By Aris Barkas/ barkas@eurohoops.net
The NCAA, until recently, didn’t pay student-athletes; however, with the new rules about NIL deals, this has changed.
With young players, especially from Europe, using the NCAA option as a professional alternative and no European clubs being in a position to give young players these kinds of contracts, FIBA decided to step in and try to regulate the landscape.
Most European clubs are getting low or no compensation at all for grooming the players, and as FIBA Secretary General Andreas Zagklis explained during the FIBA Mid-Term Congress in Bahrain, NCAA players should not be treated just as students anymore.
“These amounts of money that end up in the hands of 18-20-year-old players are welcome for them by their entourage. We’re happy for them,” Zagklis said. “At the same time, we need to acknowledge that this has stopped being an academic experience primarily for the athletes. The colleges in the NCAA are getting closer every day to being commercial entities or professional clubs.”
With this in mind, FIBA believes that it’s justified to require a Letter of Clearance for players outside the US in order to play in the NCAA.
Zagklis explained: “Our ecosystem is based on one principle — you can transfer as long as contracts are respected. Agreements must be respected. In order to transfer from one professional basketball institution to another de facto professional basketball institution, there should be a process, a Letter of Clearance”.
So it’s clear that FIBA wants to treat NCAA colleges as clubs, as Zagklis said: “There must be clearance from the exiting club and national federation, and there needs to be some safeguards of where the player is going: what the conditions there will be, what will be the availability for the national team, and what is the recompense for the FIBA ecosystem, including our clubs, our leagues, our federations and their members that have invested for someone who started playing at the age of 9, 10, or 11 and now ends up with a 7-figure check in the hands at the age of 18.”