This may cause you to audibly laugh out loud -- but I'm not a lawyer......so I don't know how this fully works but I would guess that it has more to do with not being paid at all -- and outright banned by these entities who were later sued, and lost, in federal court over this topic. So I think if your employer denied you pay for X amount of years, you can in fact sue for back wages.
They weren't employees of the NCAA. They were college students playing a sport willingly and being compensated with free tuition, room & board, meals, clothing, etc. This is the most pathetic lawsuit I've ever heard of.
But that's not what the courts have ruled recently (which is how we got here). Appeals court rules NCAA athletes may qualify as employees.
More importantly to this lawsuit - they were blocked by these organizations from profiting off their own images while those organizations profited off their image (and continue to).
Courts haven't ruled in the slightest in regard to former athletes. They already played knowing full well what they were and weren't allowed to do, courts can't retroactively pay players when they were amateur athletes.
I guess we'll see -- this is the first challenge of its kind. It's not about knowing what they were and weren't allowed to do, it's about if the organizations at the time had the authority to do that while also profiting off of them (and I think the answer is no because they've already lost that court case). So then the question becomes, can former athletes college damages for that (already ruled illegal) rule that prevented them from compensation?
That's the thing though - they were already compensated. They signed for what they got as a compensation package for playing in college. The rule changed, too bad. As it's been discussed, ruling in their favor would essentially open the floodgates for any person who wasn't paid as much for a position years ago that someone now is paid. They're being excessively greedy without realizing the damage they're doing. Thousands upon thousands of athletes played college sports without getting paid for it.
Am I wrong?
I'm not a lawyer either but I know how precedence works.
Which was deemed illegal by the courts. A pretty big distinction to point out.
It’s never right to be mean.
From my understanding is the NCAA is still selling stuff using their images.
I think that is the only argument really that a court could possibly side with. Maybe they can get $1 like a lot players did for O’Bannon case