What tennis players really want from a lawsuit against their sport

Tuesday Tennis Antitrust Legal issued by the Professional Tennis Players Association (PTPA) and player claimants from the entire men's and women's game as the largest administrative bodies in tennis as a cartel and accused them of running a corrupt, insulting and illegal system.

The central allegations in the document Are that the defendants, the ATP and WTA tours and the International Tennis Federation (ITF), determining prize money, suppressing competition, subject players to a punishing schedule and lock them up through mandatory tournaments and ranking points. The International Tennis Integrity Agency, which investigates antidoping and anti-corruption in sport, is accused of questionable research practices. The four Grand Slams are mentioned as co-samenwers.

In a conference call on Tuesday, the PTPas -executing director Ahmad Nassar explained what the claimants expect to happen now: I just expect them to follow the law, he said.

The four defendants all issued statements on Tuesday in response to the court case. The ATP went on the counterattack: while ATP has remained aimed at delivering reforms that benefit players at multiple levels, the PTPA has consistently chosen division and distraction through incorrect information about progress. Five years after its foundation in 2020, the PTPA has difficulty establishing a meaningful role in tennis, so that his decision to take legal action is not surprising at the moment.

The WTA called the PTPas promotion both regrettable and misled, while the ITF and ITia hit a more neutral tone.

One of the central concerns of the lawsuit is money, in particular the part of the income that players receive from the tournaments in which they play. Price money at the four Grand Slams floats about 15 to 20 percent of their turnover, with comparable figures at ATP and WTA 1,000, 500 and 250 events (the other tournaments on the tennis circuit). In other large sports, including NBA, NFL, MLB and even another individual sport such as Golf, that share becomes up to 50 percent.

Another is the 11 -month schedule, the players of which have said the sport up and down, is too long and too worldwide. Other complaints in the court case are in a revealing Venn -chart between sporting organizational principles and antitrust principles. Receiving ranking points for some tournaments and not others to prevent a ranking system from showing readable fans who do well and that is not, and to draw attention to events that produce the most income and eyeballs for tennis, are all sensible strategies, but they could all be displayed if they are contrary to the anti -native of the antitute.

Likewise, the absence of top players from the list of claimants can ensure that the lawsuit is weakened in the eyes of sporting prestige or relevance, but that is meaningless in the eyes of a court: it is the content of the complaints that are important, not who makes them.

During the Call Conference, Nassar and James Quinn emphasized, one of the lawyers who work on the suit and an old antitrust process, emphasized that the goal is not to destroy or even re -destroy the structure of tennis. It is implicitly an invitation for discussion and resolution that is more favorable for players, in contrast to discovering what judges in New York City, London and Brussels will be of tennis compliance with antitrust legislation.

Novak Djokovic and Vasek Pospisil together founded the PTPA; Djokovic is not mentioned as a claimant in the lawsuit, but Pospisil does. (Brenton Edwards / AFP via Getty images)

The emphasis on lawsuits on tennis management also raises questions about the extent to which the issues set out are fundamental importance for the sport, instead of a consequence of how it is being done.

The defendants use ranking points, says the court case, mainly to force players to participate in their tournaments to the exclusion of other competitive tennis events.

Instead of a merit -based ranking system driven by how players perform compared to other players, how often they win, and the scale of their victories in competitions, the ranking point system rewards how often they play at events on the tours, says it.

Players can play more tournaments than others, which gives them more opportunities to build their rankings, and Tweaks can be made for the prevalence of compulsory events, but it is difficult to claim that there are many players in the tennis history who have refused their rightful place in the sport because of an unfair ranking.

Power and results are rewarded. Many players are robbed of the level of attention or compliments they deserved, but in an individual sport a few selected stars will generally take a large part of the oxygen in the room and thereby the money that it entails. Players will always want a ranking system and need to offer a structure with which the best can play at the most glamorous events. In 2022, Wimbledon was unabated in the eyes of the world even though no ranking points were granted, but the competitors were still there because they had earned their status through that system.

Regardless of the reforms of the schedule, only so many players can compete at any certain event. It is right that the 128 players should receive a larger piece of the income at the Grand Slams, but that is still only 128 players. Those who don't make it will still suffer. Compare that figure of 128, or 256 over the two singles, with something like the Football World Cups. More than 1,200 players gather in the United States, Mexico and Canada for the men's tournament in 2026. More tournaments with more prize money can offer more players more opportunities to play, but that would extend the schedule, whose length is an important complaining in the suit.

The ATP tour has introduced a program called Baseline that guarantees players an income that is stratified by ranking; If they do not reach a certain threshold by prize money, it will be topped up by the Tour. For players in the Top 250, that minimum is $ 100,000 (77,000), provided they play 15 events. The WTA does not have such a program.

Existing tournaments that are performed externally to the ATP and WTA tours, or are punished by them, but do not have ranking points (such as the Laver Cup), show a different limit to this strategy. Tournament income comes from ticket sales, mediaettes and sponsor offers. 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 next to them.

In the court case, the PTPA points to the fact that players are unfairly forbidden to play in non-tours sanctioned events in a way that illegally limits their earning power. That is difficult to argue, but those exhibition events want the biggest names; Increasing the number of them would not immediately correlate with more players who get similar opportunities. Six Kings Slam last year in Saudi Aarabia, where the winner received the biggest salary in tennis history, hardly any enriched fringe players.

Instead, it made the portfolios of the most successful and richest players on the Tour, including Djokovic, Jannik Sinner (who won the $ 6 million/4.7 m prize) and Carlos Alcaraz. To satisfy fans, media and sponsors, everyone who gains events wants to attract the biggest names, and not necessarily the players who can use the extra bump in income. PTPA figures about the Call Conference emphasized the importance of preventing players to sleep and scrape in cars; No reasonable person would claim that. The extent to which any improvement in the exchange of income from the lawsuit to players will drip into that bracket of the sport can still be seen.

Tennis players tolerate the cited anti-competitive activity by tennis boards for some time. If they can get a larger guaranteed share of income and a less mandatory schedule, they will probably still tolerate this. Fairer reward and planning for the players, including a good low season, would probably go a long way to satisfy the claimants in this case and extend the wider play brotherhood, even if many of the complaints in the court case extend further than this.

Most players have been quiet since the news from Tuesday fell, probably partly because the PTPas -rights cases details, both ATP and WTA players have to submit disputes with the tours for arbitration. Solving disputes in other ways, including by individual legal steps, can be contrary to the Tours Rulebooks. Since the tours are involved in an active legal matter, players may be more careful about their criticism.

And so for the Miami Open, a combined ATP and WTA 1,000 event, which started on Tuesday. It is one of the many of those tournaments that recently extended from a week to nearly two, in a format that did not go well with players or fans, but has brought the former more prize money. Giving and taking continues.

(Top photo: Patrick Hamilton / AFP via Getty images)