By: Mia Massimo
On June 10, 2025, Judge Claudia Wilken approved the landmark settlement in House v. NCAA, reshaping the future of college athletics. The agreement requires the NCAA and its member conferences to pay nearly $2.8 billion in damages to former athletes and permits schools to share up to 22% of athletics revenue directly with players. The settlement dismantles the foundation of the NCAA’s century-long amateurism model, which had previously barred athletes from monetizing their name, image, and likeness, and moves U.S. college sports toward a structure that increasingly resembles the professional systems that dominate the global landscape.
For decades, the NCAA’s rules prohibited college athletes from receiving any form of compensation beyond scholarships and limited stipends. That paradigm began to crumble in 2021, when the Supreme Court decided NCAA v. Alston, holding that the NCAA’s limits on education-related benefits violated antitrust law. Within weeks of Alston, the NCAA suspended its longstanding amateurism restrictions, adopting an interim policy that allowed student-athletes to profit from their name, image, and likeness (NIL). By 2024, the NIL industry was valued at over $1.6 billion, encompassing social media endorsements, brand partnerships, and collective-driven revenue streams.
But the rapid growth exposed regulatory inconsistencies: state laws diverged, collectives blurred the line between sponsorship and salary, and the NCAA’s enforcement capacity lagged behind commercial reality. The House settlement was not just a response to these tensions—it was an acknowledgment that the American college sports model could no longer sustain its legal or moral distinction between amateurism and labor.
Under the terms of the settlement, schools that opt into the new system will be permitted to share revenues directly with athletes, subject to Title IX compliance and internal caps. This revenue-sharing mechanism effectively formalizes what the NIL era had already made inevitable—the recognition that college athletes perform economically valuable work. Yet as the United States takes its first steps toward a semi-professional model, it also reveals how distinct its approach remains from the rest of the world, where athletic talent has long been treated as labor from the very start.
Outside the United States, sports systems are structured around professional clubs and academies rather than universities. In Europe, soccer institutions like FC Barcelona’s La Masia identify and train players as early as age twelve, providing stipends, education, and housing before signing them to professional contracts as teenagers. This model reflects a belief that athletic development is a specialized trade rather than an extracurricular activity. By the time European athletes reach college age, many are already earning professional salaries and managing commercial endorsements.
Basketball illustrates this contrast even more vividly. In the U.S., elite players traditionally pass through NCAA programs before entering the NBA draft, their economic value deferred until graduation or early departure. In Europe, however, teenagers routinely turn professional at sixteen or seventeen, competing in senior leagues such as the EuroLeague and earning six-figure contracts while still minors. The growing NIL marketplace has already begun to blur these boundaries, with American programs recruiting European prospects through lucrative NIL packages that rival professional contracts.
The Latin American model follows the same professional trajectory but reveals the risks of early commercialization. In countries such as the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, and Cuba, baseball academies operated by or affiliated with Major League Baseball teams sign athletes as young as sixteen. While these academies have produced some of the sport’s greatest players, they have also drawn criticism for exploitative labor practices, inadequate education, and limited oversight.
Collectively, these systems rest on an assumption foreign to U.S. collegiate athletics: athletes are workers, and athletic performance is labor. The NCAA, by contrast, has long maintained that student-athletes are students first, their participation framed as educational enrichment rather than employment. That distinction has come under increasing legal scrutiny.
In February 2025, National Labor Relations Board Acting General Counsel William Cowen formally rescinded a 2021 memorandum issued by former General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo, which had declared that college athletes should be treated as employees under the National Labor Relations Act. Cowen’s withdrawal reflected a broader rollback of Biden-era labor interpretations and underscored the continued uncertainty surrounding athlete employee status.
Additionally, after a regional NLRB director ruled in early 2024 that Dartmouth College’s men’s basketball players were employees and certified their union election, the players’ union voluntarily withdrew its petition in January 2025. The withdrawal effectively extinguished what had been the first certified bargaining unit of college athletes in U.S. history. Even so, the House settlement’s embrace of direct revenue sharing continues to blur the amateur–professional divide that once anchored NCAA policy, keeping alive the broader question of how the law should define athletic labor in a rapidly professionalizing environment.
While the House settlement aligns the NCAA’s financial structure more closely with global norms, it exposes a persistent tension at the heart of American sports: the collision between education and employment. Outside the U.S., athletic training and professional development operate largely independent of higher education, and compensation is viewed as a natural extension of merit. Within the U.S., college athletics remain tied to an educational mission that often masks the reality of commercialized labor.
For international athletes, that tension is even sharper. Roughly 12% of Division I athletes are non-U.S. citizens, most holding F-1 visas that strictly limit off-campus employment and business activity. Because many NIL deals qualify as employment for tax or immigration purposes, these athletes cannot fully participate in the new compensation landscape without risking their visa status. A few universities have attempted workarounds—structuring deals through foreign entities or conducting promotional activities when athletes return home—but those solutions remain legally precarious and financially limited. In practice, the House settlement may further widen the divide between domestic and international athletes, even as it brings the United States closer to international standards of compensation.
While European and Latin American athletes are accustomed to direct pay and contractual security, international students in the U.S. remain subject to immigration rules that effectively deny them equal economic opportunity. The Housesettlement, therefore, both narrows and exposes the gap between the United States and the rest of the world. It narrows it by institutionalizing athlete compensation, bringing American college sports closer to the professional models long established abroad. But it exposes the gap by revealing how many structural barriers—immigration limits, inconsistent state laws, and the absence of collective bargaining—still prevent parity.
Whereas a seventeen-year-old in Europe or Latin America can sign a binding professional contract and join a players’ union, a twenty-year-old international athlete in the U.S. may still risk visa violation for posting a sponsored video. By formally acknowledging that college athletes contribute to a multibillion-dollar enterprise, House forces the NCAA to confront that amateurism has functioned less as a principle than as a legal fiction. The decision marks a cultural turning point, one that brings U.S. college athletics into a global conversation about fairness, labor, and the future of sports.
But without broader reforms—on employment classification, visa access, and governance—college athletics will continue to occupy an uneasy middle ground, torn between its academic mission and commercial reality. For generations, the United States has tied athletic opportunity to education, celebrating amateurism as a defining feature of college sports. Whether House ushers in a more equitable and sustainable model, or simply marks the beginning of a gradual realignment toward global norms, its legacy will depend on how the NCAA and its member institutions choose to navigate this new professional landscape.
