Roger Federer: The billion-dollar backhand

**Zing Tsjeng** (0:07)
It's 1993, a 12-year-old boy stands on a baking hot tennis court in Basel, Switzerland. He's lanky, but still stands barely taller than the net.

**Simon Jack** (0:17)
He's just lost a set, he starts screaming. Swear words are flying out of this small boy's mouth as he slams his racket on the ground.

**Zing Tsjeng** (0:24)
He looks out to the stands and sees his mum and dad get up and leave, shaking their heads in shame. His lip quivers and he starts to cry.

**Simon Jack** (0:31)
I have to change, he tells himself. I can't keep losing my head. And he will change. He will become known as the most elegant and composed player in history.
And, of course, for our purposes, the highest paid.

**Zing Tsjeng** (0:45)
Welcome to Good Bad Billionaire from the BBC World Service. Each episode, we pick a billionaire and we find out how they made their money.

**Simon Jack** (0:52)
We take them from zero to their first million, and then from a million on to a billion.

**Zing Tsjeng** (0:56)
My name is Zing Tsjeng and I'm a journalist, author and podcaster.

**Simon Jack** (0:59)
And I'm Simon Jack, I'm the BBC's business editor. I'm a fan of tennis and there is few better sites. Smaller sport, I would say, than watching Roger Federer play at his peak.

**Zing Tsjeng** (1:09)
Have you ever seen him play in the flesh?

**Simon Jack** (1:11)
Yes, I have. It looks effortless, and yet the speed the ball goes and the shots he plays, it's really remarkable. He hasn't won the most Grand Slams in history, but many would say he won them with the most style. But he retired in 2022 after a 25-year professional career. He played 1,750 competitive matches across singles and doubles.

**Zing Tsjeng** (1:33)
And he won 20 Grand Slam singles titles, two Olympic medals. He holds the record for most Wimbledon championships, with eight under his belt.

**Simon Jack** (1:42)
We should probably explain what the Grand Slams are. So that's Wimbledon, the US Open, the French Open and the Australian Open. There's four of them.

**Zing Tsjeng** (1:50)
Well, the prizes in tennis are big, and he has won over $100 million in prize money. But as you can tell, that's nowhere near a billion.

**Simon Jack** (1:58)
But in 2025, he was declared a billionaire worth $1.1 billion. And according to Forbes, this makes him only the seventh athlete to join the billionaire club. So how did he make that much? Well, let us travel back in time to find out.

**Zing Tsjeng** (2:16)
Roger Federer was born in 1981 and grew up in suburban Basel, Switzerland. It was a middle-class family. One older sister, his father and mother both worked at a pharmaceutical company.
And the family spent weekends at the company's tennis club. And his parents both competed non-professionally. So tennis was kind of in their blood.

**Simon Jack** (2:34)
Yeah, and he was a fast learner. His mother said that Roger had unbelievable coordination from the very beginning, saying that at age one, he could kick a soccer ball in your direction. We noticed this, but we didn't push him. All the major decisions of his sports career he took himself.
He had his first tennis ball over the net at age three. He didn't quite beat Tiger Woods' first game of golf at 18 months old. But at 1985 H4, he watched Boris Becker win Wimbledon. I remember that match. A 17-year-old qualifying Becker shocked the world. Becker became his idol. And he apparently cried when Boris lost in 1988 and 1919 According to his mum, he was very vibrant, a bundle of energy, sometimes very difficult. In fact, he could be impulsive and competitive, and he had to keep moving. Otherwise, he became unbearable.

**Zing Tsjeng** (3:19)
Something that I think a lot of athletes have in common, you know, that constant urge to move when they're a kid that has to be channelled somewhere, somehow. Well, Roger was athletic, he loved many different sports as a child, especially football, which he played for years alongside tennis. There's an alternate universe where Roger Federer is one of Europe's greatest footballers, I think. But Roger told biographer Rene Stauffer, I liked tennis the best of all sports. It was always exciting and winning and losing was always in my hands.

**Simon Jack** (3:45)
Now, that's very interesting that because basically on any given point, there's a winner and a loser. So you've got a series and because of the very clever scoring system in tennis, there's kind of like a climax and a cliff edge, lots of them all of the time. So it does keep your attention very much.