What tennis players really want from a lawsuit against their sport

New York Times

19-03-2025

Tuesday's tennis antitrust lawsuit issued by the Professional Tennis Players Association (PTPA) and player plaintiffs from across the men's and women's game labeled the biggest governing bodies in tennis as a 'cartel' and accused them of running a 'corrupt, abusive and illegal' system. The central allegations in the document are that the defendants, the ATP and WTA Tours and the International Tennis Federation, fix prize money, suppress competition, subject players to a punishing schedule and lock them into it through mandatory tournaments and ranking points. The International Tennis Integrity Agency, which scrutinizes anti-doping and anti-corruption in the sport, is accused of questionable investigation practices. The four Grand Slams are named as 'co-conspirators.'
Advertisement
In a conference call Tuesday, the PTPA's executive director Ahmad Nassar explained what the plaintiffs expect to happen now: 'As simple as I could possibly state it, I just expect them to follow the law,' he said.
The four defendants all issued statements Tuesday in response to the lawsuit. The ATP went on the counter-attack: 'While ATP has remained focused on delivering reforms that benefit players at multiple levels, the PTPA has consistently chosen division and distraction through misinformation over progress. Five years on from its inception in 2020, the PTPA has struggled to establish a meaningful role in tennis, making its decision to pursue legal action at this juncture unsurprising.'
The WTA called the PTPA's action 'both regrettable and misguided,' while the ITF and ITIA struck a more neutral tone.
One of the central concerns of the lawsuit is money, specifically the proportion of revenue that players get from the tournaments in which they play. Prize money at the four Grand Slams hovers around 15 to 20 percent of their revenue, with similar figures at ATP and WTA 1,000, 500 and 250 events (the other tournaments on the tennis circuit). In other major sports, including the NBA, NFL, MLB and even another individual sport like golf, that proportion is higher and gets as high as 50 percent.
Another is the 11-month schedule, which myriad players up and down the sport have said is too long and too globally disparate. Many of the other complaints in the lawsuit sit in a revealing Venn diagram between sporting organizational principles and antitrust principles. Receiving ranking points for some tournaments and not others in order to avoid demeriting events, using a ranking system to legibly show fans who is doing well and who is not, and focusing attention on events that produce the most revenue and eyeballs for tennis are all sensible strategies, but they could all also be shown to be in violation of antitrust law if they artificially restrict competition.
Advertisement
Similarly, the absence of top players from the list of plaintiffs may make the lawsuit appear weakened in the eyes of sporting prestige or relevance, but that is meaningless in the eyes of a court: it is the substance of the complaints that is important, not who is making them.
On the conference call, Nassar and James Quinn, one of the lawyers working on the suit and a longtime antitrust litigator, emphasized that the aim is not to destroy or even remake the structure of tennis. Implicitly, it is an invitation to discussion and resolution that is more favorable to players, as opposed to finding out what judges in New York City, London and Brussels will make of tennis' compliance with antitrust law.
The lawsuit's emphasis on the governance of tennis also raises questions about the extent to which the issues raised are fundamental to the sport, rather than a consequence of how it is run.
The defendants use ranking points, the lawsuit says, 'primarily to compel players to participate in their tournaments at the exclusion of other competitive tennis events.'
'Instead of a merit-based ranking system driven by how players perform relative to other players, how often they win, and the scale of their victories at matches, the Ranking Points system rewards players for how frequently they play at events on the Tours,' it says.
It's true that players can play more tournaments than others if they so chose and thus have more opportunities to build their ranking, and tweaks could be made to the prevalence of mandatory events, but it's hard to make the case that there are lots of players in tennis history who were denied their rightful place in the sport because of an unfair rankings system.
The reality is that ability and results are rewarded. Plenty of players have been deprived of the level of attention or plaudits they deserved but in an individual sport, a few select stars will generally take a large proportion of the oxygen in the room, and with it the money that it brings. Some sort of ranking system will always be wanted and needed by the players to provide a structure that allows the best ones to play at the most glamorous events. In 2022, Wimbledon was undiminished in the eyes of the world despite no ranking points being awarded, but the players who were there were still there because they had earned their status through that system.
Advertisement
Regardless of reforms to the schedule, only so many players can compete at any given event. It's right that the 128 players at the Grand Slams should receive a bigger slice of the revenue, but that's still only 128 players. The ones who don't make it will still suffer. Compare that figure of 128, or 256 across the two singles draws, to something like the football World Cups. More than 1,200 players will gather in the United States, Mexico and Canada for the men's tournament in 2026. More tournaments with more prize money might offer more players more opportunities to play, but that would elongate the schedule, whose length is a key complain in the suit.
Existing tournaments that run external to the ATP and WTA Tours, or are sanctioned by them but do not have ranking points (like the Laver Cup) show another limit to this strategy. Tournament revenues come from ticket sales, media rights and sponsorship deals. Fans buy tickets to see their favorite players and the most famous players; media companies and sponsors buy rights and deals to broadcast and advertise alongside them.
In the lawsuit, the PTPA points to the fact that players have been unfairly prohibited from playing in non-tour sanctioned events in a way that illegally restricts their earning power. That is hard to argue, but those exhibition events want the biggest names; increasing the number of them would not directly correlate to more players getting similar opportunity. Last year's Six Kings Slam in Saudi Arabia, where the winner received the biggest pay check in tennis history, hardly enriched fringe players.
Instead it fattened the wallets of the most successful and richest players on the tour, including Djokovic, Jannik Sinner (who won the $6million/£4.7m prize) and Carlos Alcaraz. To satisfy fans, media and sponsors, anyone putting on this kind of event will want to attract the biggest names possible, and not necessarily the players who could most use the extra bump in income. PTPA figures on the conference call emphasized the importance of preventing players from sleeping in cars and scraping by; no reasonable person would argue with that. To what extent any revenue-sharing improvement from the lawsuit will trickle down to players in that bracket of the sport remains to be seen.
Tennis players have tolerated the cited anti-competitive activity by tennis governing bodies for some time. If they can get a greater guaranteed share of revenues and a less mandatory schedule, they are likely to tolerate it still. Fairer remuneration and scheduling for the players, including a proper off-season, would likely go a long way to satisfying the plaintiffs in this case and the wider playing fraternity, even if many of the complaints in the lawsuit extend further than this.
Most players have been quiet since Tuesday's news dropped, presumably in part because as the PTPA's lawsuit details, both ATP and WTA players are required to submit disputes with the tours to arbitration. Resolving disputes in other ways, including through separate legal action, could leave them in breach of the tours' rulebooks. Since the tours are involved in an active legal case, players may be more cautious about their criticisms.
And so to the Miami Open, a combined ATP and WTA 1,000 event, which got under way on Tuesday. It is one of many of those tournaments that recently extended from one week to almost two, in a format that has not gone down well with players or fans — but has brought the former more prize money. The give and take goes on.