Quang Duong Contract Terminated By United Pickleball Association For Repeated Breaches

Forbes

12-07-2025

Quang Duong won't be celebrating another PPA tournament win for a long, long time.
As I write this, at 5pm EST on 7/12/25, I'm about eight hours late to this news. However, this situation is worth writing about, even as others have already opined in a way that I cannot necessarily out-do.
At around 9am on Saturday morning, in the midst of the mid-season Beer City Open MLP tournament, the UPA posted a press release and notified the media that it has officially terminated the playing contract of teenage star Quang Duong for 'multiple and repeated violations of the exclusivity terms of the agreement.'
Yours truly, when the news broke, was in the middle of an on-camera interview for a forthcoming documentary series, and I was able to do a live-reaction on-camera to the news. I'd imagine such a stroke of luck will eventually be a fun feature in the final product, but we won't know for months. But, if you were wondering, that's why I'm not writing this for hours after the news reveal.
This immediately severs the contractual and salary arrangement between the league and Duong, reportedly worth between $250k and $300k per year (depending on your source). It also costs the MLP team LA Mad Drops its marquee off-season acquisition for whom they paid $80k in the 2025 MLP player draft earlier this year. A MLP GM onsite in Grand Rapids confided that the team will get a 'credit' for that money, as will other teams who spent money on missing players. However, Duong was a major player for the Mad Drops this year, and replacing him with an undrafted/onsite sub is not exactly a like-for-like talent replacement (Rafa Hewett, recently dropped from his Challenger MLP team, was his replacement in Michigan, and his team was upset in the first round of the tournament despite being favored).
More importantly, this move sets a pretty specific precedent that the league takes its exclusivity clauses pretty seriously. It was just six weeks ago that Duong was fined $50k and suspended for parts of two events for a similar infraction, and it seems to be a pretty galling gambit to essentially do the exact same thing a couple months later. This action comes on the heels of the tour announcing its intent to pivot to prize-money based compensation, a step that will bring about serious change for the finances of both the tour and many of its players, and I suspect the last thing the league wants is for there to be players who think they can 'get away' with things related to contracts.
In the simplest terms, I do not have a ton of sympathy for Duong's firing. When you sign a contract that pays you handsomely, you essentially have two choices: abide by the terms and reap the financial benefits, or ignore the terms and risk losing the contract. Duong chose the latter, and has now suffered the consequences. Duong has now proven that he does not respect written contracts multiple times, as we saw with the acrimonious break between him and his former paddle sponsor Selkirk, where he was reportedly served a Cease-and-Desist letter by the company for his contract breach actions. Now, he's lost his salary and his guaranteed income from the tour. If you were a future sponsor or paddle manufacturer, would you trust the Duong camp to abide by terms of a contract?
How much of this is on Duong himself, versus how much is being dictated by his father, who is known in the industry to be a dominant force in every aspect of his son's career thus far, is not for me to say. Others closer to the tour have speculated as much, and it is entirely possible Duong himself is being 'told' what to do here and isn't personally to blame. Certainly the Tennis world is rife with stories of overbearing fathers who 'coach' their teenage prodigies into complete mental breakdown and attempt to curate every aspect of their lives. That could be what we're seeing here. It could also be someone who is getting offered significant dollars to support the sport he loves in his home country and is making what he feels is a logical choice. If one were to get paid $100k to fly to Vietnam and perform a function that costs a $50k fine back home, did they really lose out on anything?
That being said, both sides are 'losing' in this situation in significant ways. Duong's fame and his 'value' back home is entirely because he's a top-10 ranked player on the tour of record here in the USA. Now his contract is terminated; will he even be 'allowed' to enter PPA events going forward? The answer here, based on the 'Vivian Glozman' rule we learned about earlier this year, will be, 'not for a while at best.' Players cannot play qualifiers if they're ranked highly, but they cannot be in the main draw unless they're under contract. Duong has already been removed from the PPA's rankings site so we can't quote his exact ranks upon his termination, but in his last event played (The Atlanta Slam in mid-May) he was a 6th seed in Singles, the 11th seed in Men's Doubles (playing with his former MLP partner Hunter Johnson), and the 5th seed in Mixed (playing with Anna Bright); those seeds all indicate he was likely within the top 20 in all three disciplines, and thus will be in the Glozman loophole until he expires enough points to drop outside of the top 50. Whether this contract termination also means that the PPA can choose to 'deny service' to the player, even if he chose to enter an event in the future, remains to be seen and isn't something we'd know for months anyway.
But what about the UPA? They lose out here too, even if their hand was forced into taking this action today. Vietnam is a massive market, arguably now the 2nd biggest pickleball playing market in the world. The PPA knows this, launching PPA Asia last November, and a number of top pros went over on Joola's dime in March to promote the sport alongside Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf. Duong's booming popularity in the country was absolutely a big leverage and selling point, and something the tour could build upon to help seize control of the newly emerging Asia market (where there are multiple big-money competitors already in place). So, this decision couldn't have been done lightly, and a cost-benefit analysis of the points in the last two paragraphs probably was debated for a few days before they pulled the trigger here.
What happens now? Will Duong play APP Events? Will he just stay in Vietnam and cash in while he can? Will the lost opportunity of competing week in/week out with the best players in the world take the luster off his stardom? All great questions that should be answered in the coming months.