How a Toronto hockey league turns kids’ joy into an $8.8m cash cow

W alking into a Greater Toronto Hockey League (GTHL) arena, you’ll see fans, parents, and kids ready to take to the ice. At some rinks, where the city’s elite players compete in the world’s largest amateur hockey organization, you’ll also see corporate sponsors, agents, personal trainers, scouts and media.

As the NHL puts it, the GTHL is “Where NHL dreams begin”. Parents quit jobs, sell homes, move their families and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to ensure their children can play in the GTHL. For some of them it’s worth it: stars like Connor McDavid, Mitch Marner and John Tavares honed their skills in the GTHL before embarking on careers in the NHL that have made them multimillionaires.

The GTHL, whose players range in age from nine to 18, is the definition of high-performance youth hockey, but it is also an example of how kids’ joy can be exploited for profit. Making money from youth sports is neither new nor illegal, of course. But in the GTHL, the thirst for profit is particularly egregious.

A wide-ranging TSN investigation this month characterized the league as “a major industry that league officials struggle to police properly”. Money flows in and out of the GTHL, as adults fund – and profit from – what is, in effect, unpaid labor.

Many would dismiss such concerns. If the kids are enjoying themselves – and staying active – what is the problem? But scholarly consensus has long existed that high performance youth sport, including elite minor hockey, can be understood as a form of child labor, and thus a constraint on the fundamental right of children to be free of the adult obligation to work. While children chase their NHL dreams, their on-ice performance also produces money and prestige for parents,