  We study a variant of the ring of components of Hurwitz moduli spaces for
covers, introduced by Ellenberg, Venkatesh and Westerland in 2016 in their
proof of the Cohen-Lenstra conjecture for function fields. For $G$-covers of
the projective line, we show that the ring of components is a commutative
algebra of finite type. We therefore study it using tools from algebraic
geometry. We obtain a description of the spectrum, relating its geometry to
group-theoretical properties and combinatorial aspects of Galois covers. When
$G$ is a symmetric group, we are able to fully describe the geometric points of
the spectrum.
