MT240 Unit 4 Labor and Compensation Study Example

Where an $80 Football Ticket Goes: A Unit 4 Labor and Compensation Study of College Athletes Before and After 2025

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

MT240: Sport in Society

Unit 4 Labor and Compensation Study

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The university, its ticket breakdown and budget shares are composite and illustrative; court decisions and dates are real and cited; the sources cited are real.

The Ticket

The composite university plays in a major conference and sells about 62,000 football tickets a game at an average price of $80. Using the athletic department's published budget, the price of one ticket can be divided by where football revenue goes. Coaches' and staff salaries take the largest share, about $17.60. Payments on the bonds that built and renovated the stadium take about $12.40. Support for other sports, most of which lose money, takes about $19.60. Game-day operations, including security, ushers and lights, take about $9.20. Facilities and maintenance take about $8.80. Conference dues and athletic administration take about $5.60. And athlete scholarships, the value of tuition, room, board and books for the football roster, take about $6.80.

Seen this way, the athletes who produce the game received less of the ticket than the stadium's lenders, and about a third of what coaches and staff received. The comparison is not perfect, since scholarships also have value beyond their cost, including degrees that raise lifetime earnings, but it shows how the money from the game was divided.

Before 2021: The Amateur Model

For decades, college sports rested on the idea that athletes are students who play for the experience and an education, not employees who play for wages. The National Collegiate Athletic Association limited compensation to the cost of attendance and banned payments for an athlete's name, image or likeness. Coakley (2021) describes this amateur ideal as an ideology that served the interests of universities and coaches by keeping labor costs low while revenues rose with television contracts.

Garthwaite et al. (2020) estimated how football and men's basketball revenue was shared under these rules. They found that the money generated by players in those sports, who were disproportionately Black and from lower-income families, largely funded coaches' salaries, facilities and other sports whose athletes were more often white and from higher-income families. The ticket breakdown above reflects the same pattern in one budget.

The First Change: 2021

In June 2021, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in NCAA v. Alston (2021) that the association's limits on education-related benefits violated antitrust law. Justice Kavanaugh's concurring opinion went further, questioning whether the rest of the compensation limits could survive. Within days, the association adopted an interim policy allowing athletes to earn money from their name, image and likeness through endorsements, appearances and social media, starting July 1, 2021.

At the composite university, NIL income flowed unevenly. A starting quarterback might earn several hundred thousand dollars a year through local car dealers, a booster-funded collective and national brands, while most offensive linemen earned a few thousand dollars and many backups nothing. NIL money also came mostly from outside the athletic department, so it did not change the ticket breakdown.

The Second Change: 2025

In June 2025, a federal judge approved a settlement of antitrust lawsuits brought on behalf of college athletes (In re College Athlete NIL Litigation, 2025). The settlement required payments to former athletes for past restrictions and allowed schools to share revenue directly with current athletes, up to a cap of about $20.5 million per school in the first year, rising over time. It also replaced scholarship limits with roster limits.

The composite university chose to share the maximum, directing about 75 percent to football, consistent with football's share of athletic revenue. Spread across ticket revenue and other football income, direct payments add about $9.40 per ticket to what the players receive, raising the athletes' share from about $6.80 to about $16.20, close to the coaches' and staff share for the first time.

For the first time, the players' slice of the ticket is about the size of the coaches'.

Where the Money Comes From

The new payments must come from somewhere in the budget. At the composite university, the athletic department cut about $3.10 per ticket from support for other sports, eliminated two sports and reduced roster sizes in others, and raised ticket prices and donation requirements for premium seats. The rest came from new conference television revenue. That means part of the cost of paying football players falls on athletes in sports that do not generate revenue, a consequence critics of the settlement predicted.

The Title IX Question

Revenue sharing also raises a question the settlement did not answer: whether direct payments must be distributed in a way that satisfies Title IX, the federal law requiring equal opportunity for women in education programs, including athletics. Federal guidance on that point shifted in early 2025, with guidance issued and then withdrawn within weeks, and lawsuits from women athletes have challenged the settlement's distribution. At the composite university, directing three quarters of the money to football means women's teams receive a small share of direct payments, which could expose the university to complaints or litigation regardless of how the federal guidance settles.

What Kind of Work Is This

The two changes move college football closer to professional sport without making players employees. Athletes now receive direct payments tied to revenue, sign agreements that resemble contracts and can lose payments if they leave a team, yet they have no union, no collective bargaining and no employment protections. Coakley (2021) notes that the line between amateur and professional sport has always been drawn by those who control the money, and the 2025 settlement redraws that line without giving athletes a voice in where it falls.

Who Gains and Who Loses

Football players gain the most, especially starters at well-funded programs. Athletes in sports that are cut lose their teams. Coaches' salaries have not fallen, and in many programs they continue to rise. Stadium debt remains a fixed cost that must be paid regardless of how revenue is shared. The university's general fund is largely unaffected at major programs but faces pressure at smaller ones, which may struggle to share any revenue at all.

Conclusion

Following one ticket shows that college football's labor arrangement changed more between 2021 and 2025 than in the previous fifty years. Players now share revenue directly, but the arrangement still rests on court settlements rather than bargaining, and the cost has been passed partly to athletes in other sports. Whether the next step is employment status, collective bargaining or federal legislation, the ticket breakdown will show who pays for it.

References

Coakley, J. (2021). Sports in society: Issues and controversies (13th ed.). McGraw-Hill.

Garthwaite, C., Keener, J., Notowidigdo, M. J., & Ozminkowski, N. F. (2020). Who profits from amateurism? Rent-sharing in modern college sports (NBER Working Paper No. 27734). National Bureau of Economic Research. https://doi.org/10.3386/w27734

In re College Athlete NIL Litigation, No. 4:20-cv-03919 (N.D. Cal. 2025).

NCAA v. Alston, 594 U.S. 69 (2021).