Growing up in Hawaii, Roman Wilson didn’t notice how a lot cash was in school soccer till his senior 12 months in highschool when he took a weeklong recruiting go to to the mainland. His first stops had been Cal-Berkeley and U.C.L.A. “Very nice facilities,” he thought.

Then he visited Michigan.

“Just the building alone that we get to be in every day is millions upon millions of dollars,” mentioned Mr. Wilson, a large receiver. “One of the biggest weight rooms I’ve ever seen. The training room is outstanding. Even flying planes to games — that costs a lot of money, too.”

At Michigan, the cash comes flooding in from quite a lot of sources: ticket gross sales from school soccer’s largest stadium that may pack in additional than 100,000 followers for each dwelling sport; payouts from the richest conference television deal; seat licenses; sponsorships; and donations from a few of the greater than half-million Michigan graduates who reside world wide.

It provides as much as what the college expects to be $214 million in athletic division income for this educational 12 months, making it one of many wealthiest applications within the nation. And that doesn’t embody millions more that are raised by booster-run collectives that funnel cash to athletes in alternate for his or her endorsement rights.

Washington, which performs Michigan on Monday night time within the College Football Playoff title sport, introduced in $145 million final 12 months, which was twenty fifth amongst public universities, in keeping with a USA Today database. Michigan was fourth.

The sport, which will likely be performed in Houston, comes at a time of dramatic upheaval for the uniquely American mannequin of school athletics.

The pressure between the enterprise of school sports activities and the holistic mission of upper training, which doesn’t exist wherever else, has by no means been larger. This is obvious within the creation of coast-to-coast conferences, lawsuits looking for employment standing for athletes or laying out antitrust expenses, and hints that tv riches could immediate soccer to interrupt away from the N.C.A.A., the governing physique for school athletics.

Increasingly, school soccer’s powerhouses resemble N.F.L. groups with a category schedule and homecoming.

So a lot so {that a} broad swath of stakeholders entertained what not way back may need been dismissed as a whimsical query, however that signifies a elementary shift in school sports activities: How a lot would Michigan soccer be price if it could possibly be purchased on the open market, just like the recently purchased Washington Commanders of the N.F.L. or Dallas Mavericks of the N.B.A.?

“I’d say at least a billion,” mentioned Gerry Cardinale, the founding father of the non-public fairness agency RedBird Capital, which owns the soccer membership A.C. Milan and a stake the Fenway Sports Group. “Four to five times revenue. $1.5 billion would make sense.”

Cardinale, in doing his back-of-the-napkin math, acknowledged that uncoupling a school soccer program from its college can be difficult. But the train underscored to him that school soccer is a uncommon commodity in sports activities: an undervalued asset.

Television contracts can be even richer if the conferences shopped their rights collectively, somewhat than competed in opposition to one different with the networks.

When Florida State initiated talks with private equity firms final summer time whereas it was exploring methods to lift the $130 million exit fee from the Atlantic Coast Conference, it confirmed how hungry some colleges are for capital.

‘The Only Professionalized Amateur Sport’

Of course, the cash chase underscores the underlying inequity of school soccer and basketball — that the windfall funds opulent services, ballooning staffs and coaches’ salaries that exceed $10 million, however just isn’t shared immediately with the athletes who generate it.

“One of the underpinnings of college athletics that makes it valuable, ironically, is amateurism,” Mr. Cardinale mentioned. “It’s the only professionalized amateur sport.”

Jack Swarbrick, the Notre Dame athletic director, described a widening spectrum between colleges that cling to a student-athlete ideally suited — serving to gamers do their finest on the sector and within the classroom — and ones that primarily license their marks out to a third-party enterprise masquerading as an athletics division.

“It inevitably can’t hold together in its current scope; it just can’t,” mentioned Mr. Swarbrick, who will retire later this 12 months. “I don’t know where that winds up, but it’s a dynamic tension that can’t be quashed.”

There are few locations the place that pressure is as heightened as at Michigan.

In the South, which has dominated school soccer over the past decade, the game might be the tail that wags the canine on campuses. Alabama, for instance, has used its football dominance underneath Coach Nick Saban to remodel the college. A string of nationwide championships lured extra out-of-state college students, who pay larger tuition, which has financed an upgraded college, which has raised the college’s educational profile, which attracts higher college students.

Michigan’s Rise

Michigan has lengthy been thought-about among the many finest public universities within the nation, together with the University of California’s flagships in Berkeley and Los Angeles.

The college’s ascent, practically a century in the past, got here alongside the state’s rise as an industrial engine for the United States after World War I, when it started attracting analysis expertise away from East Coast establishments, together with a younger scientist who was launched to finding out virology in Ann Arbor — Jonas Salk.

Many of the athletics division’s largest donors contribute way more elsewhere round campus. The Miami Dolphins proprietor Stephen M. Ross donated $100 million to the enterprise faculty that’s now named after him. The former Mets proprietor Fred Wilpon, whom the Michigan baseball and softball complicated is called after, has donated $61 million to fund a scholarship program for first-generation school college students. (Mr. Ross and Mr. Wilpon declined interview requests.)

The college “has a place in the imagination of Midwesterners,” mentioned Jordan Acker, a member of Michigan’s Board of Regents. “It’s placed physically in the heart of the industrial Midwest, 30 minutes from the Rouge factory, and yet is worldwide in its reach. What we tell ourselves and we believe is that this university we’ve built and nurtured is both unique and important. The idea of the elite public university is unique to America.”

Or as Ken Davidoff, a Michigan graduate and a former sports activities columnist for the New York Post put it: “We’re generally an arrogant breed. We have far better academics than Iowa State and have far better athletics than Yale.”

This high-mindedness has not insulated Michigan from the usual fare athletic scandal. The Fab Five basketball groups, cultural touchstones of the Nineties, had been discovered to have been paid by a booster. A era later, an Ann Arbor News investigation found athletes had received good grades for doing minimal work.

In 2020, scores of Michigan athletes came forward to say they had been sexually assaulted a long time earlier by a health care provider throughout bodily examinations, echoing related instances at Michigan State and Ohio State.

The most sensational story of this school soccer season was the uncovering of an elaborate, unlawful, sign-stealing scheme orchestrated by a soccer aide named Connor Stalions. That led to a suspension of the head coach, Jim Harbaugh, for the ultimate three video games of the common season. This bookended the three-game suspension Mr. Harbaugh was hit with at the beginning of the season for mendacity to N.C.A.A. investigators in a separate matter.

Not that any of this has tempered the keenness round soccer.

In reality, Michigan and its followers have leaned into the function of sufferer as simply as every other righteous group and fan base. In an indication of the occasions, a collective that helps Wolverines athletes is peddling “Michigan vs. Everybody” merchandise, T-shirts beginning at $45.

“I don’t see it creating shame for the university,” mentioned Andrei Markovits, a professor of comparative politics and German research at Michigan who has written books on international sports activities tradition. “All of this is excused if you win.”

It additionally helps that Mr. Harbaugh is a former star quarterback at Michigan. The athletic director, Warde Manuel, is one among Mr. Harbaugh’s teammates. And the lads’s basketball coach, the opposite high-profile athletic division place, is Juwan Howard, a cornerstone of the Fab Five basketball groups.

Colloquially, they’re known as Michigan Men. (There just isn’t believed to be an archetype but for Michigan Woman.)

“The Michigan Man is an elite person,” Mr. Markovits mentioned. “It’s the way you pronounce something, the way you behave. You’re not just crudely into sports. Nevermind that Harbaugh doesn’t care about the French Department, it bleeds into what makes Michigan special.”

Those many Michigan women and men could also be much more entwined with soccer as the faculty sports activities world wrestles with an unsure future. Michigan could not have the existential angst of many colleges about being left behind throughout an period that has the earmarks of consolidation, however there are questions on what income sharing will appear to be, the right way to fund Olympic sports activities and the right way to sustain with the Joneses.

“Are we moving to a place where athletic departments are run by the donors?” requested Bob Boland, a sports activities regulation professor at Seton Hall. “University presidents might tell you they already are. We’re in an interesting place here as the enterprise is spilling over its institutional walls.”