About
About Cleat & Cone
The parent's guide to youth soccer gear, organized by age and level.
Why this site exists
A parent signs their kid up for soccer and is immediately confronted with a set of questions nobody has prepared them for. Does a five-year-old need cleats? What is a size 4 ball, and is that the one? Why are there three kinds of shin guard? What does FG mean, and is it the same as AG?
Every existing answer is organized the wrong way round — by product, which is how a warehouse is arranged, rather than by the child, which is how the decision actually works. So a parent looking for “what does my eight-year-old need” ends up reading a spec comparison written for adults.
Cleat & Cone flips it. Find your kid’s age group and the page tells you what they need, in what size, and what to skip — with the league standards cited and an honest note on where spending more buys nothing.
Why level, and not age alone
Because the level bundles together everything that decides a purchase. The age group sets the ball size, the format, the pitch dimensions and how much running a kid actually does, and those together determine whether cleats are needed at all, whether cushioning matters, and whether there is a goalkeeper to buy gloves for.
Gear also maps onto level naturally rather than by our imposition. Ball size 3 is U6 to U8, size 4 is U9 to U12, size 5 is U13 and up. Shin guard sizes are set by the child’s height. Goalie glove sizes come from hand measurement. The products are already organized this way; nobody was presenting them that way.
Who writes it
Ryder M. — the hands-on owner behind Magoo Media Group, the publisher of Cleat & Cone. He researches and writes the site’s gear guidance himself.
We are going to be specific about what that does and does not mean, because the gap between the two is where most gear sites lose their credibility. It means one person reading manufacturer specifications, confirming products are currently sold, checking how sizing behaves on a growing foot, and citing league and safety standards to sources that can be checked.
It does not mean a coaching license, a playing career, a test lab or a panel of experts. We have not claimed any of those and we are not going to, because they would be easy to falsify and because the useful expertise here is organizational rather than athletic. The full method, including the limits, is on how we pick.
What is on the site
70 pages covering 62 products, organized two ways at once:
- By level — U6 first kicks, U7–U8 rec, U9–U10, U11–U12, U13+ travel and club, plus what actually changes between rec and travel.
- By gear — cleats, soccer balls, shin guards, backyard goals and rebounders, goalkeeper gear and team kit.
The site index lists everything in one place.
How it makes money
Through Amazon Associates links. When you buy something through a link here, we earn a commission at no extra cost to you. That is the only way the site earns, and it never decides the order of our recommendations — the pick that is right for the child wins, including when that pick earns us less.
The full statement is on our affiliate disclosure page, and a short version appears above the fold on every page that recommends something.
The publisher
Cleat & Cone is published by Magoo Media Group.
Get in touch
Corrections are genuinely welcome — a discontinued product, a changed size chart, a league rule we have described wrongly. Email contact@cleatandcone.com or use the contact form. How we handle corrections is in our editorial policy.
There is no phone number and no mailing address for Cleat & Cone — it is a national publisher rather than a storefront, and we would rather say so than invent one.