Under the reserve clause system, a player was bound permanently to the team who signed him first.

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College athletes are much closer in their economic situation to baseball players in the days of the Reserve Clause prior to free agency.

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Thereafter, the reserve clause was replaced with free agency.

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But despite a lot of improvement since the bad old reserve-clause days, when players had no freedom at all to change teams, the market for major-league players is still not entirely free.

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