At Wimbledon, on Friday 3 July, a group of doubles players signed a statement that included a line built to last: they are not, they wrote, a “carnival sideshow”. A few days earlier, away from the courts, around fifty doubles specialists had met ATP executives to be briefed on the plan the Tour has in mind for them from 2028. According to Ben Rothenberg, reporting on Bounces, the plan is circulating internally as Product 28. They came away with a very clear picture: draws cut in half, from 32 to 16 pairs at Masters 1000 events and to just eight at 500 and 250 tournaments; the share of prize-money allocated to doubles reduced from 20 to 10 per cent; access to Challengers redirected in favour of singles players. The Slams, for now, are not involved. For now.
In their statement, the players spell out the arithmetic: with draws that size, and with that level of prize-money, making a living from doubles will become impossible for anyone outside the top 30. This is not a tweak, they argue, but the end of doubles as a profession — presented as a cost-cutting measure and pushed through, in their words, “with almost no transparency and almost no consultation with the players whose careers and livelihoods are on the line”. Asked for comment, the ATP said it is assessing the “doubles product” in order to build a more sustainable long-term model. It also added a revealing detail, one we will come back to: the resources freed up would be used to increase prize-money in the early rounds of singles.
The paradox is that all this is happening while the ATP is telling the richest story about itself it has ever told. The official OneVision material speaks of player compensation reaching $269.6 million in 2025, rising to $400 million once the Slams are included; of 88 players earning more than $1 million on court; of $18.3 million in profit sharing distributed to 186 professionals. The pension plan has been expanded to as many as 300 beneficiaries a year — and among the 200 receiving full contributions are, under the rules, the top 50 in the doubles rankings. The same system that currently includes doubles players in its own protection scheme is preparing, if the players have done their sums correctly, to make that profession financially unviable for some of the very people it claims to protect.
Then doubles enters the picture, in other words, and the story changes. The right word is not modernisation. It is subtraction.
Because ATP doubles has already been cut down once before. Since 2006, the men’s Tour has removed two fundamental elements of the long-form match: a real third set and advantage at 40-all. In their place came a 10-point match tie-break at one set all and a sudden-death point at deuce. The reason given at the time was explicit: to make match length more predictable for tournaments and broadcasters. The current rules confirm that format: every doubles match, finals included, is played this way.
So doubles is not some natural product that the public has rejected. It is a product the Tour has gradually compressed. It has been stripped of time, narrative weight and competitive breadth; then pushed into secondary slots, onto secondary courts, given little promotion, and treated as an appendix to singles. Now, after making it shorter and less central, the system discovers that it “delivers less” and proposes cutting it again.
It is a perfect mechanism, almost industrial in its efficiency: first you impoverish the format, then you use that impoverishment as proof of its weakness.
And this is not our own malicious reading. The doubles players say as much themselves in the statement, accusing the Tour of half-hearted marketing, of never properly exploiting television and commercial rights, and of staging matches poorly. Doubles, in other words, has not been taken to market and failed. It has never really been taken to market at all.
In 2024, after all, the ATP had already tried to “relaunch” it through a series of experiments: more entries for singles players, a shot clock reduced to 15 seconds after short rallies, quicker changeovers, spectators free to move around. In Madrid, the trial featured 32 teams, but only 16 were admitted as pairs on the basis of the doubles rankings; the rest of the places were reserved for, or favoured by, the presence of singles players. The stated aim was to create new stories and make the product livelier. Here too, the question is the same: why must doubles save itself by becoming something else — shorter, more random, more dependent on singles players, more bent towards instant consumption — rather than being promoted for what it is: a discipline with a different grammar, different tactics and a different history?
The answer lies in the economic model of contemporary tennis. On these pages, in The winner takes it all, we wrote that the problem is not only how much money reaches the players, but how that money is distributed within the category of players itself. The famous 17.5 per cent of global revenues supposedly going back to athletes is a convenient figure precisely because it puts the world number one and the world number 250 in the same basket: the champion who monetises every week and the professional who ends the season breaking even, or worse. In 2024, ten players — less than one per cent of professionals with ATP points — earned almost $100 million between prize-money, bonuses and profit sharing; further down, the numbers fall off a cliff, and the break-even zone, where a player finishes the year at zero after paying for travel, coaches and taxes, sits somewhere around 300-350 in the rankings.
Doubles takes that argument one step further. Because here we are no longer looking at the gap between the singles number one and the singles number 250: we are looking at an entire category treated as the economic outskirts of the Tour. The doubles player is the ATP’s structural “number 250”. Not because he plays a lesser form of tennis, but because he occupies a less protected position in the value chain. He serves the circuit; he does not command it. He fills draws and courts in the second week, when the singles field has thinned out; he represents a huge part of club tennis culture; he decides team competitions; he produces specialists and recognisable technical identities. And yet, when the money is distributed, he discovers he is expendable.
Two examples show the scale of the problem. In Rome, in May, Jannik Sinner earned €1,007,165 for winning the singles title. Simone Bolelli and Andrea Vavassori — the first Italian pair to win at the Foro Italico, a story that by itself deserved to be the face of the tournament — shared €409,520: around €205,000 each, before costs, support teams and taxes. Almost five to one, at the home tournament, in the year of an Italian triumph. At Wimbledon, where the doubles players chose to speak out, the ratio is even starker: the champion pair share £760,000, while the singles champion earns £3.6 million on his own. If the overall doubles share were to fall from 20 to 10 per cent, the message would become definitive: not a part of the game to be developed, but a budget line to be cut.
And this is where the contradiction with OneVision becomes political, because the ATP itself says where the money taken from doubles would go: to the early rounds of singles, to help more players cope with the costs of life on Tour. Translation: this is not a savings plan. It is an internal redistribution within the player category. That the base of the singles game needs help is true, and it is exactly what we have been arguing for months. But a system that has just celebrated the richest year in its history, and that can find no better way to fund the base of singles than hollowing out an entire discipline, is admitting something: the top of the pyramid is not to be touched. The bill is not paid by those who take almost everything. It is paid by those without enough power to present themselves as indispensable.
This is not a sentimental issue. It is not about defending doubles because it is beautiful, old, elegant or romantic. It is about understanding what tennis considers work and what it considers decoration. If doubles is work, then it has to be paid, promoted, scheduled and covered properly. If it is decoration, then it can be cut as soon as singles asks for more space, more money, more centrality. The proposed reform chooses the second path.
If the only measure were filling a stand, tennis would have many easier options than doubles. It could put on any show capable of attracting twenty minutes of curiosity. But a Masters 1000 is not a shopping centre with white lines painted on the floor: it is, or should be, a tennis tournament. And doubles is not filler between one singles match and the next. It is one of the forms of the game.
That is why the doubles issue is not peripheral to the wider debate about money in tennis: it is its clearest expression. When the system talks about itself, it uses the plural — players, circuit, growth, future. When it actually distributes value, it reverts to the singular: the top players, the biggest events, the easiest television product, the upper end of the rankings.
But tennis should be careful with that logic. A champion is not economically valuable because he hits a ball well in an empty space: he is valuable because there is a circuit, a base, a calendar, depth of competition, a mass of professionals that makes the pyramid credible. The same applies to doubles. If the Tour hollows it out, it cannot then be surprised when the public sees it as secondary.
The problem is not only that the winners take too much. It is that, when the winners take almost everything, the system starts calling “inefficient” everyone it has decided not to feed any more.
Doubles is not dead. It has been shortened, pushed aside, barely covered — and is now being accused of not being alive enough.
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