Professor Steven Bank on college soccer’s future in the wake of the House v. NCAA settlement

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With the “House v. NCAA” settlement sparking uncertainty about the future of college soccer, we’re checking in with Steven Bank, Professor of Business Law at the UCLA School of Law. Bank is also an avid soccer fan and has been involved in the game at many levels: player, youth coach, referee, club administrator and soccer dad.

His UCLA School of Law courses include “International and Comparative Sports Law” and “Law, Lawyering, and the Beautiful Game.”

SOCCER AMERICA: The “House v. NCAA” settlement stipulates that the NCAA will pay nearly $2.8 billion to former college athletes who were denied NIL (Name, Image, Likeness) opportunities before July 2021. Will any of that go to soccer players?

STEVEN BANK: The short answer is that most soccer players will receive very little. The vast majority of the damages settlement is earmarked for specific injuries to football and basketball players relating to not receiving compensation for video game or broadcast revenue.

Some soccer players who received third-party NIL payments after they were permitted and also played before they were permitted may be eligible for a lost opportunities fund, but most soccer players are likely only eligible for the 5% of the $600 million additional compensation fund part of the settlement that is earmarked for participants in DI sports other than football or basketball and only if they received a partial or full scholarship.

Depending upon the number of participants in all these other sports and the number of claims filed, the amount the average individual soccer player might receive isn’t going to be more than a couple of hundred dollars and it could be substantially less.

Moreover, the damage settlement is currently under appeal on the grounds that it constitutes gender discrimination under Title IX for allocating the overwhelming amount of the funds to participants in male sports. So, right now, back-pay damages are paused and the whole allocation formula could change.

SA: Going forward, the settlement allows schools to directly pay athletes, to share up to $20.5 million per school per year with players starting 2025-26. How will this impact men’s and women’s soccer? Are only football, men’s basketball and women’s basketball players going to receive compensation from their schools?

STEVEN BANK: Schools are permitted to decide how they allocate the funds and that is likely going to evolve over time.

In theory, a school could allocate the money equally among all athletes, but in practice, they will probably allocate most to football and basketball and a few other popular and successful sports on their campus and a small amount would be left for the other sports. 

Purdue, for example, announced that $300,000 would be set-aside for non-revenue sports to retain or recruit high-level athletes and the remainder would go to football, men’s and women’s basketball, and volleyball. Kansas announced that it was including women’s soccer among seven sports that would receive the vast majority of the revenue share.  I expect that there will be other schools that will elevate their women’s soccer team to that group too because of their success and popularity and to equalize the payments between men’s and women’s sports. 

SA: The NCAA will no longer maintain sport-specific scholarship limits. Will that decrease scholarships available in men’s soccer? Women’s soccer?

STEVEN BANK: Some schools, such as University of North Carolina and Texas A&M have already announced that they will fully fund all roster spots, which would obviously increase the scholarships available in both men’s and women’s soccer.  

Other schools have not made such commitments and they may make those decisions on an ad hoc basis depending upon the needs and priorities in individual sports.

For less well-off revenue share schools, there’s a chance that the revenue shares would be paid in lieu of scholarships, which could result in a net decrease in scholarships in men’s and/or women’s soccer. Players might be worse off in that situation since the revenue share payments will be subject to income taxation, while scholarship amounts are exempt.

SA: I assume Title IX makes men’s soccer more vulnerable?

STEVEN BANK: The current gender discrimination litigation over the allocation of the back-pay damages may help shed light on how all payments under the House settlement will be treated for Title IX purposes. That said, if revenue sharing is subject to Title IX and there is no intervention from Congress or from the Administration in terms of enforcement efforts, the payments to the football team would have to be offset by a large amount of payments to women’s sports teams and any non-revenue men’s sport would only make that disparity more challenging.

SA: Do you foresee massive elimination of non-revenue sports programs?

STEVEN BANK: Cuts are already happening to some extent. Since the House settlement was introduced last year, dozens of sports have been cut, most notably in tennis, swimming, track and field, and men’s volleyball.  Some have cut portions of sports, like diving or field events.

I think the House settlement is a bit of a scapegoat for schools that are also facing  the Trump Administration’s cuts to federal research grants and threats to deny visas to international students, the threats to student loans under the Budget Bill, the looming demographic cliff, and the financial hangover of the pandemic, but I don’t think you can ignore the financial pressures colleges are under to “keep up with the Joneses,” so-to-speak, in athletics. 

SA: There are already robust college club sports conferences and national championships (run by NISRA). Might college club sports grow in stature?

STEVEN BANK: I do think that is a possibility. In soccer, I could see U.S. Soccer’s involvement with the recent announcement of the formation of a College Soccer Committee blossoming into the conversion of many college soccer programs to club status and entering into leagues under the U.S. Soccer umbrella and potentially participating in the U.S. Open Cup.

That could happen in other sports as well that had active national sports governing bodies. Rugby is an example of a college sport that has largely existed outside the NCAA system with the help of its governing body. It could reduce the expense problem if sports weren’t tied to football-centric leagues focused on TV rights that had teams flying around the country rather than playing the schools in their own backyards.

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SA: Why are college coaches concerned about the roster-size reduction? It seems like they’ve much larger than needed at 30-plus. Twenty-eight players seems plenty.

STEVEN BANK: In soccer, part of that is connected to the complaints (mostly on the men’s side) about the compressed fall schedules. Injuries are part of all sports, but they take on added significance when a relatively minor injury causes a player to miss a third of the season because the schools have to play so many games each week to fit them all in.

In an average season, you may need 32+ players to be sure you can hold a full field scrimmage involving at least 22 players during a mid- or late-season practice.  If you’re aiming for 28, on the other hand, you might fall short some years and have 26, which is reduced to 18 through attrition or illness/injuries by late season and pretty soon you are left with a short bench, which only increases the risk of injuries as more players have to play full 90s.

Part of that, however, may be connected to the revenue needs of their university. If you’re a coach and you have 28 players and they are all on full scholarship, the university will consider your team to be a net drain on the campus operating budget.  You may produce happier alums who may give money down the road, but that’s long after the current administrators are gone. If you can have a roster of 35 in which 15 are on scholarship, then you’ve brought 20 mostly full-tuition players to the university. Your value to the school is greater in that situation. Plus, you’ve created a situation where there’s more competition at practice and more opportunities to run different kinds of drills where everyone gets more touches on the ball.

STEVEN BANK: For schools in DII and NAIA that offer scholarships, the removal of the DI scholarship cap hurts them, but the reduction in roster sizes helps them. The cascade effect from the latter likely helps all of the sub-DI divisions as more players of higher quality become available in their division, but that assumes a “DI or Bust” player will continue playing rather than quitting the sport.

From a prestige perspective, many DIII schools (particularly high academic ones) are better known than DII or NAIA schools, so kids who are squeezed out of DI and could make the finances work may be more likely to view DIII as the primary alternative to DI.  

The House settlement and its de facto employer-employee model may also help DIII sell its unique status as the one division in college sports where you can truly be a student-athlete. There’s a world in which the House settlement leads to the breakaway of revenue sports from the NCAA and non-revenue sports all basically become levels of DIII without (athletic) scholarships, without extensive travel, and with rules to ensure the student in student-athlete is given equal billing.

SA: What’s the significance of D3 college athletic programs signing deals with FloSports streaming?

STEVEN BANK: This is the counterargument to my response above. As DIII schools start signing streaming deals for their games, the line between them and DI sports starts to blur just a bit.

At this point, the streaming payments are basically just like charging tickets for their friends and families to attend games, which some DIII schools/sports have done for years, but there’s some fear in the DIII world that it is the camel’s nose under the tent for the monetization of DIII athletics. I think that complaint mostly comes from older alumni who don’t realize that this is already happening in youth soccer, where kids travel all over the country to tournaments that are streamed with services like Veo, but it is something to be wary of in the future.

For now, I think the FloSports contracts that leagues are signing reflects the reality that small liberal arts colleges are facing their own financial headwinds that are smaller in size, but no less serious, than the ones DI universities are facing with the House settlement and the advent of revenue sharing.

SA: Do you imagine the changes in college sports will impact the USA’s youth soccer industry, which is fueled much by college dreams?

STEVEN BANK: That’s probably more likely to occur in girls soccer, where college remains the dream for most players and the number of women’s DI programs made it largely realistic for strong players. The question is whether the House settlement’s roster limits will lead more girls to pursue DII or DIII schools or whether they will quit soccer altogether rather than play something other than DI.

For boys soccer, professional academies have been the driving force for youth soccer for a while.  Some obviously still view college as the pinnacle, but typically that only occurs after they have been pushing along the elite pathway and get a wake-up call somewhere along the way. The best male players have long given up college when a pro team called and I don’t think the amount of money available for revenue sharing in men’s soccer is going to be anywhere close to even the paltry wages they might get under a MLS Next Pro contract.

SA: There’s been an increasingly major presence of international students in college soccer. Just one example, the 2024 NCAA Division I men’s champion Vermont started seven foreign players in its final win over Marshall, which started 10 foreigners.) Is there any way for you to predict how the Trump administration’s move to limit international students will play out for college soccer?

STEVEN BANK: There are so many obstacles to the Trump Administration’s policies, both from the legal side and from the political side, that it’s hard to make grand predictions. There are definitely hard-liners on immigration that would like to end student visas for all international students and not just athletes or soccer players — and those hard-liners don’t have Trump’s short attention span or tendency to bend his views to the political winds. 

That said, I think the most immediate effect of these policy moves is to chill international students and their parents from considering coming to the U.S., for fear that they could have their visas revoked at any time or be unable to leave the U.S. during breaks for fear that they wouldn’t be able to come back. It probably won’t affect current students and maybe not new recruits, but it could leave a lasting negative impression that affects future classes.  

SA: Does the House Settlement impact foreign college athletes? Has or will NIL impact  foreign college athletes?

STEVEN BANK: Normally, foreign students cannot earn money in the U.S. under a student visa except under certain very limited circumstances. That seems at odds with the kind of money they might get in some of the sports (e.g., basketball). Currently, the favored workaround is characterizing the revenue share as royalty income from the licensing of their intellectual property, rather than income from employment since they won’t be classified as employees. That may work for NIL payments, but revenue sharing seems to go beyond that.  The argument hasn’t been squarely addressed in the courts, though, and doesn’t quite work under existing tax or immigration law. Right now, this is one of the many loose strands in the House settlement that could unravel and bring down the whole system if someone decided to pull hard on it. 

SA: Anything else you’d like to add?

STEVEN BANK: The only thing we can really be certain of is that this is the beginning, not the end, of the legal battles over the structure of college sports.

Not only is the settlement ripe for attack under Title IX, as discussed above, but unless and until athletes are declared employees, allowed to unionize, and both sides engage in collective bargaining, it will be ripe for further antitrust lawsuits by future athletes who are not bound in any way by this settlement. That’s why the NCAA and schools and conferences have pushed so hard for a legislative solution that includes an antitrust exemption, but the money in DI revenue college sports is so large, it may be hard to put the genie back in the bottle.

• Steven Bank, Professor of Business Law at the UCLA School of Law, comments on sports law on his @ProfBank X account.

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