My daughter plays on 2 teams, a travel team and a club team. For those not familiar with these, here's a brief summary:

Travel - team is made of of kids from the same community/school district, but a higher level of skill/competition than your basic youth/rec league, sometimes much higher. The top level Travel teams (like ours) are competitive with good Club teams. You can have players from outside of your community on your team, but the # of these "guest" players is limited. Coaches are from the community and are volunteers, lots of parent volunteers. We're fortunate that our travel team coach is a former college All American soccer player. Usually use facilities in the community, such as a soccer field at the local rec center.

Club - team is made up of kids from anywhere. Usually requires a tryout. Top level Club teams are typically better than top level Travel teams. High level of skill/competition, in large part because you can draw kids from all over, and because of the coaching/facilites. Professional coaches, paid staff, paid positions for parents as team managers, etc. though there are parent volunteers as well. Most clubs own very nice indoor facilities. Ours has a full size soccer field inside, which is 115 yards long x 74 yards wide, and there is room to spare inside of the building.

Travel is not cheap, but Club is more expensive. My daughter plays year-round with Club, and almost year-round with Travel. She enjoys them both. We enjoy Travel more because we know all of the kids and all of the parents. One of the nice things about her Club team is that 8 of the 18 players (including her) are also on the Travel team, which is an unusually high number of kids from the same community to be on a Club team. Once they get to high school, that will have to change, as Ohio High School Athletic Association only allows 5 players from the same high school team to play on the same Club team. We probably spend about $6k/year on soccer, between what we pay for the teams, plus buying shoes/equipment, cost of traveling, team parties, etc. It's worth every penny to us. It's helped her confidence, her fitness, her work ethic, and she's made a great group of friends.