Tennis leaders of ATP and WTA Tours present the Grand Slams with a new plan to fix the sport

In April 2024, the four biggest tournaments in tennis, the Grand Slams, presented a plan to restructure the sport. Dubbed the “premium tour,” it included Wimbledon and the Australian, French and U.S. Opens, alongside ten more top-level tournaments run through the ATP (men’s) and WTA (women’s) tours. It included doubling prize money for the top 300 men; quadrupling it for the top 300 women and accelerating equal pay across all events, funded through a partial pooling of the Grand Slams’ lucrative media rights.

It never went much further. But just under a year later, the tours have played a Uno reverse card by presenting the Grand Slams with a plan of their own. Andrea Gaudenzi, the chairman of the men’s ATP Tour, and Steve Simon, his counterpart at the WTA Tour, last week presented a 23-page deck to the four Grand Slams, just as the Professional Tennis Players Association (PTPA) was finalizing the antitrust lawsuit that it filed Tuesday March 18 against the tours and other tennis governing bodies.

That lawsuit, with player plaintiffs named alongside the PTPA, labeled the four Grand Slams as “co-conspirators” in a series of alleged anticompetitive practices, from prize money suppression to excluding exhibition events from the tennis world rankings. Facing a revolt from the sport’s nascent player organization, the leaders of the men’s and women’s tennis tours have joined forces to try to bring its long-battling factions — the ATP and WTA, the four Grand Slams, and the owners of the other top tournaments — under one giant governing and corporate umbrella.

The ATP and WTA deck focuses on the areas that nearly all parties agree on. Tennis’ fragmented structure weakens its ability to sell media rights and sponsorships; the season is too long and too disparate; the sport’s infrastructure does not financially support enough players sufficiently.

Its substance is familiar. Four Grand Slams. Ten top-level mixed events. A pooling of media rights and sponsorship revenues to fund it all. And a new board structure that would oversee sporting matters, with representatives for the Grand Slams, the tournaments and ATP and WTA players.

“It all starts with top players at premium events — driving rivalries and elevating the sport’s biggest stages,” the deck says. The owners of the 1,000, 500, and 250-level tournaments below Grand Slams, named for the ranking points they award to their winners, have not been included in the proposal’s formation.

The deck proposes a calendar structured as follows:

Four Grand Slams.

10 ATP Masters 1,000 events and 10 WTA 1,000 events, with the new, tenth ATP event to be held in February. The venue is almost certain to be Saudi Arabia.

16 ATP 500 events and 17 WTA 500 events, to be held in concurrent weeks.

A plan to reduce the number of third-tier ATP and WTA 250 events through “buybacks,” allowing the tours to reacquire the license for an unspecified number of the 30 ATP and 21 WTA events.

The inclusion of the 500s and some 250s is a significant diversion from the Grand Slams’ plan, which proposed incorporating those tournaments into a developmental tour, through which players would ascend to the “premium” tour. The calendar also promises “improved regional flow” and an “extended off season,” but does not discuss specifics.

The sporting structure would be overseen by a new board. There would be three representatives for the four Grand Slams; two reps for the 1,000 tournaments and one rep with the responsibility of representing 500 and 250 tournaments simultaneously. The International Tennis Federation, the world governing body that oversees national team tournaments and the Olympic competition, is not included.

There would be six player seats, three for the ATP and three for the WTA, with one chair. The deck uses photos of top players, including Novak Djokovic, who is on the PTPA executive committee, and Iga Swiatek and Carlos Alcaraz, who have recently criticized the tournament schedule and the number of mandatory events that players have to play.

The organizations that run the four majors were contacted for comment. None of them responded prior to publication of this story.

Like Gaudenzi and Simon, the Grand Slams are frustrated and disappointed with the lack of progress toward reform, according to a person involved with one of the four organizations who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

The person said the proposal from Simon and Gaudenzi had been received and in their view did not go far enough. The Slams’ priorities for change, they said, would focus on a premium product with fewer tournaments and a substantially longer off-season.

Another person who has been in contact with the Grand Slams, who also was not authorized to disclose confidential discussions, said the idea that the four Grand Slams might only receive three seats on the board was not well-received.

A third person briefed on Simon and Gaudenzi’s proposal said the proposed construction of the board was aimed at balancing representation while keeping the board from getting too large.

Tennis’ annual revenue exceeds $2.2 billion (£1.7m) but its sources are split, both by who brings it in and how. The Grand Slams’ proportion of that revenue (over 50 percent) dwarfs that of the ATP (over 30) and WTA Tour (under 10), largely thanks to their more lucrative media rights and the sponsorships that come with it, as well as the volume of tickets they can sell to fans who want to see the best players in the world.

Go further down the rungs of tournament prestige and revenue drops while its proportions change; the less lucrative the tournament, the lower the proportion of revenue that comes from media and sponsorships. The split revenues also harm the various bodies’ negotiating positions in media rights, because they are effectively competing against each other. Selling one package would maximize competition from bidders and so, the theory goes, drive up the price.

Gaudenzi and Simon’s solution is what the deck calls “commercial aggregation.” In practice means incorporating a company called Tennis Ventures which would include the commercial interests of the ATP, WTA and the four Slams. The deck says that the Slams would retain control over their domestic media rights, but international media rights — and data and streaming rights — would be packaged. The streaming piece could be critical, as sports media faces a contraction in the value of traditional television rights and contracts come up for renewal.

A united company of this kind has been a key plan for the ATP and WTA, but any merger between the two organizations has yet to be finalized. Adding the Grand Slams would require their willingness to give up some of the power attached to their media rights. Thus far the Grand Slams have struggled to agree on how they might one day share their lucrative rights solely with each other.

On the remuneration side of things, the ATP and WTA pledge to “give players their fair share.” They say this will be achieved by creating “a profit-sharing model where players and tournaments share in new value created.”

The proportion of revenue that players get from the tournaments in which they play was a major issue outlined in the PTPA’s lawsuit. Prize money at the four Grand Slams is around 15 to 20 percent of their revenue, with similar figures at ATP and WTA 1,000, 500 and 250 events. In other major sports, including the NBA, NFL, MLB and even another individual sport such as golf, that proportion gets as high as roughly 50 percent.

One of the major ways the proposal says it will increase player revenues is through bringing the Grand Slams into the “bonus pool,” which already exists on the ATP Tour for 1,000-level events.

Per the ATP, the “collective profits generated by the tournaments above on-site prize money” are split 50-50 between the event in question and the players. There is a separate bonus pool for the best-performing players at ATP 500 events.

Adding a bonus pool from the much more lucrative Grand Slams would make a significant financial difference, and the majors have also been asked to contribute to player welfare initiatives and the circuits that sit below the main ATP and WTA tours. “This is ultimately about creating a sustainable ecosystem,” Gaudenzi and Simon state in the document. “Where players have transparency over the financials. Where your wins are their wins.

“Getting us away from the endless cycle of negotiations and strained relationships, to a place where players are working with you as vested partners.”

Such a system would rely on the Grand Slams sacrificing some of their financial power for what the tours frame as the greater good.

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

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