Live from Wimbledon - Player media protest gathers pace

**Catherine** (0:10)
Hello, and welcome to The Tennis Podcast, live from Wimbledon, presented by Barclays, the official banking partner of Wimbledon. Today has been media day here at SW19. Our bandwidth has been, well, speaking for myself, completely maxed out. It has been grossly over-simulating in kind of the most fun possible way, hopping from room to room, trying to make the most of the precious few minutes that the players, the top players, have offered up for pre-tournament media because that has kind of been the lead story of the day here today. As we heard a couple of days ago, the protest action that started in Paris at the French Open a few weeks ago has continued here at Wimbledon and is set to continue throughout the first week of the tournament. This is the top players or most of the top players, more on that to come, led by high-profile sports administrator Larry Scott. They are all limiting their time spent with the media in order to impact the Grand Slams and their high-paying rights holders in particularly in here, that would be the BBC and ESPN most prominently, to impact them in hopes of negotiating a higher share of revenues in player prize money as well as improved player welfare. A reminder that Wimbledon announced a 20% increase in prize money for this year, the highest ever year-on-year increase, but as a percentage of overall revenues, it falls short of the 16% that the players were targeting. It's 14.4%, I believe, at the moment. So they were targeting 16% for this year with a long-term goal of achieving 22% of tournament revenues going into player prize money, and that would be in line with what the tours are able to offer.
Matt, you probably attended the most top player press conferences today in the beautiful air-conditioned media theatre here. How big a feature was this protest in how the day unfolded?

**Matt** (2:18)
On the one hand, I would say quite a big feature. I was in several press conferences today that were pretty much cut short by the players themselves. They were timing them. I'm talking about Jannik Sinner, Rina Sabalenka, Koko Goff, Jessica Pagula. These were all players who just were in and out of the press conference room. Not really short, but maybe a little bit shorter than usual and keeping an eye on it, and they left.
So it was definitely a feature and there were definitely a lot of questions about the action that the players were taking. So a feature in that sense as well. But I must say similarly to Paris, not a massive feature, I don't think, in terms of big player quotes and headlines to come out of it, because quite frankly, none of them really said anything of significant weight in terms of really explaining in more detail what it is they're looking for here. You know, Sinner kind of set the tone early. He was first in just after 11 o'clock this morning, and he was asked to think about it three times, and he engaged the first time in which he answered, well, it's not about the money, and then checked himself and said, it's not all about the money. And that was leading on to them being asked about welfare issues, which the players say is a big part of this. And he shut that question down. He said, now is not the time to talk about that. And then he was asked a third time about it, and he said, I think we're done talking about it. And I just left with this feeling of, if you go into protest, on the one hand, absolutely the protest is limiting the media that they're doing. That is the protest in itself.
It's maybe that more than the words they say, but I just think it's a tremendous opportunity for them to get their point across, to explain what it is they really want, to put some pressure on the slams that way, as well as with meetings, get the message out there, and I just can't help but come out of all these press conferences and think, you've missed a bit of an opportunity there to talk about this and get people maybe understanding you more and on your side, because I think they do have a bit of a sort of optic PR problem, particularly this one, because the change, you know, because of the rise that Wimbledon has given. So it was just sort of lacking in that sense of sort of, I'll tell you what it was lacking, Catherine, oomph.

**Catherine** (4:51)
And you know how I feel about things that are lacking oomph, yeah.
I share a lot of your feelings. I think, David, a few days ago, when we were discussing this, when it first was announced or first came out that this protest would be continuing at Wimbledon, and we were all quite surprised by that, and I imagine Wimbledon were as well, you said, well, look, if they don't care about optics, if they don't care about the PR of it, then this seems like a good plan.