Matthew Syed is 100 percent correct and this is a great article.
Tennis Australia Chief Executive Craig Tiley believes that the Australian Open prize money should rise from the current $55 Million to $100 Mil within the next five years.
Interesting Craig.
I wonder how much of that projected $100 mil is actually going to go into the pockets of the people who are putting on the show in relation to the 'people' who are benefiting from them ??
We trust you will do the right thing Craig, considering your 'extensive' tennis background.........
the times
Give tennis players a fairer share of riches
Novak Djokovic is right. Players deserve a bigger slice of the revenue of professional tennis. They should dissolve the ATP, create a new union and fight for themselves. If they fail to do so, they will only have themselves to blame for the fact that so few players make ends meet and most retire without enough money to retrain for a long retirement, let alone buy their own home.
Make no mistake: tennis is one of the toughest sports on the planet to make a decent living from. I remember going to the Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy in Florida a decade ago and noting tennis courts stretching to the horizon, with passionate kids on each one and determined parents watching on. “It doesn’t get tougher than this,” Bollettieri told me. “Everyone has a dream.”
Across the United States and South America, that dream is alive in thousands of young minds. In Asia teenagers devote themselves to the ambition of becoming the next Serena or Roger. In Europe tennis remains a huge sport, not least in the east, where stars from Slovenia, the Czech Republic, Croatia and Serbia inspire legions of young people to devote themselves to a game with an authentically global reach.
Those who make it to senior level may be described as the lucky few, but that is an overstatement. Unless you make the top 150 or so, you are on the cusp of a dream that may never be yours. Thirty-five weeks are spent living out of a suitcase, hustling for training partners and sleeping in low grade hotels . That’s 35 weeks of battling with one’s own sanity and the doubts of loved ones in the hope of making that final step into the grand-slam events, the game’s great amphitheatres.
Dan Lobb, a close friend, devoted his childhood, his adolescence and his twenties to the game, and earned virtually nothing. Tim Patience, a fine coach at a club near where I live, who had many of the weapons needed for the very top but lacked that final ingredient, earned precious little too. Dustin Brown, who dazzled the world with his victory over Rafael Nadal at Wimbledon in 2015, economised for his first three years on tour by travelling, sleeping and cooking in a camper van.
Much of the response to Djokovic’s intervention on Monday, where he called for players to fight for a larger share of revenues, has focused on his career earnings of £80 million. How could he be so greedy as to want more, many asked. But too little of the reaction has focused on the big fat zero that so many talented players earn as they surf the tantalising line between anonymity and stardom.
It is worth remembering that Djokovic has called for more money to flow down the pyramid, with more prize money for Challenger and Futures events, the factory floor for the next generation of stars. A more enlightened system would make more of these events. It would see them not as liabilities but as assets. It would create more powerful narratives to connect those battling for a shot at glory with the public, who will watch them if they ultimately break through.
But more should go to the top players too. At present, they receive between 15 and 28 per cent of the revenue from ATP events, which is too little. Too much is going to tournament organisers, with the ATP hopelessly conflicted. The so-called union represents the players and the organisers, trying to act as fair broker, but instead is pulling itself into all manner of unsustainable contortions. Djokovic is right to imply that the very body that is supposed to act as the voice of the players is institutionally hoarse. That is why it was rather brave of him to speak up.
As for the grand-slams, the situation is even more unbalanced. According to reports, the male players receive only 7 or 8 per cent of total revenues, despite recent increases, rising to 14 to 16 per cent when you include the female players. This highlights, perhaps more than any other stat, the way that players have been played like violins.
By way of comparison, players in the NBA receive around 50 per cent of revenues generated by their league. In the Premier League, according to Deloitte, it is a similar figure. Tennis players are near the bottom of the pile and are entitled to wonder why.
It is true, of course, that a proportion of the profits from grand-slams are funnelled into grassroots tennis, but that is a second-order issue. There would be nothing to prevent players from sanctioning a proportion of new funds going to the lower echelons of the game, another possibility that Djokovic has mooted.
Indeed, this may act as a much-needed wake-up call for the governing bodies, many of which (although not all) are inefficient monopoly providers that have grown fat on the ring-fenced proceeds of grand-slams, not to mention subsidies from national governments.
On a wider point, what is the moral problem with players, who have battled through a fiercely meritocratic system, seeking a larger share of the proceeds from commercial rights whose value would be utterly worthless without them?
The players are the stars of the show, the entrepreneurs who gamble thousands of hours in pursuit of stardom. They have frighteningly short and uncertain careers. So long as they pay their taxes, we should not begrudge them. Fighting for more from owners and organisers is something that they should have done long ago.
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