After months of playing backslashes, the four Grand Slams have gone on the offensive in the battle for the future of tennis.
In meetings with representatives of the men’s and women’s ATP tours last week in London, and with players and agents this week in Madrid, Grand Slam leaders outlined their most ambitious plan yet to reform the current structure professional tennis. It is a premium tour anchored by the four Grand Slams and higher-level combined events, featuring top players from the ATP and WTA tours.
According to a person briefed on the Grand Slam proposal and subsequent meetings, who spoke on condition of anonymity to protect relationships, the details are as follows:
- Double the prize money for the top 300 men.
- Almost quadrupled the prize money for the top 300 women.
- Use part of their own media rights to finance these changes.
- Equal payfrom the start, for men and women at all premium circuit events, instead of making women wait until 2027 to receive the same pay as men in some of the biggest tournaments.
- A calendar which includes the four Grand Slam tournaments, as well as 10 other high-level mixed tournaments, the locations and dates of which are to be determined, as well as a team event.
- The tour would end in time to allow for a six-to-eight-week offseason.
The project would capitalize on the lucrative media rights of the Australian, French and US Opens, alongside Wimbledon, and those of other major Masters tournaments, to create a premium tour – various versions of which have been at the heart of their previous proposals, but with little meat on the bones beyond that. ESPN’s 11-year deal for the US Open is worth almost $800m (£647.7m), with media rights estimated to make up more than half of All England Tennis’s annual revenue Club, which hosts Wimbledon, year after year. year Released.
The Slams say the plans will dramatically increase men’s and women’s salaries faster than the ATP and WTA can achieve, focus the season around 15 events in a premium tour and extend an offseason that has been reduced to just a few weeks only for the summit. players.
Grand Slam and tour executives were not immediately available for comment.
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The leaders of the ATP and WTA, who have long considered the collective project of Wimbledon and the US, French and Australian Opens as a threat to their relevance and perhaps their existence, are not excited about the latter idea, according to the person briefed. the plan and the meetings.
Discussions between tours and Grand Slams have become less tense in recent weeks, according to a BBC report. Although one official recently described “productive discussions” between the sides, this latest move could jeopardize any hint of détente that may have begun to develop in recent months.
It shows that even as tours have worked to tighten their control over the sport, Grand Slam tournaments have continued to work to wrest it away from them, something they have been demanding since last summer.
The leaders of the two circuits have long sought guarantees that they will play an important role in the governance of the sport, and this iteration of a premium circuit would relegate most of their tournaments to a lower status that top players would have much less incentive to participate in.
Now, the tour’s lack of enthusiasm could be questionable, because by bringing players into the discussion for the first time, the Grand Slams are playing a significant role.
It’s their strongest move yet to curry favor with those who have proven time and time again that they hold the most power in tennis – the stars of the sport, who lure fans into buy tickets and watch the games at home.
They are now promising to offer these players many of the things they have been looking for for years, including accelerating the closing of the prize gap that persists in several tier 1000 mixed events and, overall , including greater financial rewards for a less demanding schedule than the current 11-month job that incentivizes players to risk their health and well-being by participating in as many tournaments as possible.
THE Grand Slam leaders have been pushing for months to use existing 250- and 500-level tournaments to create a qualifying circuit for players outside the top 100. Top players could potentially compete in those events but wouldn’t win ranking points thanks to them.
No one involved in the process expects any changes to occur before 2026, and the tenuous and combative nature of talks between Grand Slam officials and the tours could prevent any change.
Above all, to contribute to the financing of this premium circuit, the Grand Slams have committed for the first time to include part of their media and sponsorship rights, which are the most expensive in sport and which they have long kept largely for them.
For months, Grand Slam players hesitated to make such a commitment as they negotiated among themselves over how much of their resources they wanted to invest in an effort that would make them major financial partners in the future. of professional tennis, rather than independent entities that organize annual competitions, even if they are the largest annual competitions in the sport.
However, over the past year, tours have taken a series of steps that the Grand Slams have seen as a threat to their primacy, including potentially disrupting a calendar that culminates four times a year with the Grand Slams.
The leaders of the organizations that control the Grand Slam tournaments have decided that the only way to ensure they maintain their strength is to invest more in the overall management of the sport.
In meetings and during a presentation at the BNP Paribas Open in Indian Wells, Calif., in March, top tennis executives were still waiting for a high-end tour plan that Grand Slam tournaments had been expected to flesh out for years. month – to the point that the proposed presentation had slipped since last November, during the ATP Finals in the Italian city of Turin. Four months later, no framework for the integration of media rights and other commercial partnerships was in place.
Today, a month later, the Slams have made their decision.
The latest move comes after ATP leader Andrea Gaudenzi pushed the tours to invest in a plan that would bring in around $1 billion in tennis investment from Saudi Arabia. Most of that money would come from the sale of a new tournament, a 10th Masters 1000 event.
A bidding process for the event is underway, also involving Dubai and Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, Doha, the capital of Qatar, another Gulf state, and Australia, with most of those involved in the process s expecting the Saudis to win, thus adding the tournament to his three tournaments. annual offers for the WTA Tour end-of-season finals in Riyadh in November and for the Next Gen finals the following month.
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Even if some of Saudi Arabia’s influx of money would eventually trickle down to players, it would impose costs on the schedule that players already consider far too long, including the addition of another tournament mandatory high-level, perhaps at the very beginning. of the calendar after an already reduced offseason. It is not yet clear what additional growth opportunities would be available once the additional tournament money is spent.
Grand Slams operate on the principle that, on the other hand, a premium tour which can pool its media rights and sell them as a single, elite and exclusive package to sponsors and media companies – in the manner of Formula 1 – could bring to market the kind of focused tennis product that this fractured sport has tried in vain to deliver for decades.
The battle continues.
(Top photo: Glyn Kirk/AFP)