There is an ongoing debate in the literature concerning the effects of averaging out inhomogeneities (“backreaction”) in cosmology. Inparticular, some simple models of structure formation studied in theliterature seem to indicate that the backreaction can play asignificant role at late times, and it hasalso been suggested that the standard perturbed FLRW framework is nolonger a good approximation during structure formation, when thedensity contrast becomes nonlinear. In this work we use Zalaletdinov'scovariant averaging scheme (macroscopic gravity or MG) to show thatas long as the metric of the Universe can be described by theperturbed FLRW form, the corrections due to averaging remainnegligibly small. Further, using a fully relativistic and reasonablygeneric model of pressureless spherical collapse, we show that as longas matter velocities remain small (which is true in our model), theperturbed FLRW form of the metric can be explicitlyrecovered. Together, these results imply that the backreaction remains small even during nonlinear structure formation, and we confirm thiswithin the toy model with a numerical calculation.