American college athletics constitute, in effect, the second-biggest sports league in the world (after the NFL), generating $19bn in revenue in 2024—twice as much as the English Premier League. Nearly all that revenue comes from American football and men's basketball. The system is governed by the NCAA.
Universities function as a farm system for the richest professional sports leagues, including the NFL, the NBA, professional baseball, hockey, women's basketball, golf and tennis. The revenue generated by top programmes subsidises other college sports. For decades the system was lucrative because the labour was free: athletes received academic scholarships but no salaries. The spoils flowed to coaches, administrators, commissioners and media conglomerates.
The University of Michigan's American-football stadium in Ann Arbor, known as the Big House, can pack in 115,000 fans, making it one of the world's most capacious. Michigan's football programme generated $150m in revenue in 2024, including television rights.
In 43 of 50 American states the highest-paid public employee is a university football or basketball coach. Texas A&M, the largest university in the country, is paying about $77m in severance over eight years to Jimbo Fisher, its former head coach, while handing his successor $7m a year. In 2023 over 60% of athletic-department spending fell into three categories: facilities, coaching salaries and pay for athletic-department staff. Barely 10% went to scholarships. Over the past two decades, athletic-department spending has grown by 244%, compared with a 113% rise in academic spending.
Some 70% of public universities across the top tier of athletic programmes use academic funds to prop up their athletic departments. In 2024 just 18 of 110 public universities in the top division reported athletic revenues that exceeded their expenses.
The system first cracked in 2019 when Gavin Newsom, California's governor, signed a law letting college athletes profit from their "name, image and likeness" (NIL), meaning they could earn money as social-media influencers and brand ambassadors. The NCAA fought the law, but the Supreme Court upheld broader student compensation and full NIL rights soon followed nationwide.
NIL has produced its own murky marketplace. Third-party "collectives" funded by boosters, operating like political super PACs, funnel staggering sums to athletes. Since 2022 the NIL fund for Texas Tech University has raised $63m. At Michigan Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, helped pry the top high-school quarterback away from Louisiana State University for a reported $10.5m over four years.
In June 2025 a federal judge approved a $2.8bn settlement between the NCAA and a coalition of current and former college athletes, compensating players for years of lost earnings. Each university may now pay up to $20.5m a year directly to its roster of athletes. The settlement allotted three-quarters of retroactive compensation to former football players, 15% to men's basketball, 5% to women's basketball and 5% to the rest.
On July 24th 2025 Donald Trump issued an executive order about "saving college sports", laying out interventions involving the distribution of athletic scholarships and the shenanigans of wealthy alumni.
How Title IX, America's gender-equity law for universities receiving federal funds, will shape the new order remains an open question. If the courts decide that revenue need not be shared equally between men's and women's sports, market forces could create vast disparities.
My darling wife was always glum. I drowned her in a cask of rum, And so made sure that she would stay In better spirits night and day.