The Harsh Truth Behind Income Inequality in Tennis
It is currently 7 pm on Sunday, September 11, 2022. In Queens, New York, a tennis match is in progress. This is no ordinary tennis match, however: it is the US Open, where Spaniard Carlos Alcaraz and Norwegian Casper Ruud are ruthlessly facing off in the finals to see who will become the next world’s best. They have spent the last three grueling hours playing three sets, with Carlos winning two out of the three. The score starts to tip in Carlos’s favor and it is now 40–30; he has one more point to win before he is crowned the world champion. Carlos serves, to which Ruud dives for the ball, but to no avail. The crowd goes into a wild uproar, while Carlos collapses to the ground, still unable to comprehend what he has just accomplished.
If you watched this once-in-a-lifetime match live, or later on some other platform, you likely weren’t paying attention to one key aspect of the US Open: money. Can you guess how much Alcaraz won from winning the US Open? $2.6 million. And can you guess how much Ruud, defeated at the hands of Alcaraz won? $1.3 million. These numbers are astonishing, which is not to say that these athletes do not deserve their prizes. Both Carlos, Ruud, and the many other players who competed in the US Open no doubt put their blood, sweat, and tears into playing their very best. It should be noted, however, that there is a massive wealth disparity in the professional tennis landscape.
Before we dive into the details, let’s take a bird’s eye view look at income in tennis compared to other sports. If you are ranked as the 500th best player in sports such as basketball, soccer, or football, you likely are making above $500,000, allowing you to build a beyond stable and more than happy life for yourself. On the other hand, if you are the 500th ranked tennis player in the world, you are more likely than not to be falling into debt from your expenses and unable to make a decent living off the tournaments you participate in.
On average, the top five tennis players make around $8 million each. Players ranked 50–100 make around $500,000, while players ranked 500–1000 make just $7,000. To help visualize this, here’s a chart created by MyTennisHQ:
Apart from an income gap within the tennis community, there is also a gap in tennis income in comparison with other major sports. Tennis is the 4th most watched sport globally but manages to control just under 2% of global sports media rights.
With all this in mind, one wonders if there is any way to solve income inequality in tennis forever? One major problem with tennis is that there is no unified governance to look over all tournaments. You have different organizations: the ATP, WTF, ITF, and much more. All of these tennis organizations are highly unregulated, with very few rules on how much or little they are allowed to pay participants. If we could somehow get many of these major organizations to fall under one central management, it might be easier to solve wage gaps in tennis. “We shouldn’t be competing with one another. We should be competing with the outside world” said David Haggerty, President of the ITF. Another potential solution is to put more funding into lower-ranked tournaments. We are already seeing this happening now, with all four of the grand slam tournaments moving to provide more prize money for players that get eliminated in the earlier matches. The COVID-19 pandemic has further helped to speed this up as well, with the ITF providing monetary “player relief” to the top 750 players in the world who weren’t able to compete for several years. While there are major hurdles to overcome, if we take the right steps then we can make tennis a prosperous sport for all for many years to come.
