New NCAA Eligibility Requirements Could Impact Top International Players

The guidance issued this month largely surrounds compensation and professional team involvement, but how it will be enforced is unclear.

The NCAA distributed new eligibility requirement guidance to member schools earlier this month. | Matt Pendleton-Imagn Images

New eligibility requirement guidance that could significantly impact top international talent headed to college basketball was distributed by the NCAA earlier this month.

The guidance, distributed May 8 and obtained recently by Sports Illustrated, lays out updated preenrollment eligibility requirements largely surrounding compensation and professional team involvement. How aggressively the requirements will be enforced is unclear, but they lay the groundwork for the NCAA to push back significantly on professional players in Europe and other top international leagues enrolling in college. 

In part, the guidelines state that prospective student-athletes who “entered an agreement with, competed on or received compensation from a team that participates in a league with minimum compensation that exceeds actual and necessary expenses” will not have their college eligibility reinstated. The document lists MLB, NBA, NFL, Premier League and WNBA as examples of such leagues, but other top basketball leagues globally could also qualify. 

“Actual and necessary expenses continue to be a factor in a prospect’s eligibility, but as part of that broader effort to update preenrollment rules, the NCAA also identified several international leagues in which participation by a prospect is likely to result in violations of NCAA rules and a loss of eligibility,” an NCAA spokesperson said in a statement to SI. “The Association is modernizing the rule book in several ways to ensure college sports are played by college athletes and not used as a fallback for professional athletes, and the age-based eligibility model now under consideration is designed to address many member schools’ concerns regarding eligibility.”

The EuroLeague, widely considered the top professional league in the world outside of the NBA, has a collective bargaining agreement with a minimum remuneration of €50,000 (approximately $58,000) net (post-tax) for first-year players in the league, almost assuredly exceeding the NCAA’s guidelines. In recent weeks, several active EuroLeague players committed to college programs for the 2026–27 season, including Quinn Ellis (St. John’s), Saliou Niang (LSU), Márcio Santos (LSU) and Mantas Rubštavičius (Auburn). Each agreed to seven-figure deals between NIL and revenue share with their new colleges, according to sources familiar with their recruitments. 

Player recruitments, such as Ellis and Niang, were buoyed by the fact that a number of EuroLeague players were granted college eligibility last season. That included elite young talents like Dame Sarr (Duke) and Ivan Kharchenkov (Arizona) as well as older pros like then-21-year-olds Elias Rapieque (Kansas State) and James Nnaji (Baylor) who had extensive EuroLeague experience. In addition, older players from other top divisions like 22-year-old Thijs De Ridder, who played in the Spanish ACB (considered the top domestic league in the world other than the NBA) also received NCAA clearance. That gave schools the confidence to make significant investments into similar players for the 2026–27 season—players whose eligibility could now be in doubt based on the updated rules. 

Arizona’s Ivan Kharchenkov was one of the EuroLeague players who was granted college eligibility last season. | Erick W. Rasco/Sports Illustrated

“Why would you do this midstream when there’s a hundred million dollars out on the street?” one head coach who signed an international player this spring said. 

Even players from smaller, less lucrative professional leagues might not be in the clear. For players who earn above actual and necessary expenses based on contracts required to be submitted to the NCAA, the guidance states that reinstatement will be evaluated on a “case-by-case” basis considering how long the player was receiving a salary above their expenses, the quality of the league they played in and other factors. Dozens, if not hundreds, of prospective men’s basketball players alone could require such a review. And for players who play on professional teams, years of eligibility could be docked from their ledger if they’re allowed to play at all. 

Earlier this spring, the NCAA also tightened the qualifications for what’s commonly referred to as the NGB waiver, which provided an avenue for older players to extend their eligibility clock by justifying delayed enrollment because the player was playing with their national team. That waiver is likely to disappear in future years if the NCAA’s age-based eligibility model is enacted later this year, but changes have impacted eligibility cases for a handful of prospective college players for next season already.

It’s still very early in the eligibility review process for the vast majority of the top international talent that has signed with college programs in recent weeks, so the practical impact of these changes is still unclear. But a return to a more stringent accounting of players’ pre-college earnings and subsequent ineligibility could wreak havoc on rosters throughout the sport, including plenty of the biggest programs in college basketball. 

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