Sports fan have grown understandably suspicious of the idea of “amateurism,” given how deceptively the term is deployed by the NCAA. Even Brett Kavanaugh seems tired of it, telling the NCAA’s attorney in this week’s oral arguments that: “It does seem… that schools are conspiring with competitors to pay no salaries to the workers who are making the schools billions of dollars on the theory that consumers want the schools to pay their workers nothing.” The idea that not paying athletes is integral to the NCAA’s product is just cynical bullshit used to justify an obviously unjustifiable system.
But is there a way to salvage the concept of amateurism from the corrupt and exploitive model of the NCAA? I ask this because of an article in Axios that tried to estimate what certain college basketball stars could be “worth” if they could monetize their name, image, and likeness; it came up with this ranking:
It may sound old-fashioned, but I think it’s totally reasonable to be unsettled by a list like this. Personally, it seemed to confirm the exact fear I wrote about last week, that certain NIL reforms would turn college athletes into glorified Instagram influencers. A system where Paige Bueckers is paid six-figures to hock Evian on TikTok is not really the Future I Want.
And yet the article is pitched in a triumphant way. The framing Axios uses, and the way I first saw the list on Twitter, emphasizes how well female athletes would do under the system—eight of the top ten earners in this system would be women. This is pitched as a victory for equity.
Looking closer at the list, though, you can see this comes at a steep cost. While people like Bueckers and Hailey Van Lith would earn good money, as you scroll down, the numbers dissipate. Caitlin Clark, who is 20th on the list, would earn ~$11K, suggesting that all but a few dozen players would earn under $10,000, or sub-poverty wages. Over 1,500 athletes played in the Men’s and Women’s Tournaments this year (to say nothing of the players who missed the cut), meaning this change would very little for over 95% of college athletes.
The reason the term “amateurism” rings so hollow is that college sports is so obviously a major business. The NCAA earns billions of dollars and has strict rules on what players can wear and drink, based on endorsement deals worth millions. So it’s disingenuous to suggest there isn’t a market for a college athlete’s labor.
But labor markets are also bad! Simply creating some “market” for athletes’ to get paid would simply recreate the imbalances and inequities that exist in other labor markets. It is tempting to look at the class of high-earners and celebrate its inclusion of women and Black athletes—the same way ExxonMobil and Goldman Sachs will try to celebrate the number of women and people of color in their executive suites—but that only obscures the much larger class of people who are failed by the system.
So is there a way to ensure that college athletes are paid for their labor, while still preserving a concept of “amateurism” that tries to reject the legitimacy of labor markets? I don’t know! But I can think of at least three principles associated with amateurism that, when taken seriously, could be useful for building a more just system.
1) Recognizing that these are students. The NCAA is always saying shit like this, and it always sounds like bullshit because obviously most students don’t fly to Indianapolis for three weeks in the middle of the semester to play basketball. But athletes often talk about the difficulty of balancing academics and athletics, saying that it’s the equivalent of working two full-time jobs. This isn’t that unusual under capitalism—many workers have to balance work with something else, whether it’s being in school or being a parent or just another job that provides necessary income. What if amateurism meant empowering athletes to prioritize what they needed to prioritize, without fear of losing their income or their status on the team?
2) Not over-commodifying the players. Just speaking personally, I would not want to have to assemble a mass of Instagram followers and sell them shit just to get paid. It seems perfectly reasonable to not want players chasing individual endorsement deals. It’s only when so many OTHER people are profiting off similar deals that prohibition seems unjust. Instead, why not simply pay them for the work they do on the field or the court?
3) Preserving team cohesion. Something that bothers a lot of people about the possibility of paying college athletes is imagining some kind of “free agency” for college students—it seems to undermine the point of having a college team. It would also create the same divide between stars and average players that exists in the professional realm. But allowing advertisers to bid on players creates the same divide, as the Axios list shows. What if college athletes were paid a flat, equal sum that did not vary widely between schools? This way you could limit the ability to bid on labor without eliminating compensation directly.
These are not real solutions, of course—the system is more complicated than this. But we should not let the NCAA’s bastardized version of “amateurism” define our terms. Nor should we accept the false choice between player exploitation and “the free market.”