‘It is clear more needs to be done for lower end players for whom the rising costs of professional tennis have out-stripped prize money.”
Those were the words of the All England Club Chairman Phillip Brook, announcing prize money changes for Wimbledon 2012 to help qualifiers and first round losers.
So, I’ve made an effort to analyse the figures and see what conclusions can be drawn.
First things first, if you don’t like numbers, then go and grab some tea, open up the delightfully written The Next Point instead and enjoy his ability to merge words together in such a pleasing fashion.
What I’ve done here is to try and look at the ATP and Challenger tours in 2001 and 2011 to see the changes, and if claims that prize money hasn’t really gone up for the non-elite players in a decade.
If you are concerned (and you got this far), these figures exclude the World Team Cup and end of year Tour Championship, but do include the four Grand Slams. Before getting on to money figures, there is also the question of opportunites to earn.
Benoit Paire regrets not being ranked 96 a decade ago
A first analysis says the top players have it easier and those ranked in the 70-100 range especially, have it harder.
The elite get first round byes more often now at Masters series. While the amount of players in Masters Series events has remained exactly the same (544) the distribution has changed.
Six of the nine Masters series in 2001 had 64-man draws, with just two having 48. Miami has retained its unique 96 player entry.
In 2011, Indian Wells had 96 places, not 64, Miami was stuck on 96 – the other events all had 56 and Paris remained on 48. It means that Indian Wells takes up all the slack of the cutbacks in the other events. You better be ranked well early in the year to get your share of Masters loot.
The second is the increasing regularity of 28 man draws in 250 events, which give the top 4 seeds byes. They suffer in ranking points of course if they lose, but not in the cheques they draw.
These 28 man events look to have squeezed the opportunities again for lower ranked players, as the number of places per year on the main tour for players has dropped. In 2001, there were 3,016 spots in the draws that needed filling.
In 2011, that had fallen to 2,724. That’s 292 earning chances gone, all from the ATP Tour and not the Grand Slams. It’s an 11% drop in tour places. Not terribly impressive, you would have to say, from a player run tour. Think about that, and it makes sense why the lower ranked players have really targeted the Slams as a way to make more.
The tour had also shrunk by two events , with fewer tournaments in Europe and North America, and one extra in Asia.
So to prize money.
In 2001, the ATP Tour (excluding the four Slams, World Team Cup and End of Year finals) offered just over US$50mn in prize money to the players. Almost half of this, US$22.5mn, was in the nine Masters series. So to summarise broadly, there were a few more tournaments, but they tended to carry a lesser part of the cake, with the money filtered towards the top events.
The reality is it's often about the chase for these
By 2011, this picture has changed – the overall prize money was a little more than US$80mn, but the proportion in Masters series has shrunk to US$28mn (35%).
This partly comes down to the distorting effect of the substantial purses offered in the Middle East and China for 500 and 250 events, that also conveniently seem to cover the mandatory smaller events the top players have to feature in. So though there seems to be more money smeared around the non-elite events, it’s less spreading the wealth than at first glance.
Very few events have kept the same status or the same draw size over this 10 year period, so the comparisons are difficult, but we can look at San Jose, Rotterdam and s’Hertgoenbosch, which have kept the same size field, ranking points and rough place in the calendar.
First round losers in San Jose in 2001 picked up US$3,720, and in 2011, $5,210. In s’Hertogenbosch, the figures are US$3,720 and US$5,135. The figures for the event winners are $54,000 to US$92.000 in San Jose, and $54,000 to $90,538 in the Dutch event.
Again, we can see the money being sucked up to the top. The first round losers have a decade long rise of 40% in their money. The winner gets a 70% rise in San Jose. The figures are similar in Holland, so the gap between those who lose early and the winner has become more stretched over the decade.
In Rotterdam, the figures are more dramatic. Those first round losers have their money go up 40%, and the winner’s money has more than doubled. While the winners are particularly benefitting, the same also applies for semi-finalists, in that their percentage raise over the decade is more than the first round loser.
Juan Ignacio Chela lived through 2001-2011 on the ATP Tour, mostly surviving without Twitter
It’s also worth looking at the average income of those ranked in the lower reaches. The 70-79 ranked players took home an average of US$179,000 in 2001. In 2011, that figure was up to $300,000. In the 110-119 range the average was $127,839. Last year it had moved up to $149,074.
The figures, which are a fairly small and arbitary examples do gradually suggest the rich are getting rich, and those in the middle/lower reaches of the Tour are feeling the squeeze. Some of this, is of course, down to the fact their are currently four elite players continually making runs to the latter stages of the main tournaments, but this shouldn’t have quite the effect it seems to on those round the 70-120 mark.
So my very broad, conclusion, is, from these ATP Tour only figures, that the money is being slowly pulled to the top. When you look at the four Grand Slams, they have, firstly, moved closer to similar prize money across the four events. The worst of them has almost doubled prize money for first round losers. Winners money has moved at a greater pace, but the rate of change from quarter-finalists back is not as dramatic as in ATP events.
To summarise, if you believe, and you should, that being involved in the first round of the Wimbledon draw is a success, and not failure, then the figures do broadly back their case. It’s also ironic that the ITF-run Slam appear to have moved to address this issue before the “player run” Tour.
In the last of this series, calculator permitting, we hope to examine the Challenger Tour and see how prize money there stacks up.
