New NIL and revenue-sharing rules in college basketball are luring top young pros from elite overseas clubs to U.S. campuses with more money, playing time, and NBA exposure.
The University of Virginia‘s men’s basketball team hasn’t won an NCAA Tournament game since it won the national championship in the 2018-19 season. After a bridge year under interim coach Ron Sanchez following longtime head coach Tony Bennett‘s retirement last year, the Cavaliers hired Ryan Odom from VCU in March. And in his first year as a head coach in a major conference, Odom recruited a pair of European players with significant top-league experience.
After four games, Belgian forward Thijs De Ridder leads the team in scoring after playing two years with Bilbao Basket in Spain’s top Liga ACB, while German center Johann Grunloh leads the Cavs in rebounds and blocks after playing in Germany’s top league a season ago. The 20-year-old Grunloh is currently ranked 65th on ESPN’s 2026 NBA Draft board.
Historic performance 👊
Thijs De Ridder recorded the first 20-point, 10-rebound double-double in a UVA debut since Chris Williams tallied 20 points and 10 rebounds against VCU on Nov. 13, 1998 @RidderThijs
🔹⚔️🔸#GoHoos pic.twitter.com/mhy94DM1E2
— Virginia Men's Basketball (@UVAMensHoops) November 4, 2025
This international trend is happening across teams nationwide. New NIL and revenue-sharing rules have elite European prospects leaving top clubs to join college teams for increased playing time, more money, and potentially more exposure as they look to get drafted into the NBA. According to one estimate, international players now make up 15% of D1 men’s rosters. American players who can’t make the NBA have a long history of traveling to Europe to begin or extend their professional careers and increase their earning power. Now, young Europeans are coming to the U.S. to give themselves a better shot at a lucrative NBA future.
“Agents are much more open to the idea of their clients coming to the States for college with some level of monetary compensation,” Matt Henry, a Virginia men’s hoops assistant coach, told Boardroom over the summer. “And a 19-, 20-, 21-year-old, 22-year-old would be valued more by a college program than an unrestricted age league in Europe.”
European prospects can be found up and down ESPN’s draft board as the basketball globe has dramatically shrunk. Instead of playing against 30-year-olds in the EuroLeague for a paltry salary, Italian guard Dame Sarr left FC Barcelona for Duke and its one-and-done draft factory. Washington big man Hannes Steinbach exited the German Bundesliga to play the lead role for the Huskies after starring for his national team in the finals of the U-19 World Cup. Last year, BYU recruited Russian guard Egor Dëmin from Real Madrid, and he was drafted eighth overall in June by the Brooklyn Nets.
Twin Croatian big men Tomislav and Zvonimir Ivišiċ played for years at Montenegrin club SC Derby in the Adriatic League before departing for Illinois, where Tomislav is now a legit NBA draft prospect. The Illini under head coach Brad Underwood have developed a strong European pipeline, with Lithuanian point guard Kasparis Jakučionis having been drafted to the Miami Heat this past June and Montenegrin big man David Mirkovic joining Tomislav in this year’s starting five. Now, roughly a quarter of the NBA is from outside the U.S., making the NBA dream seem more attainable than ever for international prospects.
Tomislav Ivisic, Illinois 7-1 C, 22 y/o
-PnR screener specialist: 30 3PTM on pops, 77% on rolls
-36% on 154 3PTA. Shoots easy ball at 7-1
-Effective mix of strength, footwork touch for low post
-Awesome passer, IQ/quick processing evident
-Translation questions around… pic.twitter.com/aokiYJ8J2e
— Jonathan Wasserman (@NBADraftWass) October 3, 2025
“NIL has opened up the floodgates,” ESPN college basketball analyst Fran Fraschilla told Boardroom, “because when you pay a kid $750,000 to come to college from Belgrade, it’s probably the most money in some cases these kids will make in their entire lives. It’s like the gold rush of the 1840s and 50s to California. Agents who would never, ever send their kids to the NCAA are now making more money at Illinois and Virginia than they ever would at a team like Cedevita in Croatia.”
Scouting internationally is a vital part of Odom’s recruiting strategy at Virginia. Henry made trips to Switzerland and Serbia over the summer, though scouting service and traditional word of mouth also help source talent. He had heard that De Ridder and Grunloh were looking to come to the U.S. for college and connected with scouts and agents who helped him reach out to their inner circles.
“Just like any recruitment domestically, you’re trying to develop a relationship with them and see if your values align,” Henry said. “It’s not that different than what you’re trying to do when any kid joins your program as a freshman from Newport News, Virginia, or a fifth-year transfer from Los Angeles.”
De Ridder and Grunloh came over at the same time as the House Settlement brought revenue sharing to college student-athletes, guaranteeing direct payments to players from schools for the very first time. But in addition to the visa complications placed on U.S. immigrants under the current administration, there’s a large gray area about how much F-1 international visa holders can be paid, if at all. Different schools may have a greater appetite for risk or a tighter or looser interpretation of F-1 rules that could impact their ability to recruit overseas.
“We currently have chaos in power conference college athletics,” Fraschilla said. “Nobody knows what the rules are. When it comes to NCAA rules regarding the transfer portal and NIL, they vary from state to state. There’s nobody in charge of telling us here’s how the rules are going to break down over the next five to 10 years. So until that happens, we still are in the Wild West phase.”
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Players who went straight from high school to the G-League and didn’t make the NBA are now being recruited by college basketball teams despite having played professionally in the US. As long as the NIL and revenue-sharing money is better than what they’ll make elsewhere, European pros like De Ridder and Grunloh are going to continue to immigrate to college hoops. And that’s worrisome for these European teams, which are now seeing an exodus of their promising young prospects.
“From talking to friends in Europe,” Henry said, “there’s concern that all of their best young prospects are going to get gobbled up into the college system and that they don’t know what the unintended consequences are for their domestic basketball and development when all of a sudden their best players is being outsourced to the us. And I say that without a judgment of it being bad or good, but it’s going to be different.”
Fraschilla believes there will still be a plethora of international players coming to college basketball who have already played professionally and will have a leg up on most American college freshmen, who have largely only competed in high school and AAU competitions. But until there are concrete guidelines on revenue sharing, NIL deals, and F-1 visas, we’ll still be living in a largely lawless gray area in collegiate athletics as a whole.
“We just don’t know where the finish line is with regarding what a professional athlete is and what an amateur is,” Fraschilla said.
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Shlomo Sprung
Shlomo Sprung is a Senior Staff Writer at Boardroom. He has more than a decade of experience in journalism, with past work appearing in Forbes, MLB.com, Awful Announcing, and The Sporting News. He graduated from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 2011, and his Twitter and Spotify addictions are well under control. Just ask him.