The Grueling Economics of Tennis

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Grueling Economics of Tennis

Podcast: Big Take – Bloomberg and iHeartPodcasts
Episode Date: July 10, 2026
Host: David Gura
Featured Guests: Matt Futterman (The Athletic), Hannah Miller (Bloomberg)

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Episode Overview

This episode dives deep into the broken economics underpinning the sport of tennis. As Wimbledon hits its peak, host David Gura examines why tennis, despite its tradition, popularity, and rising viewership, is financially lopsided and lagging behind modern sports leagues in terms of player compensation and business model efficiency. Featuring insights from reporters Matt Futterman and Hannah Miller, the show unpacks tennis’s fragmented power structure, the challenges faced by professional players versus team athletes, and ongoing efforts to shake up the governance and economics of the sport.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The Spectacle and Money of Wimbledon

• Tennis tradition: Wimbledon is described as "the pinnacle" of tennis tradition—flowers, high tea, and champagne among its entrenched rituals.
  • “The grounds are amazing…there’s high tea…People are allowed to bring champagne into the grounds.” – Hannah Miller [02:07]
  • Memorable Moment: A Wimbledon official requesting spectators avoid opening champagne bottles during play. [02:16]
• Soaring costs and prize money:
  • Tickets on Center Court can now exceed $500,000—a figure that’s doubled from the previous year. [02:30]
  • Winners take home nearly $5M, reflecting growing financial stakes at the top.

2. Tennis’s Financial Inequality and Fractured Model

• Athletes’ share vs. other leagues:
  • In the NBA, NFL, MLB, and NHL, athletes receive ~50% of league revenue; in tennis, it’s under 20%. [03:15, Futterman]
  • “Tennis sits in a more complicated gray area with athletes taking home less than 20% of the revenue.” – Matt Futterman [03:13]
• The toll on players:
  • The season is nearly year-round (11 months), pushing players to compete constantly to stay afloat, especially outside the elite ranks.
    • “The season is too long. It’s 11 months. There’s no off season, there’s no breaks… the matches are so much longer… The planet’s getting hotter, it’s getting harder to do their jobs.” – Matt Futterman [03:42]

3. Organizational Chaos: The ‘Seven-headed Beast’

• Lack of unified governance:
  • Tennis is likened to the United Nations “with no real authority,” and rival organizations—the four Grand Slams, ATP, WTA, ITF—each run their own show.
    • “It is so fractured, it’s basically the United Nations. No real authority… seven or eight different authorities and governing bodies. They all kind of hate each other…” – Matt Futterman [05:06]
• Competition for deals:
  • Poor coordination means tournaments compete for sponsor and media attention, undercutting the sport’s overall value and making sponsorship extremely complicated.
    • “They’ve done an absolutely horrendous job of pooling their media rights. So they really devalue themselves.” – Matt Futterman [06:39]
    • Case study: BNP Paribas, the biggest tennis sponsor, has to negotiate 65-67 separate contracts across the tennis world. [07:03]

4. Tennis as a Media Product

• Media rights and viewership:
  • Grand Slams are ‘must-see TV’ and valuable to networks, with growing viewership (record audience for Serena Williams’ early-round match this year). [08:41; 09:18]
• Participation boom:
  • US tennis participation up 60% since 2019, boosted by COVID and the sport’s easy-to-follow structure. [09:03]
  • “Covid has actually helped increase people’s interest in the sport…It’s an easy sport to understand.” – Hannah Miller [09:03]

5. Superstar Effect and Trickle-Down Limitations

• Star-driven spikes:
  • Iconic matches (Alcaraz vs. Sinner; Federer vs. Nadal) are still widely discussed, and modern stars like Coco Gauff and Iga Świątek keep the sport relevant.
    • “These sort of epic matches have a way of just capturing attention and grabbing people. They produce stars…” – Matt Futterman [09:41]
  • Yet, success and increased revenue at the top don’t extend to most players.

6. The Pro Tennis Economic Grind

• Team sports vs. tennis:
  • In leagues like the NFL, even non-starters are financially stable due to team-provided support. [13:04]
  • In tennis, players are “independent contractors”—shouldering costs for coaching, travel, training, and agents.
    • “You’re an independent contractor and it’s all on you.” – Matt Futterman [13:33]
  • Typical agent takes ~20% of endorsement deals. [13:33]
• Top-heaviness:
  • Top men (Alcaraz, Sinner) can make $100M/year (mostly via endorsements), top women (Gauff) around $30M. After the top 50, income drops fast.
    • “Once you’re outside the top 80, you’re probably around breaking even.” – Matt Futterman [14:07]
  • Most outside the top 100 likely lose money on tennis itself. [14:57]
• Breakout stories:
  • A single deep tournament run can be life-changing, e.g., Arthur Ferry’s £900,000 windfall vs. prior career earnings and new sponsorship opportunities. [15:10]
    • “He has gone overnight from being a no name to one of the biggest names in the UK right now.” – Hannah Miller [15:10]
  • Retired stars set the template for lifelong income:
    • “Roger Federer is making far more money now than he ever did as a tennis player.” – Matt Futterman [15:57]

7. Legal/Structural Challenges and the Push for Reform

• Calls for antitrust action:
  • Real change likely needs regulatory or legal intervention—forcing tennis powerbrokers to collectively bargain with players.
    • “It’s going to take a court in the US or a regulatory body in Europe to tell tennis that it is in violation of antitrust rules and it needs to reach a settlement. With the players.” – Matt Futterman [16:54]
  • The Professional Tennis Players Association (PTPA) is leading a class-action antitrust suit against governing bodies, alleging cartel-like collusion. [17:12]
    • “They have filed an antitrust suit, essentially charging collusion, that the organizing bodies of tennis basically work together… to create essentially a cartel…” – Matt Futterman [17:24]
  • In contrast to other sports, tennis lacks a collective bargaining agreement that legitimizes league cartels and allocates revenue more fairly.

8. Love of the Game Still Thrives

• Enduring passion:
  • Despite all, players and fans remain attached to the game’s stories and personalities.
    • “Too many people would consider Serena Williams to be the queen, the goat of tennis.” – Hannah Miller [18:23]
  • Optimism remains for stars’ returns and the sport’s ability to keep generating interest.

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Notable Quotes & Timestamps

• “The season is too long. It’s 11 months. There’s no off season, there’s no breaks.”
  – Matt Futterman [03:42]
• “Tennis is sort of the last frontier in terms of change and modernization and it is decades behind where other sports are.”
  – Matt Futterman [04:20]
• “They’ve done an absolutely horrendous job of pooling their media rights. So they really devalue themselves.”
  – Matt Futterman [06:39]
• “I have something like 65 or 67 different contracts that I have to sign with different entities in tennis.”
  – Matt Futterman quoting BNP Paribas executive [07:03]
• “If you’re Carlos Alcaraz or Jannik Sinner, you’re probably making in the neighborhood of $100 million a year. … Once you’re outside the top 80, you’re probably around breaking even.”
  – Matt Futterman [14:07]
• “Roger Federer is making far more money now than he ever did as a tennis player.”
  – Matt Futterman [15:57]
• “Too many people would consider Serena Williams to be the queen, the goat of tennis.”
  – Hannah Miller [18:23]

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Major Timestamps

• [01:49] – Wimbledon’s current hype and rituals
• [03:13] – Revenue split: Tennis vs. other leagues
• [05:06] – Tennis’s fractured governance
• [06:39] – Competition, media rights, and sponsorship dysfunction
• [09:03] – Participation and viewership surge post-2019
• [13:04] – Player income and costs in tennis vs. team sports
• [15:10] – Cinderella stories and what a tournament run can do
• [16:54] – Legal action and prospects for organized change
• [18:23] – Enduring player and fan attachment to tennis

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Tone and Language

The speakers blend sharp economic analysis and business context with passionate, relatable storytelling about tennis’s personalities and traditions. Matt Futterman’s style is candid, sometimes wry, underscoring the outlier status of tennis in global sports. Hannah Miller’s observations add texture from on-the-ground experiences and the fan/player perspective.

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Conclusion

This episode offers a critical lens on the economics of tennis: its grand traditions, fractured structure, the immense divide between stars and journeymen, and how legal developments might force modernization. Despite these systemic issues, the romance of the sport, its iconic battles, and its compelling stories continue to drive interest and participation—ensuring tennis stays relevant even as its business model faces overdue scrutiny.

Transcript

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[Bloomberg Audio Studios Announcer]

Bloomberg Audio Studios Podcasts Radio news

[David Gura]

the Wimbledon finals are this weekend the pinnacle of the oldest and most revered tennis tournament in the world.

[Hannah Miller]

Tennis has its established rituals, and Wimbledon is probably the most entrenched in those rituals.

[David Gura]

Hannah Miller covers media for Bloomberg, and she got to see the action up close.

[Hannah Miller]

The grounds are amazing. There's flowers everywhere, there's high tea. People are allowed to bring champagne into into the grounds.

[Wimbledon Official]

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. If you could avoid opening bottles of champagne when the players are about to serve. Oh, come on.

[Hannah Miller]

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]

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 center court. That's almost double last year's price and triple the year before. Prize money for the marquee 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 sport's 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]

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]

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 to go hard with little payoff unless they're at the very top.

[Matt Futterman]

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]

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]

Tennis is sort of the last frontier in terms of change and modernization and it is decades behind where other sports are.

[David Gura]

I'm David Gura and this is the big take from Bloomberg News today on the show unpacking the complic 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]

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, the athletics.

[David Gura]

Matt Futterman says tennis as an organized sport has been slow to grow up. It became professionalized in the late 1960s.

[Matt Futterman]

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. And 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. And so you have this seven headed beast, 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]

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.

[Matt Futterman]

They've done an absolutely horrendous job of pooling their media rights. So they really devalue themselves. They compete with each other for both media deals, for advertising, and that drives the price down.

[David Gura]

What does it mean for a corporate sponsor interested in backing tennis having the kind of fractured landscape that you describe?

[Matt Futterman]

It is so hard for a corporate sponsor to get the value out of tennis that it gets from another sport. You take a company, I may just pick one out of the air that has had a big deal with Major League Baseball, bank of America, I think they have deals or they've had a deal, you know, with the league, and then a presence with just about every other team. And that's basically sort of one stop shopping. There's no way to do that in tennis. I was having a conversation with one of the top executives at BNP Paribas, which is probably the biggest sponsor of tennis in the world. And you know, one of their top executives, he said, I have something like 65 or 67 different contracts that I have to sign with different entities in tennis. And that's different media companies, different tournaments, different tours, different organizations. And so when you are a big sponsor and you're looking about how to spend your money, you know, you want to capture a big audience and you want to do it as easily as possible. Tennis is a hugely desirable audience, but they make it really, really, really hard for the people that are interested in tennis to connect with it and to partner with it.

[David Gura]

If you're streaming Wimbledon in the US right now, you're likely watching on ESPN, which has exclusive streaming rights to the tournament through 2035. Bloomberg Media reporter Hannah Miller says Grand Slams like Wimbledon are hot commodities for the companies vying for a media deal.

[Hannah Miller]

Tennis is set apart from other sports in that there are these must watch events. And you see that with the slam tournaments for tennis fans, those are going to be must see TV for them. So that does make it an easy sell.

[David Gura]

Viewership has been on the rise, and so has participation. The number of Americans who play tennis has grown almost 60% since 2019.

[Hannah Miller]

Covid has actually helped increase people's interest in the sport, whether watching at home or even trying it for themselves. It's an easy sport to understand. You know, when you have one person winning over the other, there aren't any ties. It's just two people grinding it out.

[David Gura]

And despite this fractured tennis landscape, Matt Futterman says a rising tide in the sport does lift some ships. Even though Serena Williams was eliminated in the first round this year, her match set an ESPN record for Day two audience. Another great match in this weekend's finals could help drive interest in the sport's smaller tournaments or get more people playing.

[Matt Futterman]

People are still talking about the five set, five and a half hour battle that Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner had last year at the French Open, the same way people still talk about the Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, Wimbledon 2008 match. These sort of epic matches have a way of just capturing attention and grabbing people. They produce stars. They've put tennis sort of in the consciousness. I don't think there's any question that tennis is having a moment. And you know, that's down to people like Coco Gauff and Alcaraz and Sinner and IGA Witek and also Zendaya, who, you know, starred in Challengers.

[David Gura]

But for players, good news at the top doesn't always trickle down to everyone else. That's coming up.

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[David Gura]

Making money as a professional tennis player is uniquely hard compared to other sports.

[Hannah Miller]

It's very interesting, the contrast between like the highest end athletes and the lowest end. I think in other sports, if you're on an NFL team, you're doing very well even if you're on the bench

[David Gura]

and not a starter, bloomberg's Hannah Miller explains. That's because in the NFL you're on a team which provides for some of your needs as an athlete.

[Hannah Miller]

Tennis players, on the other hand, it's very individualistic. Everything is on you or, you know, you and your partner.

[Matt Futterman]

If you're playing doubles, you have a lot of overhead.

[David Gura]

That's the athletics tennis reporter Matt Futterman.

[Matt Futterman]

Again, your agent is taking something on the order of 20% of all your endorsement deals. You've gotta pay a coach, you probably have to pay a physiotherapist. And remember, you earn money in pre tax dollars, you pay out salaries in post tax dollars, you've got a lot of travel expenses, you've got to find a place to train. It's the polar opposite about being a member of a team where the team takes care of all those expenses. In tennis, you're an independent contractor and it's all on you.

[David Gura]

That makes the sport extremely top heavy.

[Matt Futterman]

I mean, if you're Carlos Alcaraz or Jannik Sinner, you're probably making in the neighborhood of $100 million a year. But the bulk of that is going to be with endorsement deals and appearance fees and all sorts of things like that. So they are really in another stratosphere, the women. I think Coco Gauff is the highest paid player and she's up in the 30s in terms of millions of dollars. The rest of the top 10, you're still doing quite well. You should be in the eight figures, but then you have a pretty good fall off where you're getting into single digit millions. I'm not playing any violins for any of these people. You get outside the top 50, you start to get worried about falling outside of the top 80, because once you're outside the top 80, you're probably around breaking even.

[David Gura]

Start to move outside the top 100 and you're likely losing money on the game itself. But unlike some other sports, Hannah Miller says one big tournament win can really make a difference for a lower ranked athlete.

[Hannah Miller]

There's a great example of this with Arthur Ferry, who is, it's a Cinderella story. He's a Brit who had an amazing quarterfinal win over a top ranked player. He has gone overnight from being a no name to one of the biggest names in the UK right now. He will make at least £900,000 just from getting to this point in the tournament. If you look at his winnings prior, that dwarfs what he's gotten before. And he's also now a great target for sponsors and that'll be another great source of income as he goes along.

[David Gura]

It's that point, the sponsorship deals that are never guaranteed but a possibility after a match or after retirement, that creates a model that keeps players in the game.

[Matt Futterman]

The model for this is Arnold Palmer in the 1960s and Mark McCormick, who was the founder of IMG, which is sort of the first great sports and entertainment conglomerate and really the guy who made the sports business. And I think what McCormick and Palmer understood was that he could really be sort of the first great sports brand. He became something bigger in retirement than really he ever was during his playing career, especially from a financial point of view. And that has really been the model. Roger Federer is making far more money now than he ever did as a tennis player.

[David Gura]

What would it take to kind of change the structure that you've described, this fractured structure of professional tennis, to make it work more in favor of the players?

[Matt Futterman]

It's going to take a court in the US or a regulatory body in Europe to tell tennis that it is in violation of antitrust rules and it needs to reach a settlement. With the players.

[David Gura]

A group of players is trying to force that change by suing the ATP and WTA tournaments and the Grand Slams. It's called the Professional Tennis Players association, or the ptpa.

[Matt Futterman]

They have filed an antitrust suit, essentially charging collusion, that the organizing bodies of tennis basically work together with each other to create essentially a cartel, which is what all sports leagues are. Ultimately, they are cartels. The difference between them is that if you take the NFL, it has a collective bargaining agreement and the players have given their blessing for that cartel to exist. They're allowing them to break antitrust rules. They're allowing them to set things like salary caps. These are antitrust lawsuits that happened or had the potential to happen or were threatened to happen with the other sports decades ago, and they settled them out and now they're going on in tennis.

[David Gura]

With the PTPA suit and broader questions about the future of tennis business model still in flux, Hannah Miller says the athleticism and stories the sport generates still keep fans coming back. And that love of the game keeps players coming back.

[Hannah Miller]

Too many people would consider Serena Williams to be the queen, the goat of tennis.

[David Gura]

Quintessential goat.

[Hannah Miller]

Yes, she didn't perform as well as she would have wanted, as her fans would have wanted. But that's not to say that she's not going to come back again. So I'm holding out hope for the US Open. We'll see what happens.

[David Gura]

This is the big take from Bloomberg News. I'm David Gura. The show is hosted by me, Sarah Holder and Juan Haas. The show is made by Aaron Edwards, David Fox, Jeff Grocott, Paddy Hirsch, Rachel Lewis Christie, Laura Newcombe, Naomi Ng, Julia Press, Tracy Samuelson, Naomi Shaven, Alex Segura, Julia Weaver, Yang Yang and Taka Yasuzawa. Nicole Beemsterboer is our executive producer. To get more from the Big Take and unlimited access to all of bloomberg.com, subscribe [e-mail] podcastoffer. Thanks for listening. We'll be back on Monday.

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