The figures the sport quotes about its own economics were collected in 2013 — a new peer-reviewed study is the first serious attempt to update them.
This article was published with support from our partner, SpicyCreator.
When the International Tennis Federation last published a full review of the professional game’s finances, it counted the players who finished the year in profit. The answer was 336 men and 253 women.
Five hundred and eighty-nine people, worldwide, across both tours, in a sport played in almost every country on earth.
That number has been quoted in tennis journalism ever since. It is also more than a decade old, and the study behind it has never been repeated at the same scale — which means the sport has spent twelve years arguing about its own economics using a snapshot taken in 2013.
What the 2013 review actually measured
The ITF’s headline threshold — the ranking at which prize money starts covering costs — was placed around 330 in the world for men.
Two qualifiers travel with that number and are usually dropped. It was calculated for men competing in North America, and it excluded the cost of coaching. A player’s coach is among the largest line items in a professional season, so the most-cited break-even figure in tennis is a break-even figure for a player travelling without one.
The same review put annual expenses at roughly $39,000 for a male player, excluding team costs, and found the top 50 men — the top 1% of the ranked population — taking 60% of a total men’s prize pool of $162 million.
None of this was hidden. It has simply been compressed, over years of retelling, into a single round number detached from what it counted.
The first serious update
A study accepted this year in the Elsevier journal Social Sciences & Humanities Open takes a different route to the same question.
Rather than surveying a season, Katharina Schoettl and colleagues at Seeburg Castle University, the DHGS German University of Health and Sport, and the University of Applied Management tracked a cohort: the top 100 junior players of 2008, born between 1990 and 1993, followed to the end of their playing careers.
Two findings stand out.
The break-even ranking, on their analysis, sits at approximately 150 on the ATP and WTA lists — considerably higher up the ladder than the older figure, though the two are not measuring quite the same thing.
And of those hundred elite juniors — the best of their generation, the group most likely to succeed — only 32 to 34% ended their careers with a positive financial balance. Two-thirds of the most promising teenagers in world tennis spent more on the sport than they took out of it.
The authors also note that men sustained longer careers than women in this cohort, which they attribute partly to the greater earnings available on the ATP circuit outside the Grand Slams.
Why the two numbers differ
They are answering different questions, and the difference is instructive.
The federation’s review asked how many players finished a given season in profit. The cohort study asked how many players, over an entire career, came out ahead. A player can clear expenses in a strong year and still retire at a lifetime loss, having spent five seasons climbing and two paying for injuries.
Nor do they cost the same things. Excluding coaching, as the 2013 figure did, moves the threshold a long way down the rankings. Include it, and the ladder gets much steeper.
The honest summary is that tennis does not have one break-even point. It has a range that shifts by well over a hundred ranking places depending on what you count, and the sport’s public conversation has settled on whichever number suits the argument being made.
The direction of travel
One trend line from the older analysis has not been contradicted since.
Adjusted for inflation, prize money on the ATP’s Challenger circuit — the tier where players ranked roughly 100 to 250 compete — had fallen 25% over the preceding six years. That is the level immediately below the main tour, the one players must pass through, and its real value was going backwards while the sport reported record revenues.
The distribution underneath is equally lopsided. The ITF estimated that the 4,978 men who won some prize money but sat outside the top 1% averaged a little over $13,000 for the year. Meanwhile a player ranked high enough for direct entry to all four Grand Slams could lose in the first round at every one of them and still collect around $130,000.
The gap between those two figures is not a gradient. It is a step, and it falls at the point where a player gains automatic entry to four tournaments.
What nobody has measured
The most striking thing about researching this subject is how thin the evidence base remains.
There is one federation review from over a decade ago, one newly accepted cohort study covering a hundred juniors from a single year, and a great deal of anecdote. The authors of the new study say as much: systematic empirical evidence on individual profitability is limited, and most of what exists comes from practitioner accounts and player statements rather than data.
That matters, because the policy arguments now running through the sport — over Grand Slam prize money, over Challenger funding, over how much the tours redistribute — are being conducted on a factual basis that would not survive scrutiny in most industries.
The new study ends with proposals: flatter prize money in early rounds, travel grants for players ranked 150 to 300, better media rights sharing at lower-tier events. Whether any of those are the right answer is arguable. What is not arguable is that the sport should be able to say, with current numbers, how many of its professionals can afford to be professionals.
At the moment the best available answer is a count taken in 2013.
Ugh. I have the strong impression that tennis, like most other things, has become a cash cow for CEOs and other behind-the-scenes fat cats.
It would help immensely also if more of a tournament’s prize money went to the first half of competitions than is currently the case. I think the prize money for winning the tournaments is obscenely high compared to the money for early-round tennis; and that tier of players is already making megabucks outside of prize money.