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CalMatters is suing the second UC campus — UC Berkeley — in as many months to force the institution to release financial data on how much its student athletes earn from name, image and likeness deals.
The suit, filed last week in the Alameda County Superior Court, is nearly identical to the one the nonprofit news outlet filed against UCLA in August. In both cases, the campuses refused to divulge how much they pay athletes after a national legal settlement last year that permits U.S. colleges to compensate their athletes directly.
“We are reviewing the complaint and are going to decline comment at this time,” wrote Janet Gilmore, a spokesperson for UC Berkeley, in an email Sunday.
The payments are a key way campuses recruit student-athletes — and have risen dramatically. The commission responsible for managing so-called NIL funds in the U.S. cleared more than $227 million in July and August, almost double the amount last year. Campuses can direct up to $20.5 million to student-athletes. At UC Berkeley, that pool of money is made up of athletics revenues, philanthropic funds, and “some campus funds,” the school’s chancellor, Richard Lyons, wrote last year.
“UC Berkeley has not produced records sufficient to show how those public funds are being distributed,” the suit alleges. It argues that state taxpayers are entitled to learn the names of players universities pay and the teams for which the players compete.
CalMatters spent almost a year seeking the data from UC Berkeley. It filed numerous California Public Records Acts requests to public universities across the state. Several campuses offered paltry data in response. Others, however, produced at least partial records, indicating that the
payment records and contracts the newsroom seeks are public records, the lawsuit said.
For example, UC Riverside reported that it provided its male athletes about $200,000, including multiple payments to the men’s basketball team, plus $70,000 for its female athletes.
A Congressional Research Service paper noted that the new name, image and likeness payment era raises questions about federally mandated sex-based fairness in university sports.
Nationally, the overwhelming majority of Division I sports programs lose money, a federal report said. UCLA and UC Berkeley’s athletics programs were in the red in 2024-25, despite using their endowment or general fund dollars to subsidize their budgets.
“Every single dollar that the university allocates is taxpayer money, whether it’s donated or not,” said independent expert Andy Schwarz, a partner at the law firm OSKR who specializes in sports economics, in an interview for a previous story. “It’s like if you have a bathtub and say the money on the right is public and the money on the left is private, but it’s all bathwater, swirling around.”
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