The Grueling Economics of Tennis

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news.

**David Gura** (0:09)
The Wimbledon Finals are this weekend, the pinnacle of the oldest and most revered tennis tournament in the world.

**Hannah Miller** (0:15)
Tennis has its established rituals, and Wimbledon is probably the most entrenched in those rituals.

**David Gura** (0:22)
Hannah Miller covers media for Bloomberg, and she got to see the action up close.

**Hannah Miller** (0:27)
The grounds are amazing. There's flowers everywhere. There's high tea. People are allowed to bring champagne into the grounds.

**SPEAKER_4** (0:35)
Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, if you could avoid opening bottles of champagne when the players are about to serve.

**Hannah Miller** (0:39)
Oh, come on. If someone actually pops a champagne bottle and you hear the cork, like, that's the noise interruption. It's not necessarily people screaming.

**David Gura** (0:50)
Wimbledon brings in a lot of money. If you wanted to attend the tournament this year without waiting hours in the queue for cheap tickets, it could take you over $500,000 to secure a guaranteed seat on Centre Court. That's almost double last year's price and triple the year before. Prize money for the Marquis Tournament is also on the rise. This year, the singles champs will each take home 3.6 million pounds or nearly $5 million.
But while players in other leagues have gained ground toward benefiting from their sports overall profitability, the Athletics tennis reporter Matt Futterman says tennis sits in a more complicated gray area, with athletes taking home less than 20% of the revenue.

**Matt Futterman** (1:35)
Compare that to the NBA, the NFL, Major League Baseball, National Hockey League. All of those athletes are guaranteed by their collective bargaining agreements, about 50%.

**David Gura** (1:48)
Matt is the author of the forthcoming book, The Cruelest Game. He says the disjoint financial model of tennis creates a system that can sometimes encourage players to go hard with little pay off, unless they're at the very top.

**Matt Futterman** (2:02)
You're seeing a lot of star players break down. The season is too long. It's 11 months. There's no off season. There's no breaks. The incentive is to play all the time. And you can't play all the time, especially now, because the game has gotten so physical, so taxing. The matches are so much longer than they used to be. The planet's getting hotter. It's getting harder to do their jobs. The work conditions are difficult.

**David Gura** (2:27)
And it's not just players. Tennis as a whole is at a crossroads. And some key figures in the multi-billion dollar sport are pushing for change to try to bring the business of tennis into the 21st century.

**Matt Futterman** (2:39)
Tennis is sort of the last frontier in terms of change and modernization. And it is decades behind where other sports are.

**David Gura** (2:53)
I'm David Gura and this is The Big Take from Bloomberg News. Today on the show, unpacking the complicated business of tennis. From media deals to player compensation, can an old school sport stay up to date in a modern economy?
Between the World Cup and the Knicks' historic win in the NBA Finals, it has been a big summer for sports. But when it comes to the way sports are structured, one exists on an island of its own.

**Matt Futterman** (3:26)
Tennis is the ultimate oddball sport. It is so fractured.
It's basically the United Nations. No real authority or actually seven or eight different authorities and governing bodies. They all kind of hate each other.

**David Gura** (3:41)
The Athletics' Matt Futterman says tennis, as an organized sport, has been slow to grow up. It became professionalized in the late 1960s.

**Matt Futterman** (3:49)
But the Grand Slam tournaments, the Australian Open, the French Open, Wimbledon and the US Open, which were functioning independently, they didn't want to give up their independence. Eventually, you had these two things created called the ATP Tour and the WTA Tour, which were the men's tour and the women's tour.
Then on top of all that, you have the International Tennis Federation, which is the world governing body, which is the sort of FIFA of tennis. So you have this seven-headed beasts, all of these people who are running these things with different agendas, fancy jobs, big salaries, and while it would make a lot of sense for them to come together, I've really never known a sports executive who negotiated himself or herself, out of a fancy job and a big salary.

**David Gura** (4:44)
That fractured landscape means it's hard for the sport to make deals in the way most other sports do. Grand slams make a ton of money from media deals, but smaller tournaments, the scores of games on the ATP or the WTA tours, don't come close.