Written by: Ayat Sohoubah
Tennis is one of the most popular and global sports in the world. The ITF reported 106 million players worldwide, with data coming from more than 199 countries (Bowers, 2024). Still, only around 400 players currently make a living from tennis; this includes men’s and women’s singles, men’s and women’s doubles, and mixed doubles. Only the 150th-ranked ATP/WTA player ever breaks even on full lifetime investment (Fraser 2023; Schoettl et al. 2025). The bottom is feeling the brunt of the sport’s economics, but currently it is the top flight of players, who are already raking in the most, fighting the hardest for their share of revenue.
The current state of revenue sharing in tennis, between players themselves and the sport’s governing bodies, reflects both the competitive nature of the sport and the now-dated structures surrounding it. Looking at prize inequality, fragmented governance, and recent reform efforts helps explain why revenue sharing has become one of the defining economic issues in tennis.
Wealth inequality in tennis is at the core of the sport’s economy. Tennis tournaments are structured as single-elimination brackets, where players compete over several rounds to reach the final and win.
In every tennis tournament, the prize money rises steeply from round to round. In 2025, after qualifying, 128 participants in the first round at Roland Garros receive €78,000; the winner earns €2,550,000, and the runner-up receives €1,275,000 (ATP Staff, 2025). In tennis, it has been studied that these large prize-money differentials between one round and the next serve as incentives that maximize player effort and performance. As the tournament continues, these rewards fold; they are meant to drive greater on-court effort and performance. This is what is called “tournament theory,” and it is what tennis is built on. (Silverman & Seidel, 2011).
This structure is part of the reason behind tennis’s huge wealth inequality between its players. While the actual marginal differences between the skills of the top flight and the rest of the tour do exist, the take-home gap is many times larger. The top 50 players earned 60% of the total $162 million men’s prize pool. The top 5 players average nearly $8 million in earnings, while those ranked 100–200 often make only $50,000–$150,000 (ITF Pro Circuit Review Stage One: Data Analysis, 2014). It’s not like this in other pro sports. In MLB, for instance, the difference between the 1st and 32nd highest paid players was 62%. Again, contrast that with the enormous 1000% gap in tennis (Gauss & Shufeldt, 2024).
While there is an issue of player-to-player inequality, the way revenue is split between first-round players and the winner is overshadowed by the greater inequality between players and the governing bodies that control the sport.
Outside of the wealth gap between players, there is also a lack of revenue sharing between the governing bodies and the players themselves.
Tennis players receive a mere 17.5% of the $2.2 billion in revenue that the sport generates annually, while NFL players earn 47%, NBA players earn 50%, and Premier League players earn 61% (Gauss & Shufeldt, 2024). This is partly because there is no single unifying body for professional tennis. The four Grand Slams govern themselves, the International Tennis Federation manages the Olympics and Davis Cup, and the Association of Tennis Professionals manages the rest of the men’s tour. This is not even taking the Women’s Tennis Association into consideration.
This creates many problems for how revenue is shared between players and the multiple tennis organizations, and even more problems for revenue generation in tennis itself. Many believe that tennis is underperforming compared to other comparable sports. ATP suggested that tennis accounts for only 1.3% of worldwide sports broadcasting revenue (McCormick, 2020). There have been talks of combating some of these issues through a combination of the men’s and women’s tours, especially as a way to fix the clutter that is tennis marketing and broadcasting: WTA CEO Portia Archer commented on this possibility, saying that being able to acquire marketplace and media rights can best be done with the combination of both commercial assets of the tours, meaning their players (Sherman, 2025).
Revenue sharing, again, remains a problem in these deals. The primary sticking point in the negotiations remains how future revenues would be divided in a combined women’s and men’s tour. According to recently filed tax returns for the 2024 fiscal year, the WTA reported revenues of $142.6 million, less than half that of the men’s tour (Avila, 2025). It’s unknown if the tradeoff to each tour is worth the predicted shared market power.
Because tennis is governed by so many separate institutions, the problem is not only that players receive a relatively small share of revenue but also that the sport has no unified system for negotiating or distributing it.
This also raises the issue of independent contractor status and litigation strategy.Professional tennis players are classified as independent contractors, not employees. Unlike most sports, tennis lacks unified player representation; as a result, tennis players must negotiate individually with the many governing bodies of the sport. Players cannot rely on labor protections, so they have recently often turned to antitrust lawsuits to protect economic freedom and market access (Quigley, 2026). This puts professional tennis players in a strange predicament, where they aren’t able to successfully negotiate their share of revenue but also bear the full financial burden of being a global athlete.
That is part of why, despite being one of the most global sports in the world, many tennis players still struggle to actually make a living from it.
This is why there is currently an antitrust lawsuit filed by the Professional Tennis Players Association (PTPA), founded by a coalition of players headed by Novak Djokovic, to improve players’ conditions across several areas. It argues that the governing bodies of tennis have deprived both players and fans of the full benefits of competition while locking athletes into a system that harms both their finances and their bodies (Ecceleshare, 2026).
One attempted solution to these problems has come through the PTPA and broader player pressure for reform.The PTPA is currently at the head of efforts to reform tennis revenue. Its proposal projects total athlete compensation, including prize purses, bonus pool money, and pension contributions, for the top 300 men’s and women’s tennis players to double within three years and triple within a decade under the system. A minimum of eight weeks of offseason is also mentioned (Shcaefer, 2026).
Outside of the PTPA, players are also pushing for a greater share of revenue. Jannik Sinner has publicly criticized the Grand Slams for failing to act on player proposals about prize money and welfare, despite earlier discussions at Roland Garros and Wimbledon. His comments, delivered alongside a series of letters signed by many of the top men’s and women’s players, renewed pressure on the Slams to reform the sport. That letter called for three main changes: direct contributions to player welfare and benefit funds, an increase in prize money’s share of Grand Slam tournament revenue from about 16 percent to 22 percent by 2030; and greater player representation in decision-making (Ecceleshare, 2025).
Outdated systems can halt revenue sharing in tennis, a global sport with the potential to generate enormous wealth. The sport’s prize structure, fragmented governance, and weak player bargaining power have created an economy where its continued growth has begun to work to its detriment.
References
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