Competitors Whose Sports Generate Significant Revenue Should Be Paid
There's nothing wrong with "amateur sports". But sports that make bank are not "amateur".
This week, the US Supreme Court will hear arguments in the latest case to challenge an NCAA “amateurism” rule. These sorts of cases date back at least 40 years, back to when the issue was whether the NCAA could limit the number of times the top football schools could be on television. They lost that one. Over the years, they’ve also lost cases on whether athletes can sell their names and likenesses as well. The NCAA’s record in court is like a typical mid-major school’s record in the organization’s namesake basketball tournament- the NCAA loses a lot of the time.
The new case involves whether the NCAA can cap the “education benefits” given to its athletes. If you take the logic of “amateurism” as a given, this position makes perfect sense. Suppose you were going to have an amateur bowling league, and one of the teams recruits a ringer, a bowling pro, not by paying him money, but by plying him with expensive gifts. Obviously that person isn’t an amateur and you could seek to exclude him from the competition.
But taking the logic of “amateurism” as a given is exactly the problem with the NCAA. As a matter of fact, it’s the problem with how we run a lot of very lucrative competitions in this country. The rule seems to be that so long as the competitors are young, it is OK to make millions or even billions of dollars off their labor and not pay them. (You might say this is the flip side of the economics of a lot of professional sports, where one of the side effects of collective bargaining is that over the hill athletes often sit pretty with overpriced guaranteed contracts, sometimes making more than the best players in their respective leagues. Being old is where it’s at, economically, in athletics.)
This is a very bad rule. The NCAA tournament, of course, is the absolute best example of this. Basically, the NBA, where people are paid to play basketball, has adopted an eligibility rule that requires players wait until they are 19 to play in the league. Since players graduate from high school at 18, this incentivizes them playing a year of college basketball at no pay, alongside athletes who aren’t quite as good as the top NBA prospects but who are also highly skilled, 18 to 22 year old college students. Because the NCAA tournament format is intrinsically interesting and makes for good television, and people develop rooting interests in colleges they did (or didn’t) go to, this enterprise makes billions of dollars. But the key is, the reason it makes billions of dollars is because of the players’ labor.
This is not, in any sense, an amateur enterprise. Even without paying the players, it is not like it upholds any of the ideals of amateurism. “Student-athletes” are routinely pulled out of their classes to play games in the middle of the week so they can be aired on ESPN and other sports networks which pay big bucks. Athletic apparel companies and rich donors pay huge amounts of money into college basketball; it’s just that the coaches (who are talented, but nobody pays to see) and college administrators (who may be nice people, but do nothing that could possibly be valued in the millions of dollars) get all the money. Because a lot of rich people are extremely invested in who wins the games, there are periodic paid athlete scandals, corruption scandals, recruiting scandals, gambling scandals, and even an occasional sex abuse scandal in college sports.
Meanwhile, the NCAA also runs a bunch of other college sports that really are amateur endeavors. Your typical college track and field program exists on a shoestring budget, for instance. And even in the “big” sports, small colleges come much closer to the amateur ideal- in NCAA’s small college divisions, there are no big television or sneaker contracts and games generate only small sums of money.
Men’s college basketball is not the only non-amateur amateur sport, though. College football works much the same way (except the NFL has a higher minimum age than the NBA, which spares us the spectacle of the “one and done” college athlete, who barely even attends a class before finishing basketball season).
There are also sports that are partially non-amateur. Women’s college basketball is a good example of this. Your typical women’s college basketball program is treading water economically. But the NCAA women’s tournament makes significant money, and it is not being shared with the athletes.
You can find these partially non-amateur sports everywhere. Your local Little League team is amateur, but the Little League World Series is a big moneymaker. An elementary school’s spelling bee is an amateur event, but the National Spelling Bee is not. An ordinary high school basketball game is amateur, but when ESPN comes out to air games live featuring the next NBA phenom, it’s no longer amateur anymore.
And that should be the governing principle here. If an event is carried on network television and generates significant sponsorship revenue, it should not be treated as “amateur”. The NCAA tournament is simply the most absurd example, where the event is literally generated billions of dollars in media rights fees. Obviously the bulk of that money should be paid out to players. But there’s no reason that adults who have zero to do with the entertainment value of little league or spelling bees should be making money off those competitions either.
I adverted to what I think the mental block is for most people, which is youth. People are uncomfortable with the idea of very young people having labor that is valuable. It smacks of child labor. But we already pay young entertainers. Hit boy bands get paid. Child TV and movie stars get paid. It’s really insulting that we have laws to protect a 5 year old who stars in a television commercial, but allow educational institutions to enslave and steal the salary of an 18 year old who is one of the best basketball players in the world. We should do better. Athletes whose sports are profitable should be fairly compensated, and the “amateur” label reserved for truly amateur (usually small scale) sports.