d. God you are stupid. College is the only reason the WNT is successful. It is also the only reason that makes financial sense for a family to spend so much time and money on their daughter’s soccer odyssey. There is no “distortion.” There is only the free market working in glorious splendor, with clubs making money and families paying for the benefit they are seeking - college opportunity. There is only “distortion” when people start doing stupid things that try to disrupt the free market and make no financial sense. Like GDA making clubs and even USSF engage in operations that are guaranteed to lose money. Like creating a league that only works if Russian oligarchs are willing to throw away hundreds of millions of dollars.
I'm sure Mark Cuban, the Buss family and Robert Kraft would take exception to your characterization that all sports oligarchs are Russians and Middle Eastern princes.
You leave so much to choose from<<<sigh>>>, but I think most obviously here's a primer on college athletics and the lack of a free market. So, the United States is (almost) the only country in the world where university programs offer robust college athletics. Now, some might argue that the reason this is so is because international governments hand out free tuition for students and so wouldn't want to spend it on luxuries like sports, and therefore is antifree market. But that ignores that even in some private universities (like Oxford and Cambridge), the same course wasn't really followed in athletics which remained, even before mass government funding went into effect on the Continent, a largely amateur affair. It certainly has something to do with it, but it's not the entire story. And indeed, in the United States there is a robust market for college sports for gridiron football and basketball, but not the other sports, and certainly do not to justify the spend by colleges on those other sports which are not profit making centers. Moreover, it doesn't explain, even if you write away scholarships, why the colleges would consider athletics (other than football and basketball) in their admission decisions.
And so we get to it...the reason why the pull of college soccer exists, particularly for the girls, is because of government intervention. First, because of the government grant and student loan programs (at subsidized interest rates), the government has created a large supply of cash in which to finance amenities (everything from college spas to the latest computer centers). So colleges, rather than compete on price, compete on what ancillary programs they can offer students. It's why tuition prices keep rising at the rate they are rising. Second, because of the scholarship limitations imposed by Title IX, colleges are required to funnel some of that money into women's athletics and soccer (with its larger teams than gynmnastics or figure skating) makes a good target for that money. Third, because of the discrimination and affirmative action debates of the 70s and 80s, and because of government pressure towards principles of diversity and equality, schools have moved away in admissions from a strict testing-admissions based process (which BTW is the way they do it in Europe) and have settled on a more holistic approach...sports becomes a way they can cook the admissions numbers (which is also BTW which you got the Lori Laughlin admission scandal....it's a way to bend the admission rules put in place via government policies whether to favor the rich, minorities, or just interesting kids that make a great fit for the sports program). There are others, but government intervention has created market distortions, because otherwise colleges would likely only have large football and baskbetball programs and intramural for everything else. There are others, such as the government visa program which has created a large influx of foreign born students competing into the admission pool, but those are the big ones.
These artificial government interventions, in turn, have created a market for club pay-to-play soccer, which is geared largely towards creating college athletes instead of professional athletes. If soccer wasn't considered in admissions, and soccer scholarships were not offered, it is very doubtful that so many people would be willing to pay the fees some clubs are demanding. And indeed, players considering a professional career would have a more stark choice: give up soccer and go to college, or go directly into the MLS or Europe.
Your economic philosophy is really hard to pin down. On the one hand you rail against oligarchs, but then you support a closed ended crony capitalist cartel like the MLS (which is really just a giant classic pyramid scheme when it comes down to it....). Your claim to free markets is almost Trumpian, but some of what you spout would make you equally at home with Robert Reich or some of the other hardline technocratic pro-management left. But the short answer is in a truly free market, pay to play doesn't exist...and we can see it both on the university and professional level in one country: the UK which doesn't have club soccer (which is ironic considering how otherwise government controlled some other sectors are in the UK).