Novak Djokovic and Vasek Pospisil’s player’s association calls for more prize money for early round losses, but they may be focusing their attention in the wrong place.
Before I say any of this, I would like to go on record to state that Novak Djokovic has more money than he can spend in a lifetime, thus his dedication to this new player’s union is really quite noble. Tennis has a serious problem on its hands, and the ATP’s inadequate response to the fact that most of its players cannot earn a proper living while a few pocket millions every year quite literally invited the creation of the PTPA. Somebody had to act. I have full respect for Djokovic putting his might behind something that probably won’t affect him personally in the slightest.
The ATP isn’t particularly thrilled with the formation of Djokovic and Vasek Pospisil’s PTPA player’s association. Actually, that’s an understatement – they DESPISE it. They haven’t explicitly said so, but I get the distinct impression that they consider it nothing less than sedition. And according to Pospisil in an expletive-filled rant on court, ATP chairman Andrea Gaudenzi was so incensed, he screamed at Pospisil for “an hour and a half” during a player’s meeting at the Miami Open earlier this year.
Suffice it to say that this is a highly charged topic. Players have taken sides; Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer, who are back on the player’s council, petitioned their colleagues to give the ATP time to make changes rather than stage a mutiny. Dominic Thiem and Kevin Anderson are team ATP, while others like Sam Querrey and Diego Schwartzman have voiced support for the PTPA.
At the heart of the controversy is prize money, particularly for players ranked outside the top 100. The PTPA is petitioning for tournaments to share a larger portion of ticket sales with the players. And while that sounds great on paper, in practice it’s not only complicated, it also probably won’t come anywhere near solving the problem.
I’m in Atlanta this week. It’s an ATP 250 event and part of the US Open Series. The prize money for the winner is around $55,000. (Note – this year’s purse is 20% lower due to the COVID pandemic). To put that into perspective, players who earn a spot in the first round of the U.S. Open get $61,000. Athletes don’t come to 250 events for the purse, they come for the ranking points. Because when you get enough rankings points, you get direct entry into events like the U.S. Open (or try to get seeded) where you can make $60,000 without having won a single match. That’s the way men’s tennis works.
To prove my point, as of the time of this publication, world No. 115 Brandon Nakashima has made his way to his second final in as many weeks at the Atlanta Open. The American teenager is clearly on his way up and his efforts in Atlanta will most likely secure him a direct entry spot in the U.S. Open draw.
With that said, I’m sure you’re starting to see the flaw in Djokovic’s big plan to “make tournaments share more of the ticket sales” already, right? The events that players outside the top 100 play (250 events, Challengers and Futures) simply don’t have enough in ticket sales to do much more than break even after shelling out prize money and appearance fees. There IS no more money to share. There just isn’t.
And by the time you get to events that DO have money to share (Masters events*) the draw is such that those tournaments are only generally available to players inside the top 50 or 60**. Put succinctly, a more generous disbursal of ticket sales revenue would put more money in the pockets of the top 50, it might benefit a few players ranked between 50-100, but it’s completely useless for anyone ranked below that. And given that the PTPA claims to represent the interests of singles players in the top 500, it’s a spectacularly inadequate solution.
Side note – it doesn’t escape my notice that Djokovic’s plan includes no hint that a possible solution would be for the prize money to be redistributed so that the winner receives a bit less and the early round exiters receive more. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying it should, since it would still only benefit players who are ranked high enough to get into a Masters event. I’m just saying it amuses me that it wasn’t on the table.
The complicated but only viable answer, of course, is that the entire system needs to be restructured. It just won’t work any other way. The tournaments that interact with players at Challenger events when they’re building ranking points need to be able to award more prize money…and they simply cannot depend on ticket sales to generate the capital. It will have to come from a pool of money managed by a single governing body and disbursed the way tax money is collected and then redistributed.
And while we are talking about a “single governing body”, yet another issue that needs to be resolved is the fractured organization model. The ITF runs Futures events and Slams, and the ATP runs Challengers, 250s, 500s, and Masters 1000 events. How can the ATP cast vision that the Slams and Masters events need to financially support the “lesser events” for the greater good when they don’t have jurisdiction in the 4 biggest tournaments of the year? They can’t.
I’m glad Djokovic and Pospisil have started the conversation. Tennis has already backed itself into a corner and functions largely as a niche sport. We cannot continue to present an image to elite young athletes that only 40 men in the ENTIRE WORLD can earn a decent living off tennis at one time. Because they’ll pick basketball or football instead, and who could blame them?
If we continue the way we’re headed, tennis will devolve into a sport that only independently wealthy players can succeed at…and I’m pretty sure nobody wants to see that.So, yes. Djokovic and Pospisil are (correctly) waving their hands in alarm, but they’re bringing a fire extinguisher when the whole house is ablaze. Time to break out the tankers and hoses.
* Slams also have plenty of cash, but they aren’t under the ATP’s purview, so they aren’t germane to discussion.
** Most Masters events have 64 player draws. Indian Wells and Miami draws are 96 players.
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