Jannik Sinner and Novak Djokovic have withdrawn from the Montreal Masters 1000, scheduled for 2–13 August. Sinner said the decision was necessary to protect his health; Djokovic’s withdrawal was attributed to workload management. Carlos Alcaraz will also miss the event, having been sidelined for months by a wrist problem. [1][2]
These withdrawals can be presented as yet another consequence of an overcrowded calendar. But while that explanation may be convincing in Alcaraz’s case—and that is hardly good news —it is not enough: every tournament takes time and wears players down; Grand Slams, moreover, last two weeks and are played over the best of five sets.
The more interesting question is this: why can a champion regard one Masters 1000—or even more than one—as expendable, but never a Grand Slam? Why has Sinner given up the theoretical chance to become the first player in history to win all nine Masters 1000 titles in the same year, apparently so that he can try to win the US Open again?
The answer is not only in the points. It lies in the way the Grand Slams concentrate three forms of value that the Masters spread across the entire season: prestige, money and visibility.
Points Explain the Rankings, Not a Player’s Legacy
In 2026, a Grand Slam awards 2,000 points to the winner and a Masters 1000 awards 1,000. [3] It does not follow, however, that a Grand Slam is simply worth twice as much.
A player who won all nine Masters would collect 9,000 points. If he also reached the quarter-finals at all four Grand Slams, he would add another 1,600, taking his total to 10,600. Depending on his rivals’ results, that tally could put him in contention for the No. 1 ranking even without a Grand Slam title.
The rankings add up a player’s results over a rolling 52-week window. On their own, they do not decide which achievements alter a player’s standing in the sport.
Caroline Wozniacki’s career illustrates the distinction. The Dane reached No. 1 in October 2010 and spent 67 weeks at the top of the rankings before winning her first Grand Slam, at the 2018 Australian Open. That victory returned her to No. 1 and brought her career total to 71 weeks at the summit. [4]
Wozniacki had already been the tour’s most consistent player. Yet her victory in Australia changed the story of her career: it did not merely add 2,000 points; it removed the main reservation that had always accompanied assessments of her achievements.
That is the limit of using points to explain the supremacy of the Grand Slams. The rankings can certify that a player has been the most consistent in the world. A Grand Slam confers a different status: champion of one of the events through which tennis writes its history.
Djokovic Is a Special Case—and That Is Precisely Why He Is Revealing
Novak Djokovic is in the final stage of a career in which he has already achieved everything a player can achieve at Masters level, in the rankings and at the ATP Finals. His approach to scheduling cannot serve as a model for the entire tour. But it can reveal what ultimately matters to an elite player. Once the need to build a ranking, demonstrate consistency and round out his résumé has fallen away, the events that retain the greatest value are the Grand Slams.
Prestige: a Seductive Word. But Not the Whole Story.
Prestige is not directly observable in the way points or prize money are. Some of its economic consequences, however, can be measured: in the returns of companies that associate their brands with an athlete, in sponsorship contracts and in the share of a player’s income earned off the court.
A study published in the International Journal of Sport Finance analysed 260 matches played by Rafael Nadal between 24 October 2007 and 17 March 2012; 85 were Grand Slam matches. The authors compared Nadal’s results with the aggregate daily returns of Banesto and Mapfre, the two publicly listed companies that sponsored him over the same period. [5]
In the estimated model, moving from non-Slam tournaments to Grand Slams initially produced a positive jump: a Grand Slam victory had a greater impact on returns than a win at a lower-tier event. The effect did not increase indefinitely, however. As Grand Slam prize money rose, the positive reaction tended to diminish; in the authors’ interpretation, shareholders may also have anticipated a rise in the cost of keeping the athlete under contract.
The finding, then, is not that every Grand Slam victory automatically increases a sponsor’s value more than the one before it. It is narrower: the model reveals an economic discontinuity between Grand Slams and non-Slam tournaments, before expectations of higher contractual costs come into play.
The limitation is explicit and important. The sample covers one athlete, one sport and two companies, which were also combined into an aggregate index. The study cannot yield a universal multiplier for the commercial value of a Grand Slam.
A second paper, published in Marketing Letters, uses a much larger sample: 1,068 events in tennis, golf and athletics held between 2001 and 2014. Victory is associated with positive and statistically significant market returns for sponsoring apparel brands; the reaction is also more favourable after a win than after a runner-up finish. The same effect does not emerge as clearly for equipment brands. [6]
This study strengthens the general proposition that winning creates value for companies that link their brands to an athlete. It does not, however, establish the specific value of a Grand Slam relative to a Masters 1000: its tennis sample includes Grand Slams, ATP 500s, Masters 1000s, the Olympics and the Finals, but the main analysis does not construct an adequate comparison among those categories.
Emma Raducanu’s case provides documentary evidence of a different kind. In the 12 months following her victory at the 2021 US Open, Forbes estimated her total earnings at $21.1 million: $18 million off the court and $3.1 million on it. [7] The estimate does not allow every dollar to be causally attributed to the New York title, but it shows how quickly the economic value generated outside the tournament can overtake prize money after a Grand Slam victory.
The announcement naming Raducanu a Porsche ambassador makes the connection explicit. The press release opens by recalling that she had made history at the US Open as the first qualifier to win a Grand Slam, and immediately goes on to announce that she would become one of the brand’s global faces in women’s tennis. [8]
A corporate press release does not measure the value of the contract, nor does it prove that the Grand Slam was its sole cause. It does, however, document that Porsche publicly presented Raducanu’s historic New York victory as central to the commercial image on which its choice of her rested.
The available evidence therefore differs in scope. Studies of stock-market returns show that victories can transfer value to sponsors; the Nadal paper also identifies a stronger initial effect for Grand Slams, although in a very small sample; the Raducanu case shows how sharply off-court income can rise after a major title and how explicitly a brand may link its decision to that victory.
They do not measure prestige in the abstract. They measure some of its economic consequences.
Grand Slam Prize Money Does Not Track Ranking Points.
In 2025, the winner of the Canadian Masters received $1,124,380. That same year, the US Open champion received $5 million. [9][10]
The ratio is 4.45 to 1.
This is not a comparison between unlike total prize pools—the Grand Slam includes men’s and women’s events, qualifying, doubles and other competitions—but between the same sporting achievement: winning the men’s singles title.
The gap is less extreme, but still substantial, on European clay.
In 2026, the winner of the Italian Open received €1,007,165. The Roland Garros champion received €2.8 million: 2.78 times as much. [11][12]
This is not a ratio that always holds, nor a universal average valid for every tournament. But it establishes an order of magnitude and reveals a clear pattern. Winning a Grand Slam can pay almost three to more than four times as much as winning a Masters held in the same part of the season.
The points merely double; the prize money can be nearly five times as high, and sometimes higher still.
Yes, it is obvious. But then, perhaps a player’s priorities are obvious too.
The Masters Are Rich, but Their Value Is Dispersed.
It does not follow from these figures that the Masters 1000 pay poorly in absolute terms.
In 2024, Sinner received the following from the Masters system:
$3,890,361 in tournament prize money;
$1,333,770 in profit-sharing payments;
$2,494,266 from the fixed bonus tied to the Masters and the ATP Finals.
The total was $7,718,397. [13]
Nine tournaments, once profit sharing and the annual bonus are included, can therefore yield more than a Grand Slam victory. But that is precisely the point: to capture that value, a player must commit to the entire Masters schedule.
The actual choice facing a player is almost never between “playing every Masters” and “playing one Grand Slam.” It is whether to enter this particular Masters, at this particular point in the calendar, or preserve time and physical condition for the next objective.
The Masters system is economically significant as a whole. Precisely because its value comes from many events, an individual tournament can become expendable without the player abandoning the system altogether.
The Sinner Case: One Record Is Not Necessarily Worth a Season
Sinner’s withdrawal from Canada is particularly significant because the Italian still had a chance to win all nine Masters 1000 titles in the same year. He had already won the first five—Indian Wells, Miami, Monte Carlo, Madrid and Rome—and that is precisely why the withdrawal was presented as the abandonment of a possible historic record. [2] Yet that record is not formally recognised.
Winning every Masters 1000 in a single season would be an extraordinary achievement. It is not, however, an institutionalised goal like the Grand Slam. There is the Career Golden Masters—the achievement of winning all nine Masters over the course of a career—and there is a record for the most Masters titles won in one season. But there is no equivalent of the Grand Slam for winning every Masters in the same year. [23]
That changes the risk calculation. A missed Grand Slam title can remain the central void in a career. Djokovic knows something about that. Missing one Masters in an otherwise dominant season may prevent a record, but it does not deprive a player of a distinction by which tennis ordinarily judges the greatness of a career.
For Sinner, then, protecting himself does not mean giving up one of tennis’s fundamental objectives. It may mean preventing the pursuit of a statistical Masters record from compromising the tournaments by which his season will truly be judged.
Sinner and the Rest: Two Kinds of Risk.
The issue is not only Sinner. It concerns the way the Masters expose players to two distinct forms of risk: retirement during a match and withdrawal before a match.
A study published in 2024 in the European Journal of Sport Science analysed mid-match retirements at ATP and WTA tournaments. In the ATP data, the Masters had the highest incidence of retirements: 1.03 per 1,000 games played, 25% more than at Grand Slams. In the model, then, Masters events recorded the highest rate of mid-match retirements. [24]
This figure concerns matches that began but were not completed. It is the problem most closely associated with injury or physical breakdown during a tournament.
A second study, published in 2025 in the Montenegrin Journal of Sports Science and Medicine, instead analysed walkovers in men’s professional tennis between 1973 and 2019. A walkover is different: the match is not played because one of the two players withdraws before taking the court. Here too, the Masters were the most affected category: 5.53 walkovers per 1,000 scheduled matches, compared with 2.12 at Grand Slams. Relative to Grand Slams, the cumulative incidence of walkovers at the Masters was 2.61 times higher. [25]
The known causes of walkovers were primarily physical: 28.67% of cases with an identified cause were attributed to injury, 7.77% to illness and 2.50% to personal reasons. The limitation is that no cause was recorded in 61.01% of cases. The figures should therefore not be overstated: not every walkover can be turned into a diagnosis. But they do document that pre-match absences are far more common at the Masters than at Grand Slams. [25]
These studies do not yet isolate the new 12-day format. Their data run only through 2019, so they primarily depict the tour before the widespread expansion of longer Masters events. They do, however, establish the baseline: even under the old system, the Masters were already the category in which both mid-match retirements and pre-match walkovers were more common than at Grand Slams. [24][25]
More recent figures for the new format indicate that the problem has not disappeared. In 2025, The Guardian counted 41 retirements and walkovers across the season’s ATP Masters 1000 events, including nine in Madrid and eight in Cincinnati. TennisTemple also reported that Shanghai 2025 had already recorded seven withdrawals or forfeits before the round of 16, placing it among the Masters tournaments most affected by absences since 1990. [26][27]
The longer format, then, does not necessarily reduce the burden. It changes its form. A shorter Masters compresses more matches into fewer days and may increase the risk of physical breakdown during the tournament. A longer Masters provides more match-free days, but extends the time spent away from home, keeps players in tournament mode for longer and leaves less genuine space for recovery, training and life outside the tour.
The players’ criticisms point in the same direction. News agencies widely reported Stefanos Tsitsipas’s objections to two-week Masters tournaments: in his view, players are not given enough time to recover or to do the intensive off-court work required to stay fit over a long season. Alexander Zverev likewise distinguishes between a day without a match and genuine rest: resting means being at home, not waiting in another city for the next round. [28]
Something similar happened after Sinner’s run through Monte Carlo, Madrid and Rome. In Paris, against Cerúndolo, he suffered a rather alarming physical collapse that was never fully explained.
Many commentators attributed that drop-off to overtraining [29]
And it is hard to see why what applies to Sinner should not also apply, perhaps to a different degree, to other players.
For a player in Sinner’s position, then, Canada can become expendable not because it is poor or irrelevant, but because it belongs to a category of tournaments that creates value only through repeated and physically costly participation. Chasing every Masters can build a record. Protecting the Grand Slams can protect the season.
Nine Events in Eight Months (and Yes, Four of Those Months Are Grand Slam Months…)
In 2026, the ATP calendar includes nine Masters 1000 events; seven use the expanded 12-day format. [14] They are Indian Wells, Miami, Monte Carlo, Madrid, Rome, Canada, Cincinnati, Shanghai and Paris.
A tenth Masters, in Saudi Arabia, could be added in 2028. [15]
The comparison with the Grand Slams is not only about the total number of competition days. It is about the fragmentation of the season.
The four Grand Slams are four clearly identifiable objectives. The Masters, by contrast, occupy several blocks in the calendar:
Indian Wells and Miami;
Monte Carlo, Madrid and Rome;
Canada and Cincinnati;
Shanghai;
Paris.
Each block means departures, continent-hopping, time-zone changes, acclimatisation, hotels and weeks during which players cannot simply go home. Even when two tournaments are part of the same trip, players still have to travel, recover and recalibrate their preparation.
Grand Slams demand a greater sporting effort within a single event. The Masters require a more diffuse commitment throughout the year.
This difference changes the real economic value of the two systems. It is not enough to ask how much the nine Masters pay in total: we must ask how many events, journeys and segments of the season are required to collect that money.
Canada’s Particular Problem
Canada occupies almost two weeks immediately before Cincinnati and the US Open. Sinner, Djokovic and Alcaraz (perhaps) are expected to play the tournament in Ohio as a warm-up for New York. [2]
That proximity makes the opportunity cost more obvious.
The problem is not that Canada lasts as long as a Grand Slam or demands the same effort: it does not. The problem is that the extended format has increased the Masters event’s time cost without bringing its economic and symbolic value any closer to that of a Grand Slam.
The more space the tournament occupies, the more valuable the alternatives become: recovering, training, spending time at home or choosing to play only Cincinnati before New York.
What Skipping a Masters Really Costs
A mandatory Masters cannot be skipped without consequences.
The fixed Masters 1000–ATP Finals bonus pool for 2026 amounts to $21,537,813. The rules state that, for a first absence from a mandatory Masters, a player’s bonus is normally reduced by 25%. The reduction falls to 12.5% if the player carries out an on-site promotional activity, but no more than $200,000 can be recouped through promotional activities. [16]
For the player ranked first in the bonus-pool standings, the fixed component alone is set at $3,918,315.
Twenty-five per cent of that figure is approximately $979,579.
This is an illustrative calculation, not the loss that Sinner—or any other player—will necessarily incur. Final positions are determined at the end of the season; the bonus also includes a variable component calculated per point; and exceptions under the rules may apply.
The scale of the incentive is nevertheless clear: the ATP has built a serious penalty into the system. But not one that, on its own, can erase the economic gap with a Grand Slam.
These figures do not, of course, prove that withdrawing is the mathematically optimal decision. The decisive piece of information is missing: how much playing in Canada changes a player’s probability of achieving a major result at the US Open. That probability cannot be measured publicly and varies from player to player.
The numbers do support a narrower conclusion: skipping a Masters can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, while winning the Grand Slam that follows can yield several million dollars more than winning the Masters. A withdrawal, therefore, is not economically irrational, even after the “fine” is taken into account.
The Scale of the Grand Slams Shows Up in Revenue
There is no complete, consistent and publicly available revenue series for the nine Masters 1000 events. Many are run by private companies or by organisations with different accounting boundaries. It is therefore impossible to state precisely that “the average Grand Slam earns X times as much as the average Masters.”
For the US Open, by contrast, audited USTA financial statements are available.
In 2024, the tournament generated $559.658 million in operating revenue. In the same document, costs attributed to the US Open—including depreciation, commitments and interest—amounted to $282.239 million. [17]
The arithmetic difference between those two lines is $277.419 million. It should not be described as the tournament’s net profit, because the consolidated financial statements include the federation’s other activities, expenses and financing arrangements. It does, however, show the scale of the economic value generated by the event.
The US Open’s “total player compensation” in 2024 was $75 million. Relative to the $559.658 million in operating revenue attributed to the tournament, that is approximately 13.4%. [18]
A Grand Slam does not necessarily dominate because it transfers an exceptionally high share of its revenue to players. It dominates because the underlying economic scale is enormous.
The Paradox: the Masters Share a Larger Slice
In 2024, the Masters 1000 events distributed an additional $18.3 million to players through profit sharing. The ATP formula divides equally between players and tournaments the category’s profits above the base prize-money level. [19]
According to Reuters, leading ATP and WTA events redistribute approximately 22% of revenue to players, while the estimated share at Grand Slams is closer to 15%. [20]
The economic hierarchy, then, cannot be explained by claiming that the Grand Slams share revenue more generously.
It is almost the opposite:
the Masters appear to share a larger percentage of a smaller pie; the Grand Slams share a smaller percentage of a much larger pie.
That is why both statements can be true:
the Masters have a more structured revenue-sharing system;
for an individual champion, winning a Grand Slam still produces far more money and sporting value on an entirely different scale.
The dispute that emerged in 2026 stems from this imbalance. Players are asking the Grand Slams for an immediate 16% share of revenue, rising to 22% by 2030. In July, Roland Garros became the first Grand Slam to put forward a formal revenue-sharing proposal, but no final agreement appears to have been reached. [21]
Why the Grand Slams Can Keep So Much
The Grand Slams are owned by or linked to the major national tennis institutions. Their revenues fund not only the tournaments themselves, but also facilities, federations, youth development and national programmes.
In 2025, the Lawn Tennis Association received a £48.613 million surplus from Wimbledon, equivalent to 90% of the Championships’ distributable surplus. The LTA is a non-profit organisation and uses its income to fund British tennis. [22]
This does not settle the dispute over the share owed to players. It does, however, explain why the Grand Slams resist adopting a model identical to the ATP’s: for the federations, increasing the percentage allocated to players means reducing the resources available for their other activities.
The real argument, then, is not between greedy organisers and rich players. It is a dispute over who should benefit from the rents generated by the four events that command the greatest share of tennis’s attention.
Put It This Way
The Masters 1000s are not minor tournaments. They offer ranking points, prize money and opportunities capable of shaping a season. Taken together, they form one of the tour’s economic and sporting pillars. But their value is dispersed: nine events, repeated travel, months of preparation and a level of physical continuity that few players can sustain without eventually deciding where to ease off.
The Grand Slams work differently. In two weeks, they concentrate what the rest of the calendar produces cumulatively: money, attention, memory and prestige. That is why a player can forgo a Masters without giving up on his season, whereas a missed Grand Slam can linger for years as the great opportunity lost.
At the beginning of this journey, Valérie Tétreault asked why so many champions could regard an important tournament such as the Canadian Open as expendable. Perhaps her “fateful wrath” also has something to do with the way such decisions are communicated—and with the assurances given beforehand.
The answer is that, in tennis as in the Odyssey, not every port of call carries the same weight.
The Masters are rich, difficult and necessary stages along the way. But the Grand Slams are Ithaca: the destination towards which champions set their course, even when reaching it means leaving a few ports unexplored along the journey.
Sources
[1] ATP Tour, “Sinner, Djokovic withdraw from Montreal”, 24 July 2026.
[2] Reuters, “Organisers raise concerns over late pullouts after Sinner, Djokovic skip Montreal event”, 25 July 2026.
[3] ATP Tour, “FAQ about PIF ATP Rankings”.
[4] WTA, “Legend Bio: Caroline Wozniacki”, 14 April 2026.
[5] Juan Luis Nicolau and María Jesús Santa María, “The Effect of Endorsers’ Sports Results on Their Sponsors’ Performance: The Shark Fin Effect”, International Journal of Sport Finance, vol. 19, no. 3, 2024, pp. 152–163. Open-access accepted manuscript. DOI.
[6] Dirk F. Gerritsen and Saskia van Rheenen, “The Value of Winning: Endorsement Returns in Individual Sports”, Marketing Letters, vol. 28, 2017, pp. 371–384.
[7] Forbes, “Highest-Paid Tennis Players 2022: New Generation Taking Over From Federer And Serena”, 25 August 2022. Figures are Forbes estimates before taxes and agents’ fees.
[8] Porsche Newsroom, “Emma Raducanu becomes new Porsche Brand Ambassador”, 22 March 2022.
[9] ATP Tour, “2025 Toronto tennis prize money”.
[10] US Open, “2025 US Open prize money sets record for largest purse in tennis history”, 6 August 2025.
[11] ATP Tour, “2026 Rome tennis prize money”.
[12] ATP Tour, “2026 Roland Garros prize money”, 19 May 2026.
[13] ATP Tour, “ATP finalises distribution of record $18.3 million profit-sharing payout”, 3 October 2025.
[14] ATP Tour, “2026 ATP Tour calendar announced”, 4 February 2025.
[15] ATP Tour, “Saudi Arabia will become the 10th ATP Masters 1000 host”, 23 October 2025.
[16] ATP Tour, 2026 ATP Official Rulebook, section 1.08.H.
[17] USTA, United States Tennis Association Incorporated and Affiliates — Consolidated Financial Statements, financial year 2024, p. 6.
[18] US Open, “2024 US Open prize money will be largest purse in tennis history”, 7 August 2024.
[19] ATP Tour, “Players earn record $18.3 million through ATP Masters 1000 profit sharing”, 14 August 2025.
[20] Reuters, “Players accuse Grand Slams of ignoring concerns as tensions rise in Paris”, 22 May 2026.
[21] The Guardian, “French Open becomes first grand slam to offer players share of tournament revenue”, 21 July 2026.
[22] Lawn Tennis Association, Finance and Governance Report 2025, p. 21.
[23] BNP Paribas Open, “Sinner Golden Masters”.
[24] Lia Oliver, Ernest Baiget, Jordi Cortés, Joan Martínez, Miguel Crespo and Martí Casals, “Retirements of professional tennis players in ATP and WTA tour events”, European Journal of Sport Science, 2024. DOI.
[25] Martí Casals, Victoria Peña, Bernat de Pablo, Rodrigo Ampuero, Jordi Cortés and Ernest Baiget, “Epidemiology and Determinants of Walkovers in Professional Men’s Tennis Tournaments from 1973 to 2019”, Montenegrin Journal of Sports Science and Medicine, 2025.
[26] The Guardian, “‘You want a player to die?’ Heat is on tennis after players wilt in extreme conditions”, 8 October 2025.
[27] TennisTemple, “7 withdrawals before even the round of 16: the 2025 Shanghai edition sets a sad record”, 6 October 2025.
[28] Reuters, “Tsitsipas questions ATP’s ‘backward move’ to make Masters events two weeks long”, 7 November 2024.
[29] Scientifictennis, IL MURO DI SINNER, 2 July 2026.
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