Dear Editor,
Many people watch sports, both collegiate and professional. With such a high viewership of college, for a long time it was argued that college athletes should be paid. As of July 1, 2021, NIL Deals, or deals made with college athletes allowing their name, image and likeness to be featured in advertising and merchandising, were made legal after years of dispute. For decades before this, colleges were turning profits off of the athletes without them seeing a penny of the marketing done with their name.
With these deals being made legal, athletes are now able to enter into contracts with different brands that they wanted to be partnered with. Not only does this finally allow student athletes to be paid for their performances, it also opens up a new market for the athletes, giving them the opportunity to “go where the money is” and attend the college that will allow them to be paid the most, as well as giving them crucial financial knowledge and assisting lower income athletes. This paired with the transfer portal being opened in 2018 makes it much easier for athletes to go where they can take care of themselves and their families.
This does two massive things in the world of athletics and economics, it takes away monopoly power from the school of using athlete’s names likeness and images for their own revenue, and it opens up a labor market, where the better an athlete is the more money they are likely to make from these deals, which can help measure their performance. By taking away the monopoly power from the schools the athletes get the right to monopolize their own branding with different companies.
The athletes are then therefore able to bargain with different companies about how much they believe they should be paid based on their skill set, similar to how an employee may bargain with a potential employer during the interviewing process. By allowing this bargaining, the athlete is able to develop financial literacy. To actually engage in a deal with the company, athletes must undergo negotiation, and learn how to read contracts, which are both very important real world skills to have no matter if the athlete eventually goes on to the professional leagues, or goes into a field of employment. These abilities are crucial for athletes that do not go professional, especially if they go into a field of business, as they are then at an advantage when working with job contracts or business deals.
When talking with Erik Hansen, an ex-professional football player, he said that learning to sign contracts when he made it to the XFL was very confusing. If the law allowing NIL had passed earlier, he, like many other athletes, would have been able to go about reading their contracts easier, which could have helped some of those that were taken advantage of avoid that situation entirely. Finally, NIL deals are vital to athletes who come from low income backgrounds and are not given full ride scholarships.
These athletes may have at one time struggled with the cost of housing, and food, so allowing these deals helps these athletes not only take care of themselves but also their families. This also benefits the athletes by taking an enormous amount of stress off of them, as not only are they focusing on their education, but also their sport, while having the worry of paying for their school at the same time. Overall, the introduction of NIL has greatly benefitted student athletes as it allows them to be paid for their skills and the entertainment they provide as they become their own brand, learn more about the world of finance, and are helped when they come from low-income backgrounds.
