The whole scenario was familiar to anyone with experience of the tour. If you had to look around the world and select the workforce with the lowest potential for solidarity, you would probably settle on international tennis players.<\/p>\n
Nine-tenths of the time, tennis is literally a zero-sum game. My victory is your defeat. And even if you expand the focus to different groups, the leading players would like to play fewer tournaments while the lower-ranked ones, who are usually knocked out early, want to play more.<\/p>\n
People often accuse tennis\u2019s new representative player body \u2013 the PTPA \u2013 of being vague on many day-to-day issues around the game. But it is difficult to find answers that unite the whole locker room, except the most obvious: better pay and perks. And even here, players feel so insecure that they are loath to challenge their employers.<\/p>\n
For an example, look at the PTPA\u2019s recent legal challenge to the whole structure of the game, which it called an anti-competitive cartel. Twelve players\u2019 names appeared on this class action, which was unveiled in March 2025. Not one of them had a top-100 singles ranking at the time.<\/p>\n
Are the players actually underpaid?<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a similar story with this recent campaign, dating back a year, to squeeze more money out of the majors. If anything, Friday\u2019s lame press-room shenanigans in Paris will only embolden the tournaments, by demonstrating that they have nothing to fear.<\/p>\n
But let\u2019s take a step back from the famously dysfunctional mechanisms of tennis governance, and ask a wider question: are the players actually underpaid?<\/p>\n
A couple of harsh truths here. Firstly, tennis remuneration follows a hockey-stick graph, with Sinner (\u00a314m prize money in 2025) and Sabalenka (\u00a311m) vastly exceeding the top-100 averages on their two tours (\u00a31.3m and \u00a3900,000 respectively). This might seem unreasonable, but it makes a certain sort of sense. There are precious few players \u2013 maybe half-a-dozen? \u2013 with enough clout and visibility to move the dial in terms of ticket-sales, sponsorship contracts or TV viewing figures.<\/p>\n
Secondly, I am always suspicious of the idea that a certain number of players should be able to make a viable living out of the game. Two hundred men and the same number of women would be a reasonable number, some say. But why that specific figure? Surely the market should decide.<\/p>\n
But this is where things get complicated. This market for tennis services is not a fair one, because the players only receive around half the surplus money generated by the majors, after costs. Last year\u2019s Wimbledon finished with \u00a355m in spare cash last summer, having paid out prize money, and \u00a350m of that was forwarded to the Lawn Tennis Association.<\/p>\n
One recent analysis suggested that the \u201cBig Four\u201d nations, who benefit from the happy accident of staging tennis\u2019s most profitable events, employ around 2,000 people behind the scenes of their tennis operations, mostly coaches and administrators. Meanwhile, perhaps 300 players make a viable living from the world tours.<\/p>\n
So if you\u2019re a player from Italy, Kazakhstan or Brazil, you\u2019re coming to the majors and grinding down your knee cartilage in order to support four national development programmes, each of which is designed to make your country less successful at tennis. (The fact that most of these programmes are not especially efficient is neither here nor there.)<\/p>\n
There is a genuine grievance here. A grievance worth some sort of industrial action. But in a sport where coordinating players is harder than herding cats, I just can\u2019t see it happening.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The whole scenario was familiar to anyone with experience of the tour. If you had to look around…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":337,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[217,295,207,219,139,220,113,28,240],"class_list":["post-336","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-french-open","tag-aryna-sabalenka","tag-comment","tag-french-open","tag-jannik-sinner","tag-novak-djokovic","tag-roland-garros","tag-sport","tag-tennis","tag-us-content"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/336","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=336"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/336\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/337"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=336"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=336"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=336"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}