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Updated September 10, 2025, at 1:00 p.m.

Harvard Athletics will begin its fall 2025 season with a hit to its revenue as the National College Athletic Association pays off a nearly $2.8 billion settlement with former college athletes who were unable to participate in lucrative brand deals over the past 10 years.

Alongside other schools outside the Power Five conferences, Harvard Athletics will lose up to 1 to 2 percent of its revenue over the next 10 years, according to an NCAA spokesperson. For Harvard, the loss would amount to approximately half a million dollars over ten years.

Harvard receives roughly $900,000 a year from the NCAA, according to publicly available tax filings. The money makes up a small fraction of the more than $43 million that Harvard receives in annual revenue.

Harvard Athletics spokesperson Imry Halevi declined to comment on how much funding Harvard will lose as part of the settlement.

The NCAA’s settlement came five years after the association was sued by Arizona State University swimmer Grant House and Texas Christian University basketball player Sedona Prince for prohibiting athletes from profiting off of the use of their name, image, and likeness in brand deals.

House and Prince alleged in their class-action suit that the NCAA’s longstanding ban on direct NIL payments to athletes was a violation of antitrust law. When the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in 2021 to require athletic associations to permit athletes to make NIL deals, the NCAA found itself under pressure — and eventually agreed to cough up billions of dollars in back pay over the next decade to former college athletes, including House and Prince, who played from 2016 to June of 2025.

Universities that chose to participate in the settlement will now be allowed by the NCAA to share NIL revenue with athletes but will face NCAA roster caps that limit the size of their teams. The Ivy League opted out of the settlement in January and pledged not to pay athletes directly.

But that doesn’t mean Harvard is unaffected. To fund the damages, the NCAA is reducing funds distributed to all Division I schools — including those which, like Harvard, opted out of the settlement.

The Ivy League’s hesitance to embrace NIL has already caused anxiety for Harvard coaches who have lost star players to schools that made it easier for athletes to receive compensation. Before direct revenue sharing became widespread over the summer, most schools paid athletes instead through private booster organizations, called collectives.

At Harvard, which never established an NIL collective, the absence of athlete pay drew concern from alumni about Harvard’s ability to attract and retain talent. Now, the expansion of NIL across the country could raise further challenges for Harvard teams’ competitiveness outside of the Ivy League.

Over the past two years, Harvard has lost a number of athletes to other schools that offer more lucrative NIL opportunities. In 2024, Harvard’s men’s basketball team lost both star freshman Malik O. Mack and junior Chisom Okpara to Georgetown University and Stanford University, respectively. And just last year, Cooper H. Barkate ’25 — a core member of Harvard football’s offensive team — made the decision to graduate early and complete his collegiate athletic career at Duke University.

Richard Kent, a sports lawyer and sports law professor, said Harvard’s recruitment may continue to take hits as, increasingly, athletes at other institutions are paid by their schools.

“Are we going to see an exodus from Ivy League schools in a lot of sports in March, April, and May? That’s the real question,” Kent said, predicting that the answer would be “yes.”

Halevi wrote in a statement that Harvard Athletics prioritizes both academics and athletics at the highest level.

“We emphasize competitive excellence alongside principled leadership, and that combination continues to resonate strongly with prospective student-athletes,” Halevi wrote.

The settlement comes with a number of additional changes that apply to all Division I schools, including ones that opted out of the settlement like Harvard.

Alongside the settlement come new reporting regulations for NCAA athletes as well. The NCAA launched NIL Go, a platform where athletes are required to report any deals that surpass $600.

According to Halevi, Harvard’s NCAA athletes will use NIL Go to report their earnings. But athletes in the College’s non-NCAA varsity sports — sailing, squash, and men’s heavyweight and lightweight rowing — will continue reporting their earnings to Harvard via the Influencer app, which also houses the NIL pairing platform where athletes can find deals.

But the regulatory landscape around athlete payments remains unstable, with ongoing litigation and intervention from the Trump administration.

With estimates suggesting that the majority of NIL revenue will go to a small subset of sports, including football, the practice could face challenges from women athletes who expect to be shortchanged. A group of female athletes has already contested the NCAA’s settlement with House and Prince on Title IX grounds.

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign law professor Michael H. LeRoy, a sports lawyer, said he expects that schools will see an increasing number of Title IX lawsuits around athlete compensation. Schools that spend more on football and men’s basketball — like those in the Big Ten and larger conferences — may find themselves under fire for inequitably distributing resources, LeRoy said.

On July 24, President Donald Trump signed an executive order mandating that schools, including Harvard, that received less than $50 million in athletic revenue during the 2024-25 athletic season “should not disproportionately reduce scholarship opportunities or roster spots for sports based on the revenue that the sport generates.”

—Staff writer Elyse C. Goncalves can be reached at elyse.goncalves@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @e1ysegoncalves.

—Staff writer Akshaya Ravi can be reached at akshaya.ravi@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @akshayaravi22.