College basketball’s top talents will earn seven-figure salaries next season, and most of the European players who are rushing over the Atlantic to cash in will be leaving behind five-figure salaries. Rick Osentoski Imagn Images
Misko Raznatovic went to his first Final Four in April. A few years ago, the trip to college basketball’s ultimate networking event would have been a waste of time for Raznatovic, the agent for Nikola Jokic, the three-time NBA MVP from Serbia.
Most of the young players on Raznatovic’s roster would never have considered coming from overseas to play for a university in the United States.
But over four days in San Antonio, he had 70 meetings. Next season, Raznatovic will probably represent 35 to 50 college players.
“It’s basically fair game for everybody now,” said Drazen Zlovaric, a former college player and coach who is the director of North American basketball for BeoBasket, the agency Raznatovic runs, which is based in Serbia. “Like the guys that you never think would come to college are actually coming to college.”
The reason is obvious: money. College basketball’s top talents will earn seven-figure salaries next season, and most of the European players who are rushing over the Atlantic to cash in will be leaving behind five-figure salaries.
“They can make in one season what they can make in half of their career by going to college,” said Avi Even, the former sports director for Maccabi Tel Aviv BC, who recently became the director of basketball operations for the basketball agency Octagon Europe.
Programs including Gonzaga, Davidson and St. Mary’s have actively recruited internationally over the last few decades. In recent years, more schools have explored their options overseas, but it was still difficult to persuade the best prospects -- particularly those connected to teams in the EuroLeague, the Continent’s highest level of competition -- to leave.
The traditional route for these players has been to start with a professional franchise’s youth program at an early age. The franchises employ coaches to work with them, often house and feed them in their teenage years and see the payoff when they eventually play for the top team. But in the last 18 months, permissive NCAA eligibility rulings, opportunistic agents and rising pools of name, image and likeness money have combined to open the floodgates.
International prospects from some of the top professional leagues in the world are about to become household names at programs including Louisville, Kentucky and Purdue. Raznatovic will represent four players on the Illinois roster alone, including point guard Mihailo Petrovic, a 22-year-old Serb who was a most valuable player candidate in the Adriatic League playing for KK Mega Basket, the professional club owned by Raznatovic’s agency.
The result is an increasingly global flavor to college basketball that figures to be even more noticeable in 2025-26.
“Name the five best players in the NBA, and look where they’re from,” Illinois coach Brad Underwood said. “I just think that we continue to follow that path, the NBA path, and then it trickles down.”
Referring to Luka Doncic, the Los Angeles Lakers guard from Slovenia, Creighton coach Greg McDermott said: “What would Luka have done as an 18-year-old given the opportunities that would be presented to him now? Would he be coming and playing a year of college? Who knows?”
Even when the NCAA loosened its restrictions on NIL rights in 2021, there was some uncertainty on how international prospects would benefit from the opportunity to make money. The F-1 student visa used by many college athletes coming from abroad allows international students to study in the United States, but they cannot work off campus. Schools like Kentucky found workarounds: The 2022 national player of the year, Oscar Tshiebwe, fulfilled NIL deals his visa would not allow while off American soil. International players can also make money by licensing their NIL rights to their schools.
Another uncertainty concerned whether players had lost their amateur status under the terms of their relationship with professional clubs in European leagues. To maintain NCAA eligibility, players can have received only “actual and necessary expenses” -- lodging, travel, meals, etc. -- and nothing further from teams they played for before college. Most coaches would have been hesitant to recruit a player like center Zvonimir Ivisic of Croatia, who started playing professionally at 16 and enrolled two years ago at Kentucky.
“He was really the guy that opened up the floodgates because nobody thought it was really possible,” Zlovaric said of Ivisic. “After that, man, it was like everybody wanted to come over.”
And then there was the belief that college basketball was not the best pathway for top international players’ development. Phillip Parun, an agent for Octagon, has often posed the question to college coaches: Which European players went to college and then made the NBA? He can list most of the recent examples off the top of his head -- Domantas Sabonis, Lauri Markkanen, Svi Mykhailiuk, Moritz and Franz Wagner, Jeremy Sochan, Killian Tillie.
Now compare that with the number of international players selected in the last 10 NBA drafts who did not go the college route: 92. (Thirty-four of those players have yet to play a minute in the NBA.)
Valentin Le Clezio, an agent with Wasserman, estimates that 60 to 80 college programs were represented at the under-18 European Championships last summer.
“When you watch a game before, there was only one or two guys on each team that were high-major players that were going to go to college,” Michigan coach Dusty May said. “Now the entire team is open to college if the situation’s right.”
Underwood said Illinois keeps a scouting database with just about every player in every age group overseas.
“Now with the money, everybody has interest,” Le Clezio said. “Everybody feels like we can get the best kids here.”
Bringing some of the best young international talent to college basketball is great for college basketball, but is it good for the overall health of the game worldwide? Similar to NIL and the transfer portal, this is a development the NCAA was not exactly ready for.
As far back as February 2024, representatives from the NCAA, college conferences, USA Basketball and FIBA have discussed how to create a clearer transaction process for players who are leaving teams in Europe to play college basketball in the United States. In the current framework, most players are able to get out of their contract because they can say they are leaving for academic reasons.
“The reality is they’re not going there for academic reasons; they’re going because they will get a nice chunk of money on top of a good basketball development,” said Thorsten Leibenath, the sports director for Ratiopharm Ulm in Germany.
It has been a disruption to the system for these professional franchises, which use their youth programs to develop their own talent. Omer Mayer, an 18-year-old guard from Israel, was one of those players. Mayer was the best young prospect in Maccabi Tel Aviv’s system. He started in the youth program when he was 12 and played in EuroLeague games each of the last three seasons. Even, the club’s former sports director, said Mayer was the “next face of the club” -- but last month he committed to Purdue.
Had Mayer left for another club in Europe or stayed with Maccabi Tel Aviv and eventually been drafted, his next club would have been required to pay Maccabi Tel Aviv for his transfer. The current rate for an NBA franchise is $875,000. Some franchises will choose to wait out a player’s contract overseas so that it is not required to pay the buyout, a “draft and stash” tactic especially popular for second-round picks.
Mayer was able to get out of his contract to go to Purdue by paying a small buyout, the amount of which was added to his agreed-upon amount with Purdue’s collective. If he does one day get drafted, Maccabi Tel Aviv will not receive a dime.
“This is where European teams struggle,” Leibenath said. “And this is where you would have to ask the question, why do we do this if we continue to not get any kind of revenue out of that or at least compensation? There’s nothing in it for us.”
Parun has proposed what he thinks could be the solution: The international club lends its players out, retains their rights and gets a small percentage of a player’s earnings while on loan, a system similar to the one soccer has internationally. Leibenath believes FIBA needs to be involved.
“In my eyes, colleges nowadays are run like pro teams,” Leibenath said. “They pay their players like pro teams. They make revenue like pro teams. If you consider them pro teams, it would make life a lot easier.”
It would also benefit everyone involved if the NCAA would adjust the wording of its requirement that only amateurs are eligible. As it stands, the organization has found it difficult to police the gray area.
“People know now I think even more so than they did obviously two or three or five years ago, if you can produce documentation that only shows that an athlete only received actual necessary expenses, that’s basically all you need,” said a former NCAA employee, given anonymity so he could speak with candor on how the process really works.
“If there’s no other conflicting materials or anyone that can go on the record that has any type of real evidence to show that the club did anything improper, then it’s just a matter of time getting through the system that that kid is eligible,” the former employee said.
Without subpoena power, the NCAA is rendered helpless in these cases. And why even try when college basketball players are now making money like professionals?
“Five years ago, none of these guys were getting eligible,” McDermott said. “There was no chance, but because of everything that’s happened in our sport and in college athletics, it’s really hard to stand firm I think on some of those reasons why guys wouldn’t be eligible that have signed pro contracts.”
The new challenge: how to determine how much college eligibility these players have. The current guide is that a player’s year in school is determined by his graduation date.
Once a prospect overseas graduates high school, he has a gap year and then he must start studying as his eligibility clock begins.
Purdue coach Matt Painter, who has served on the NCAA’s oversight committee and the National Association of Basketball Coaches board, sees an easy solution to the eligibility side. He has recommended to the NCAA that anyone college age should be eligible.
“Even if they’ve been a pro and they’ve signed, who cares now?” Painter said. “They’re all pros. Everybody’s getting paid in name, image and likeness. So what’s the difference in having a contract overseas?”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Copyright 2025
This story was originally published May 23, 2025 at 6:09 PM.