This article was originally published in Italian on Puntero.
by Andrea Scaglione
At the end of August, the USTA and New York mayor Zohran Mamdani put 1,000 US Open tickets on sale for $100 each, reserved for city residents — around 8.6 million people — valid for the main draw and not eligible for resale on Ticketmaster. In the end, 336,573 people joined the “queue”.
One thousand seats. Three hundred and thirty-six thousand requests. A tournament that drew more than 1.1 million spectators last year.
Remember: no resale. This should be fun.
What non-profit means
Let’s be clear, to avoid any misunderstanding in either direction.
The USTA is a non-profit organisation, but not quite in the sense we might immediately assume. It is a 501(c)(6), the US tax category for business leagues, the same one used by chambers of commerce and trade associations. It is not a charity, and donations to it are therefore not normally tax-deductible in the way donations to a 501(c)(3) are.
It can sell $120,000 suites for people to “watch the tennis”, sign sponsorship deals, issue debt, build up reserves, pay executives and, perfectly legitimately, end the year with a surplus. The only condition is that the surplus cannot end up in an owner’s pocket — not least because there is no owner.
The USTA makes no secret of this. It describes its Professional Tennis division as a sports marketing, entertainment and media group, responsible for generating, through media rights, sponsorship, ticketing, merchandising and betting, the money needed to fund the association’s mission.
So there is nothing inherently wrong with a non-profit making money.
The problem is something else.
We could start with a number.
The number
In 2024, the US Open generated $559.7 million of the USTA’s $623.2 million in consolidated operating revenue.
Not bad: roughly ninety per cent. Where does it come from?
Ticket sales: $208.5 million, up seventy-five per cent in a decade.
Broadcasting rights: around $140 million.
Sponsorship: $130.5 million.
Corporate hospitality and services: $83.3 million, including almost $44 million from hospitality alone, $25 million from food and beverage and $12 million from merchandising.
Even then, the US Open was also monetising the betting market by selling its data and betting rights to IMG ARENA, although the USTA accounts do not break that revenue out separately.
And, interestingly enough, we do not know how much the USTA receives from Kalshi either.
What we do know is that Kalshi is now involved. The company is valued at $22 billion and turns practically any event — a match, an election, something a politician says — into something people can put money on.
Wonderful…
A total of $21.7 million was traded on Cobolli-Comesana in the first round of the US Open.
The USTA calls this the next generation of fan engagement.
I would quietly point out that the WHO treats gambling as a public-health issue: gambling disorder is a recognised condition. It also recommends eliminating gambling sponsorship in sport.
The USTA’s stated mission is “Growing tennis to inspire healthier people and communities everywhere”: growing tennis to improve the health of people and communities.
Anyway… What matters here is the composition of the revenue.
The category that has grown the most over the past decade is the one dependent on people physically attending the tournament at Flushing Meadows. And one of the newer revenue streams measures how much additional money can be extracted from each of them after they have already paid for a ticket.
The spectator is no longer simply the customer. The spectator is the deposit being mined.
Put it this way: the USTA is not a governing body that owns a profitable tournament.
It is a profitable tournament with a governing body attached to it.
That leads us to the argument that supports everything else in this story.
Because the US Open funds American tennis, every extra dollar extracted from the US Open is another dollar for American tennis.
Therefore no commercial decision can ever be wrong.
Every commercial decision generates resources for the mission.
What the hell could possibly go wrong? Let’s see how that works in practice.
First: the concrete
May 2025: the USTA announces an $800 million project to redevelop Arthur Ashe Stadium and build a new Player Performance Center.
The project obviously includes genuine improvements: circulation areas forty per cent larger, more toilets, lifts, and so on.
Then there are the seats. Let’s stop there for a moment.
Courtside capacity rises from around 3,000 seats to 5,000.
Two levels of luxury suites are added, along with nine courtside clubs with bars and dining, plus an expanded promenade.
Premium packages for the full tournament range from $43,000 to $120,000, and the USTA expects to accommodate four times as many hospitality clients as it does today.
At the same time, around 3,500 seats disappear from the upper tiers — the “cheap” seats, in other words.
Once the work is complete, Arthur Ashe’s overall capacity will be essentially unchanged.
It is a conversion, not an expansion.
There is no point pretending otherwise, and I am putting it politely.
Two thousand people who paid less are being replaced by two thousand people who pay more.
It is about extracting more money from the same seats.
Sorry — apparently it is called yield management when you apply it to reinforced concrete.
The USTA does not say this, but in March 2026 Fitch estimated the overall cost of the project at around $1.1 billion, with approximately $850 million financed through new debt and $265 million through cash reserves.
In May 2026, the USTA was placing around $400 million in private debt with institutional investors, with an average maturity of seventeen years.
So the new Arthur Ashe has been designed to generate the money that will pay for it.
It is essentially a property development that finances itself by pushing out the less wealthy section of its own audience, and then presents the whole thing as an investment in growing tennis.
Second: the land
There is one small detail that prevents us from treating this as a private matter between the USTA and its customers.
The Billie Jean King National Tennis Center stands inside Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, on land owned by the City of New York.
In December 1993, the city granted the National Tennis Center a 99-year lease to build, maintain and operate what the contract explicitly describes as a public recreational facility.
To be clear: investment in the site — almost $2 billion over thirty years — has been funded by the USTA, not by taxpayers.
In 2019, however, an audit by the New York City Comptroller concluded that the National Tennis Center had underreported at least $31 million in gross revenue to the city between 2014 and 2017.
The audit also criticised the contract itself, because it allows the USTA to restrict the city’s access to the documents needed to verify the accounts, to the point that the Parks Department was effectively accepting the figures it received at face value.
The National Tennis Center rejected some of the findings, acknowledged around $14.3 million in additional revenue and paid $143,297.
The rest remains disputed.
If the strongest part of the contract is written in a way that keeps the accounts out of sight of the people who lent you the park for 99 years, it is difficult not to wonder what there might be to hide.
Third: the tickets
In August 2026, grounds passes with a face value of $65 were appearing on the secondary market for between $240 and $478.
The cheapest ticket for Arthur Ashe on opening day was $344.
As for courtside seats, forget it: they were over $1,000.
The USTA says it does not decide what price a private individual charges when reselling a ticket.
That is true, and in a state where resale is legal, it is difficult to argue otherwise.
Then Jon Wertheim of Sports Illustrated asked what exactly the USTA’s financial relationship was with official resale.
And it emerged that the USTA receives a share of the fees on every verified ticket resold through Ticketmaster.
Right.
The USTA would not say what percentage it receives, or how much that is worth in a year.
According to Wertheim’s sources, the revenue is well into seven figures.
The same ticket generates money twice: once when it is sold, and again when it is resold.
And throughout all of this, the USTA can continue to point out that the original list price was $65.
But what about those thousand tickets for New Yorkers — the ones that could not be resold?
The restriction existed. It was technically valid. It could be enforced immediately and at no cost.
And it was enforced.
On 1,000 tickets out of 1.14 million attendances.
Specifically, the thousand tickets that appeared in a press release alongside the mayor’s name.
Fourth: mixed doubles
We need to spend a little time on this, because now the story starts to concern tennis itself, and how to turn it into a circus.
Let’s reconstruct what happened step by step.
If you are not particularly interested in mixed doubles, apologies in advance. The point is that the same operating model could easily be extended to tennis as a whole.
One.
Until 2024, US Open mixed doubles was a 32-team Grand Slam event played during the two weeks of the main draw.
Almost nobody watched it, as the USTA quite rightly points out.
Two.
Who decided which days it was played on, which courts were used, what time the matches started and how heavily the event was promoted?
The USTA.
For years, mixed doubles was scheduled on secondary courts, in marginal time slots and often directly against singles matches, with prize money that in 2017 reached $150,000 for the winning pair.
And, of course, no dedicated promotional campaign.
The product did not exactly drown by itself. It was held underwater for a decade.
Three.
In February 2025, the USTA announces its reform, explaining that the old mixed-doubles event had been overshadowed by the other competitions taking place and had never been able to take “centre stage”.
Interesting.
The organiser decides when and how to bury it.
Then it measures the result of those decisions and presents that result as evidence that the previous model was wrong.
That would even be reasonable, if the conclusion were: “we treated mixed doubles badly.” Instead, the conclusion is: “mixed doubles does not work.”
Four.
The new format: sixteen teams instead of 32.
Two days devoted exclusively to the event during Fan Week before the tournament.
Eight direct entries based on combined singles rankings.
Eight wild cards. Arthur Ashe and Louis Armstrong. Dedicated ESPN broadcast windows.
Sets to four games, no advantage, with match tie-breaks through to the semi-finals.
The final returns to six-game sets, but keeps no-ad scoring and a match tie-break instead of a third set.
In other words: “tennis, as we think it should be”.
One million dollars for the winners, compared with $200,000 the year before.
And, crucially, the biggest singles names are brought in.
Five.
The public turns up.
In 2025, Fan Week sets a record with 239,307 attendees.
The USTA declares the new format a success.
ESPN describes it as a perfect momentum builder for the main draw.
That success proves…
absolutely nothing. Nothing at all.
No offence intended.
To find out whether the public actually preferred the new mixed doubles to the old version, you would have had to put the two formats under comparable conditions.
The old event was given a secondary court at eleven in the morning while Djokovic was playing elsewhere.
That is less an experiment than a controlled demolition followed by an inspection of the rubble.
Six.
Then comes the best part of the whole recent history of tennis.
The first tournament under the new format is won by Sara Errani and Andrea Vavassori — the only two specialists invited — who had described the changes as a “profound injustice” and a pseudo-exhibition designed purely for entertainment.
Four matches in two days.
In the final they beat Świątek and Ruud 6-3, 5-7, 10-6 in front of a sold-out Arthur Ashe.
And they take home the million dollars that had been put on the table to attract the stars.
Seven.
In 2026, following the protests, the USTA gives the specialists something: an eight-team qualifying tournament.
Six teams enter directly on the basis of the best combined singles or doubles ranking, while another two receive wild cards.
In practice, almost all six direct places go to teams built around doubles players:
Siniaková/Patten, Dabrowski/Heliövaara, Stefani/Skupski, Krunić/Pavić, Mladenovic/Arévalo, Routliffe/Glasspool.
But the specialists are not simply restored to the tournament.
They are made to play each other in qualifying for two — two — places.
The sixteen-team main draw still consists of six entries awarded through the combined singles ranking, eight wild cards and just two teams coming through qualifying.
So if you are one of the best doubles players in the world but have no singles ranking, and the USTA does not decide to invite you, your route into the Grand Slam mixed-doubles championship is this:
first, eliminate other specialists.
Errani and Vavassori, as defending champions, were given a wild card directly into the main draw.
Eight.
So there were three teams in the main draw made up of two genuine doubles specialists.
Errani/Vavassori, invited by the USTA.
Routliffe/Glasspool, qualified.
Siniaková/Patten, qualified.
The first two went out in the opening round.
Errani and Vavassori lost to Andreeva and Rublev.
Routliffe and Glasspool lost to Serena Williams and Carlos Alcaraz.
The third pair once again showed that the quality of the specialists was never the issue.
Kateřina Siniaková and Henry Patten drew the number-one seeds in the first round:
Aryna Sabalenka and Novak Djokovic.
They beat them 1-4, 4-2, 10-2.
They then reached the quarter-finals and lost 10-8 in the match tie-break to Svitolina and Monfils.
So the last possible justification disappears as well.
The specialists are not being kept at the margins because the new format is too fast, or too different from traditional doubles for them to handle.
When they actually get into the tournament, they can face the world number one and Novak Djokovic and beat them 10-2 in the match tie-break.
The real issue is that if what you want is Broadway-style Tennis — because it makes money, and then you give that money to American tennis… — you do not need mixed-doubles teams.
You need stars.
And you need them to play very little.
Nine.
At the same tournament, a wild card went to Serena Williams, aged 44, who had not played at the US Open since 2022 and who, as it happened, was paired with defending singles champion Carlos Alcaraz.
They beat Routliffe and Glasspool in the first round.
They went out in the quarter-finals to Bencic and Cobolli.
That defeat was the television peak of the day: 502,000 viewers.
Just in case anyone needed confirmation that what was being measured was the circus, not the quality of the tennis.
Overall viewing figures for the first day on ESPN2 were up 138 per cent on 2025.
The final drew 552,000 viewers.
Not a single doubles specialist reached the semi-finals.
This is not a reform that failed.
It is a reform that succeeded perfectly, for the purpose it was designed to serve.
Not tennis. Not mixed doubles.
I can think of a dozen other ideas, with very little to do with tennis, that could push the viewing figures even higher.
I will not list them here…
Fifth: the model
In July 2026, the USTA got a new chief executive — the former CEO of Tennis Australia and former Australian Open tournament director.
He did not design either the Arthur Ashe redevelopment or the mixed-doubles reform at the USTA; both were decided under Lew Sherr.
Over twenty years at Tennis Australia, however, he turned the Australian Open into one of the most aggressively sport-entertainment events on the calendar.
That is what he was hired for.
At the opening press conference of the 2026 US Open, he described the tournament’s future in one chilling sentence:
this will become tennis Disneyland.
Disneyland is fine for The Little Mermaid and company.
There are already enough problems with Star Wars…
Nobody has yet explained why this should be the stated objective of a sports governing body.
If anyone has heard a convincing explanation, I am listening.
This year, the USTA accredited around one hundred content creators, almost twice the 54 it accredited in 2025.
Around twenty of them were devoted exclusively to food and drink.
It is a legitimate and understandable strategy: you go where the audience is.
Then, during Naomi Osaka’s first-round match against Anastasia Zakharova, the umpire had to stop play because some people in a suite behind the court were filming videos with a light switched on.
And the most revealing detail is that they were not USTA-accredited creators.
They were hospitality guests.
Wimbledon has already announced that it will not accredit content creators in 2027.
A masterpiece of overreaction.
For once, the influencers had nothing to do with it.
The people causing the problem were the premium inventory — the same premium inventory replacing the 3,500 cheap seats at Arthur Ashe — and at one point during the evening they effectively had to be reminded that there was a tennis match taking place below them.
It sounds as though a screenwriter made it up. But that is what happened.
Elsewhere, in seats we can safely assume were not cheap, Sabalenka complained about people smoking weed courtside.
It is legal in the state, but still.
You have paid an indecent amount of money to watch the match. Watch the match.
Sixth: the salaries
Now we come back to something more serious.
The sort of thing that might make the “pillars of Heaven shake”, as Jack Burton would put it.
Let’s return to the $834.6 million in net assets and see how they are being managed.
According to the 2024 Form 990, the annual financial return filed with the IRS, executive compensation totalled $7,075,947.
The reported compensation figures were:
- Lew Sherr, CEO: $1,536,368
- Andrea Hirsch, COO and General Counsel: $1,331,718
- Stacey Milkovich, Chief Executive Pro Tennis: $1,069,371
- Kirsten Corio, Chief Commercial Officer: $852,212
- Craig Morris, Chief Executive Community Tennis & Youth: $783,254
The form also has the box ticked for first-class or charter air travel.
The order itself is revealing.
The executive responsible for the organisation’s statutory mission — growing grassroots tennis — earns less than the head of its commercial product and less than its in-house lawyer.
An organisation’s pay structure will usually tell you more about its priorities than any number of mission statements.
But the serious point is this.
USTA Player Development, the entity responsible for producing American professional players, spent a total of $14.68 million in 2024.
That figure INCLUDES coaches and staff, travel and facilities.
Everything. Every cent.
Eleven USTA executives cost almost half as much as the entire player-development operation.
And for me, that could almost end the entire 501(c)(6) non-profit discussion right there.
Seventh: betting
28 August 2026.
The Ninth Circuit, the federal appeals court whose jurisdiction includes Nevada, rules against Kalshi.
The issue is this.
Kalshi allows people to buy and sell contracts on the outcome of an event — whether a player will win or lose a match, for example — and argues that these are not ordinary sports bets but financial products.
In US financial terminology, they are described as swaps: contracts whose value depends on something that will happen in the future.
If they really are swaps, then they fall under the CFTC, the US federal agency that regulates futures, derivatives and similar products, leaving individual states much less room to intervene.
The Ninth Circuit, however, says that this reasoning does not hold up when applied to sport.
Kalshi’s contracts have the characteristics of sports betting, and Nevada may therefore apply its own gambling laws.
That matters because only a few months earlier the Third Circuit, the federal appeals court whose jurisdiction includes New Jersey, had essentially reached the opposite conclusion.
It treated those contracts as financial products subject to federal CFTC jurisdiction, preventing New Jersey from treating them as ordinary sports betting.
Two federal courts. Same product. Two different answers.
31 August.
Three days later, the USTA announces Kalshi as the first Official Prediction Market Partner of the US Open.
A multi-year deal.
Digital presence.
Courtside signage.
An integrity system excluding markets on officiating decisions, injuries and code violations.
Plus an agreement to share data with the ITIA.
Craig Tiley calls it the next generation of fan engagement.
2 September.
New Jersey takes the issue to the United States Supreme Court.
In much less legal language, it is asking the Court to decide this:
when Kalshi offers a market on who will win a match, should that be treated as a financial product regulated by the federal government, or as sports betting that each state may regulate under its own laws?
Three days between the ruling and the announcement of the deal.
The above is not exactly straightforward.
So let’s put it another way.
While the federal courts and the Supreme Court have yet to decide whether Kalshi’s product is betting, gambling, neither, or simply a financial product more akin to the stock market — and at this point I would add, “who exactly are you trying to fool?” — the USTA installs it as an official betting partner.
Or, to use Craig Tiley’s language and avoid upsetting the Supreme Court, as the next generation of fan engagement for the US OPEN.
A rather daring choice.
And this is where it becomes absurd.
At the same time, the ITIA — the International Tennis Integrity Agency, itself indirectly funded by betting within tennis — was examining the attendance of Serena Williams, Coco Gauff, Aryna Sabalenka, Mirra Andreeva, Taylor Fritz and others at a DraftKings Welcome Players Party.
Why?
Because players and officials are banned from promotional relationships with betting operators, full stop.
Tournaments are not.
In 2024, James Blake paid a $56,250 fine for a breach that the ITIA itself acknowledged had been unintentional.
And then, of course, some of those players walked onto court in front of Kalshi advertising boards.
So apparently the rule is not that the relationship between tennis and gambling puts sporting integrity and public health at risk.
The rule is that it puts them at risk when the player is the one getting paid.
The defence — because there is one
At this point it would be easy to dismiss the USTA as a hedge fund disguised as a tennis club.
Would that be fair?
The 2024 consolidated accounts record $75.6 million in contributions and grants, against an overall excess of operating revenue over operating expenses of $72.7 million.
In 2025, the USTA committed another $10 million to courts and facilities, quadrupling the size of the programme, as well as another $5 million over five years for small grants to local organisations.
In 2026, total US Open player compensation rose to $108 million, up forty-four per cent in two years, with $140,000 guaranteed to players losing in the first round and a player-support programme initially funded with $2 million.
And in the United States, 27.3 million people played tennis in 2025 — almost ten million more than in 2019.
Those are real numbers, and they have to be acknowledged.
With two small problems: the dates, and the mission.
That $108 million did not appear out of nowhere.
It came after months of coordinated pressure from the best players in the world, with Jannik Sinner and Aryna Sabalenka among the central figures in the protest.
A low-cost protest, perhaps, but still a protest.
At Roland Garros, the top players limited their pre-tournament media commitments to fifteen minutes.
The number fifteen was chosen to represent, symbolically, the roughly fifteen per cent of Grand Slam revenue that goes into prize money.
A month later they repeated the protest at Wimbledon, where they had planned to keep the same limit during the first week as well.
The plan was suspended after further talks with the All England Club, but the demands remained unchanged:
more prize money linked to revenue, player welfare and representation, with the aim of reaching twenty-two per cent by 2030.
The US Open’s generosity is documented.
So is the pressure that came before it.
More importantly, increasing prize money for professional players IS NOT its mission.
Its official mission, as we have already seen, is:
“Growing tennis to inspire healthier people and communities everywhere.”
Growing tennis to improve the health of people and communities.
Can professional prize money be a tool for pursuing that mission?
Not really.
Grow the game?
The money really does flow back into tennis, and that is precisely what makes the whole thing complicated.
If grassroots tennis were nothing more than a cover story, the problem would be simple.
But it is not. Or perhaps it is.
Giving some of the money back does not legitimise the way you obtained the rest.
And, above all, it does not turn a commercial decision into a decision that is good for the sport.
A governing body that undermines a discipline, measures the effects of that damage, sells the solution and collects the applause is not growing tennis.
It is growing revenue and using tennis as the justification.
The fact that some of that revenue goes towards refurbishing public courts in the Bronx is excellent news for the Bronx.
It simply does not answer the question.
Let’s borrow from Popper.
The USTA’s theory is not scientific because it is not falsifiable.
As formulated, it can never be proved wrong.
Every time commercialisation generates more money, that money proves that the decision served the mission.
Every time the new product gets higher viewing figures, those figures prove that the old product needed to change.
Every time somebody asks where the limit is, the very idea of a limit is accused of taking resources away from “grow the game”.
Non-profit status determines who is not allowed to take the dividend.
It does not mean that every possible way of generating that dividend is equally valid.
And it does not give anyone the right to call all of it growth.
One thousand $100 tickets.
For 336,573 people in the queue.
Inside Arthur Ashe, they are building a new club for the ultra-rich.
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