to appeal to the youngest age set in an appropriate way and a way that’s effective. Parents are sometimes in doubt that we can do something constructive with a 2-year-old, but we can.”
Despite Soccer Shots and its 300-plus franchises generating more than $105 million in system-wide revenue annually, according to a 2023 company disclosure filed in California, the business is also still largely a collection of people passionate about soccer, Bredeman says. Each franchisee pays about $37,000 for rights to a territory, roughly another $15,000 for training and equipment and then an ongoing 7% royalty on gross sales. Some owners use the franchise as a side gig—the smallest franchise generated $45,642 in annual sales—while others are building big businesses: Soccer Shots’ top owner made $4.58 million revenue from multiple franchises.
Even though sports instruction for tikes is a highly fragmented business, Bredeman and partners recognized that franchises in any business segment end up in periods of consolidation where some players get large and others wither away. The trio decided they wanted to be one of the consolidators and, at the end of 2021, sold a chunk of equity to Susquehanna Growth Equity (SGE) and renamed itself Stronger Youth Brands.
SGE is a division of the Susquehanna International Group, the massive Wall Street trading house that also operates SIGSports, which makes trading markets for sportsbooks.
“We had been looking at a number of franchise businesses in the youth space because we had done a lot of thematic thinking around core trends driving consumption in the U.S.—people get married later, have kids later, and those families are more and more dual income,” Kyle Squillario, who heads the business and franchising investment efforts at SGE, said. “What is really cool about Soccer Shots is they go where the kids are.”
The lack of a real estate component with Soccer Shots—the franchises always use someone else’s facilities—sidesteps paying premium rents for spaces that don’t really get used outside of school hours.
Soccer Shots also avoids less appealing business risks Squillario sees with investing in youth sports further up the age and competitiveness ladder. “I didn’t love the idea of picking winners and losers with teams or academies … [and] it’s like retention of the coach is a single point of failure in the business.”
For Squillario, who has also led investments for SGE into LUV Car Wash and College Hunks Hauling Junk, Soccer Shots remains pleasingly simple. “When my 5-year-old was 1-and-a-half, we started doing Soccer Shots,” he said. “You could see why the business was so successful, because it was no-frills in a lot of ways, but it was high impact. The kids loved it, and it was an outing, something to do on a Saturday.”
The concept also seems to have a lot of runway to growth, something Susquehanna’s investment helped with immediately. In 2022 they bought Little Kickers, a similar program started by an investment banker and mother in the U.K. 20 years before. “We had been looking to go international for a long time, but we felt like a bunch of Americans taking soccer to the rest of the world might not go that well,” Bredeman said.
System-wide financials for Little Kickers aren’t readily available, but they’re likely similar to Soccer Shots. Little Kickers has more than 300 franchises in some two dozen countries, including Canada. The top earning Little Kickers franchisee produced about $1.5 million annual sales, according to the Little Kickers website.
With both businesses, there is plenty of space for growing without acquisitions, notes Squillario. “Depending on geography and accuracy of data, we’re usually somewhere between 2% and 6% penetrated” in Soccer Shots territories. “There is a lot of opportunity in the markets we’re in to penetrate deeper.”
In addition, it’s possible Soccer Shots could expand up to older ages to serve kids, says Bredeman. “A lot of kids who are 8, 9, 10, they don’t want to play Division I soccer, they want to have a good time, but unfortunately they’re getting table scraps from the clubs, with coaches who don’t really want to be with that group of kids.”
More likely, though, according to both Bredeman and Squillario, is finding a new way to bring a sport or activity, like swimming or art, to where the kids are, while keeping technology and analytics at arm’s length, along with the inevitable competitiveness those tools bring out in parents.
“We’re not worried about people winning and losing—everyone gets a trophy,” Squillario said. “You could say it’s soft, but it’s 4-year-olds and 5-year-olds. I don’t want my 5-year-old crying at soccer practice.”
