The real bill
Academy fees are just the entry line. Boots that don't last a season, a second kit, tournament entries, the odd physio — it adds up quietly. We're noting what it actually costs, month by month, so nobody starting out is surprised.
Nobody sits you down and adds it up — the fees, the boots he outgrows, the tournament entries, the fuel. And underneath the money is the other currency: time, and kilometres. This is the ledger, kept honestly.
Academy fees are just the entry line. Boots that don't last a season, a second kit, tournament entries, the odd physio — it adds up quietly. We're noting what it actually costs, month by month, so nobody starting out is surprised.
The 5 a.m. starts, the cross-city runs to training, the tournament weekends the other side of town. Some weeks football is mostly a driving job. What the map doesn't show is how much of it we'd do again.
Two kids, two schedules, two working parents and a fixture list that lands late. Fitting it together — and who covers which run — is its own weekly puzzle.
A last-minute pair of boots the night before a final, a torn kit, a tournament you hadn't budgeted for that turns out to matter. The small unplanned ones are where it really shows.
Still being writtenThese are starting points, not conclusions — the specifics, the stories and the numbers get filled in as we live them.