Here's what colleges spent on men's soccer last year

Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.

Earlier this summer, I combed through the hundreds of itemized budget reports in our Extra Points Library to break down the size of the operational budgets for postseason baseball and softball teams. That performed well, so we also crunched the numbers for men’s and women’s basketball.

I get requests all the time to do the math for other sports. Today, I thought I’d tweak our methodology a bit and give you the data we have for college men’s and women’s soccer.

First, let’s talk about what this data tells us…and doesn’t tell us

The data that I am reporting comes directly from each school’s itemized FY24 MFRS Report. While every NCAA school in D-I and D-II has to file one of these reports, since the NCAA doesn’t actually make them public, I am only able to get the information from schools that are compelled to share it with me via Open Records Act requests.

That means I can’t get data from schools like Denver, Xavier or Wake Forest, because those are private schools. There are also a handful of public schools that don’t have to share these reports with me, like Pitt, UCF and Delaware, because of quirks in their state laws or how their athletic departments are organized.

Even with those restrictions, I can still obtain records for well over half of the D-I membership, enough for some strong samples.

The numbers that I am reporting here are the Total Operating Expenses reported on the MFRS Report. That includes institutional spending on stuff like coaches, travel, nutrition, scholarships, staffers, equipment, and more. It does not include money spent via revenue sharing (which didn’t exist in FY24), nor does it include any revenue that athletes made via NIL (brand or collective-based). I can’t FOIA that information at scale….yet.

Finally, and this is something I should have fixed in the previous newsletters, but this data is from Fiscal Year 2024, the most recent financial data available. The college sports fiscal year runs from July 1 to July 1, so the data I have would actually be from the 2023 season, not last year’s season. Confusing, I know.

So for this spreadsheet, your national champion in men’s soccer is Clemson, not Vermont.

Confusing? Sure, but that’s accounting for you.

Here are the top spending Men’s Soccer programs from FY24. I tried to change things up and get data for as many programs as I could, rather than just ones that made the NCAA Tournament. This is also why this email is not including data on women’s soccer. I have this data, but I’ll have to share it in a newsletter next week, because Beehiiv is already sending me flashing warning messages that this newsletter is too large for your Gmail account.

Anyway, here’s the men’s soccer data I have:

More data after the jump:

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