IT SOUNDS like a good deal. As millions of students struggle to pay for higher education, hundreds of universities offer full scholarships to the lucky few applicants who are talented enough to compete in intercollegiate sports. Yet a growing number of critics decry this arrangement as exploitative. And on August 8th a federal court agreed, ruling that the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), a club of schools that sets the rules governing college sports, has violated antitrust law.

The case involves Ed O’Bannon, a former college basketball star who now works at a car dealership. In 2009 he filed a class-action lawsuit against the NCAA and EA Sports, a video-game company that used a thinly disguised version of him in a video game (the avatar and Mr O’Bannon are pictured). EA Sports paid a fat fee to the NCAA but nothing to Mr O’Bannon, because college players are supposed to be unpaid amateurs.

Not cricket

Claudia Wilken, a federal judge in California, found that the NCAA was colluding to restrain trade. She ruled that its ban on players being paid for the use of their name or likeness was illegal, and suggested that colleges establish trust funds that student-athletes could tap after graduation. The effect of this decision may at first be modest: it allows the NCAA to cap payments to players at a modest $5,000 a year. However, it sets a precedent that could shake up one of America’s most popular and lucrative forms of entertainment.

Foreigners are often startled when they discover how seriously Americans take college sports. The captain of a university soccer team in Europe is no more likely to be famous than the student who came top in a chemistry exam. In America, however, the top student athletes are stars, watched and cheered by millions.

Colleges set up the NCAA in 1906, at President Theodore Roosevelt’s behest, following a spate of on-field deaths and corruption scandals. American football and basketball now operate on a two-tier system. Colleges offer students a free education, plus room and board, to play for them. The best athletes eventually turn professional and make real money. But they cannot join the National Football League (NFL) until they have spent three years playing for a college team. For the National Basketball Association (NBA), they must be at least 19 years old.

The NFL and NCAA avoid competing with each other by divvying up autumn weekends, with college football games on Saturdays and the pros on Sundays. The “March Madness” college basketball tournament sends workplaces across America into a frenzy of small-time betting. The television contracts are juicy. Across all sports, college athletic revenues are $10.5 billion a year, more than the NFL generates. Less than 30% of that goes towards scholarships and financial aid for players. In contrast, professional athletes usually receive about half of their leagues’ turnover in salary and benefits (see chart).

The NCAA insists that, as amateurs, players cannot claim workmen’s compensation for injuries on the job, which are common and dangerous among head-clashing American footballers. It also bans universities from offering high-school athletes anything of value to enroll and demands that student-athletes perform reasonably well academically. But such policies tend to be honoured in the breach. Many athletes spend far too long training to have much time for classes. Some are functionally illiterate but somehow manage to turn in well-written essays, the contents of which they do not appear to remember. Academic fraud is rife. For example, an investigation into the University of North Carolina found that athletes were often packed into “no-show classes”. At the average member school in the NCAA’s five highest-grossing “conferences” (subdivisions), just 44% of men’s basketball players graduate within six years. Newspapers are regularly filled with other college sporting scandals, such as an agent who booked prostitutes for players at the University of Miami. Yet although NCAA member schools and their affiliates are the ones breaking the rules, it is usually players who suffer the consequences. Most student-athletes technically live in poverty, because their scholarships do not cover the cost of living beyond room and board and the NCAA bars them from signing independent endorsement or licensing deals. When the NCAA’s enforcement division gets wind of players trying to make ends meet by selling autographs or merchandise, or by accepting prohibited gifts like plane tickets home, discounted tattoos or free groceries, it hands down lengthy suspensions, which often cost athletes their scholarships the following year. For decades, college sports fans cheered for their alma maters without worrying that the best coaches earn millions of dollars while the best players live hand to mouth. But in recent years the NCAA has come under pressure from the media and the courts. In 2011 Taylor Branch, a civil-rights historian, wrote an article entitled “The Shame of College Sports”, arguing that for colleges to make millions from the unpaid labour of mostly black athletes carried “the whiff of the plantation”. Joe Nocera of the New York Times has dedicated dozens of columns to the NCAA’s abuses.

Full-court press

At the same time, several legal challenges are grinding through the courts. In one, a group of former athletes is suing the NCAA to receive compensation for concussions they suffered while playing. In another case, a labour judge recently approved a request by Northwestern University’s American football team to vote on forming a union. In March Jeffrey Kessler, a lawyer who has already won an antitrust case against the NFL, filed a new class-action suit against the NCAA seeking to overturn all restrictions on paying players. If the judge in that case applies the core of Ms Wilken’s logic, the entire premise of amateur college sports will be scrapped.

For now, the NCAA is digging in its heels. It plans to appeal the O’Bannon ruling. It insists that paying student athletes more than the cost of their education would ruin college sports and expose players to “commercial exploitation”, which is an odd way of saying “being paid for your labour”. It would take a determined goal-line stand for the colleges to resist the forces now ranged against them. By refusing to concede a few more yards, the NCAA risks surrendering a game-ending score.