§ Legal · Transparency
How we make money.
Last updated · 2026-05-23
The short version
SoccerSkills is free for families. Always. Some of the gear, books, and product links inside our blog posts are affiliate links, which means we may earn a small commission if you buy through them. The drill catalog itself is never affiliate- driven, and the recommendations are products we would tell a friend about whether or not a commission existed.
How we make money
The product is free for parents and kids forever. We have not taken venture funding and we are not building toward a paid tier. The bills get paid through:
- Affiliate commissions on recommendations. If we write about a soccer ball, a training rebounder, or a youth-strength book inside a blog post and you click through and buy, the retailer pays us a small percentage. That commission costs you nothing extra.
- Future possibilities like sponsored coach collaborations or partnerships with reputable youth sports brands. None of these exist today, and none of them will retroactively put current family accounts behind a paywall.
What we have explicitly ruled out: display ads inside the product, selling family data, paid placement of videos in the drill catalog, and pay-to-rank on the operator review queue.
What an affiliate link looks like here
Every blog post that contains affiliate links opens with a one-line disclosure at the top of the article. Individual links are marked with the rel="sponsored" attribute as required by Google's spam policies, and the end of each post repeats the disclosure where it's easy to miss the one at the top.
We do this even when the FTC technically would not require it (for example, a single passing mention) because parents deserve to know which links pay us back and which do not.
The recommendations themselves
We only recommend products we have actually used or evaluated for our own kids. If something is named in a blog post, it cleared the same bar as a drill in the catalog: would a parent recommend this to another parent without anyone paying for it?
We will not write a post primarily to chase an affiliate commission. If you ever see a recommendation here that feels like a pitch instead of a real recommendation, tell us at /contact and we will look at it.
The drill catalog itself
The drill catalog (the sessions your kid actually does) is and will always be free of affiliate influence. Drills are curated by the operator (a parent) based on safety, age- appropriateness, and quality. No YouTube channel pays for placement; we do not run a sponsorship pipeline into the catalog. The trust signal is the product.
Specific programs
When this page goes live we expect to participate in retailer-run affiliate programs for soccer gear, training equipment, and youth athletic books. Specific program names will be added here as accounts get set up. As of the date at the top of this page, no affiliate accounts are active yet.
Questions
Reach us through /contact. You will get a real reply from the operator, not a form letter.