Professional tennis is built almost entirely around the ATP rankings. Points determine a player’s position, and that position opens the door to tournaments; the ATP describes the rankings as its long-standing, ‘objective, merit-based’ method for determining entry and seedings. (ATP Tour)
Then there is one small exception: some doors can also be opened by the organiser. These are called wild cards.
There is nothing inherently suspicious about them. Quite the opposite: if you look at the Slams and the biggest tournaments, the system seems to hand out its ‘invitations’ with a fair amount of common sense. A wild card goes to a promising local youngster, a former champion making a comeback, a player returning from injury, or someone who, for whatever reason, has some kind of appeal. A tournament is not an algorithm. It is a ‘machine’ that has to sell tickets and create stories; it also has to nurture young players, and it has every reason to pick a few names whom the rankings, at that particular moment, would otherwise leave out.
The ATP Rulebook does, however, draw a distinction. In singles, generally speaking and subject to certain exceptions, there is a limit of five main-draw wild cards a player can accept during the year. In doubles, there is no such limit:
- 2026 ATP Rulebook, §7.12 B:
- Singles: a player may accept up to 5 main-draw wild cards at ATP Tour tournaments per year. However, a wild card counts towards that limit of five only if the player would have been a direct acceptance on the original acceptance list. There are also a number of specific exceptions.
- Doubles: ‘There shall be no limitations of doubles wild cards for players.’ In other words, there is no limit to the number of doubles wild cards a player may receive.
Each tournament still has only a limited number of wild cards to hand out. The discretionary power involved is therefore small: only a handful of places are removed from the normal ranking mechanism. But precisely because those places are scarce, they have value. For the player, a wild card can mean money, points and access to a level of tournament their ranking would otherwise deny them; for the organiser, giving one to a particular player means giving up the chance to use that same place for somebody else. Every invitation therefore confers a benefit and entails a choice, with potential economic and reputational costs or gains. It is a delicate balance.
There is, however, no general rule preventing the same player, when their ranking would not give them direct entry, from receiving those invitations tournament after tournament. The famous five-wild-card limit in ATP singles does not prevent this: it only counts invitations received by players whose ranking would already have been sufficient for direct entry. In doubles, the Rulebook explicitly states that there is no limit per player.
The point, then, is not that doubles permits something singles forbids. Rather, the question is where that discretion is actually exercised, how often, and in whose favour.
And this is where visibility — and the cost to the tournament — come into play.
If Monte Carlo handed a men’s singles wild card to the tournament director’s mate who works as a lifeguard, within ten minutes we would know his name, ranking, CV and probably who he had rescued and who he was related to. Doubles lives in a different, shadier part of the ‘beach’. It attracts smaller crowds; journalists are less interested, and media coverage is correspondingly thinner. Who is actually checking who gets into the main draw, and why?
In singles, visibility acts almost like a form of free scrutiny. A controversial wild card at a Slam or a major tournament generates articles, angry players who have been left out, awkward questions and aggravation for the tournament director. The same slightly controversial decision in a doubles draw would probably survive only in the draw PDF.
It is precisely in that shadier part of the ‘beach’ that a discretionary decision can become much more than a simple invitation. And we know that, in some cases, it has literally become the subject of an illicit transaction, as we shall see later.
But for the moment, let us stick to perfectly legitimate uses. The first benefit, quite simply, is money: at Monte Carlo in 2026, a doubles team losing in the first round received €14,770. In Rome it was €17,060. Split evenly, that comes to €7,385 and €8,530 respectively per player for losing one match. (ATP Tour)
Those are not significant sums in the world of Sinner and Alcaraz. They are rather more significant in the world of a player sitting around No. 80 or No. 100 in the doubles rankings — and who might also be No. 500 in singles.
In mid-August 2026, among the doubles specialists in that part of the ATP rankings, we find Finn Reynolds at No. 80, Niki Kaliyanda Poonacha at 86, Fernando Romboli at 90, Reese Stalder at 96 and Kaito Uesugi at 100. In 2026 they have earned roughly $62,000, $60,000, $105,000, $64,000 and $22,000 respectively in doubles prize money. This is not an average drawn from a statistical study of players at that level, but it gives a fairly clear sense of the order of magnitude. And these are gross earnings: travel has to come out of that, along with a coach for those who have one, a physio when needed and all the other expenses. And… taxes! (ATP Tour)
Being a top-100 doubles player, in other words, does not necessarily mean being rich. Quite the opposite. It means being good enough to stay on tour, but not earning enough to be able to turn down a wild card into a major tournament.
Let us do some rough sums. If a player received twenty invitations to tournaments offering first-round prize money equivalent to Monte Carlo and lost all twenty matches, then, assuming the prize money was split equally with their partner, they would collect almost €148,000 gross. It is obviously a theoretical example: there are not twenty Monte Carlos, and one would hope there would not be twenty first-round defeats either. But it gives a sense of the value of the benefit being distributed. As we have seen, in doubles the ATP rules place no ceiling on the number of times that benefit can be received. (ATP Tour)
‘Yeah, but that doesn’t really happen! Who could possibly make use of all those wild cards?’
Low visibility is not necessary for a wild card to be awarded for reasons other than strictly sporting ones, or for it to be handed out repeatedly. Sometimes the reasons are simply commercial, and they can be entirely explicit.
A paradigmatic example is Petros Tsitsipas — and I am not putting Petros in the dock here. Let’s be clear.
In 2021, when he was ranked No. 970 in the world in singles, he received a wild card into the Marseille main draw and lost 6–0, 6–2 to Alejandro Davidovich Fokina.
The world No. 970 does not normally get a wild card into Marseille.
Tournament director Jean-François Caujolle explained that the invitation was a thank-you to the Tsitsipas family for their support of the tournament, and added that Stefanos had agreed to play in Marseille for an appearance fee roughly half what he could have demanded elsewhere. (The Guardian)
There is no indication that the wild card was sold, and therefore no allegation of wrongdoing against the Tsitsipas family. But Caujolle’s explanation is far more illuminating than a bribe: it shows how a place in the draw can become a bargaining chip within a commercial relationship with a star.
Of course, one could argue that this sort of commercial quid pro quo is simply a more elegant way of buying a wild card without any cash changing hands. But why should we? Once you start down that road, you risk delegitimising much of the invitation system, and it becomes very difficult to know where to draw the line…
Petros and Stefanos subsequently received numerous invitations to play doubles together, including at some of the biggest tournaments on the calendar. As late as 2023, they entered the Madrid Masters 1000 with a wild card. (ATP Tour)
In April 2023, aged 22, Petros Tsitsipas received the 100th wild card of his career*, across singles and doubles at ITF, Challenger and ATP events* (according to Sportskeeda and other sources).
Petros’s 16 wild cards at major doubles events between 2021 and 2023:
2021: 8 — Australian Open, Rotterdam, Marseille, Monte Carlo, Madrid, Lyon, Wimbledon, Hamburg. Rome does not count, because they entered as alternates.
2022: 4 — Monte Carlo, Madrid, Stuttgart, Mallorca. The US Open does not count, because they entered as alternates.
2023 up to Madrid: 4 for Petros — Rotterdam with Stefanos, Marseille with Luca Sanchez, Monte Carlo with Stefanos, Madrid with Stefanos.
Then things took a more positive turn: Petros genuinely became a doubles player capable of competing on the main tour. In October 2023 he won Antwerp with Stefanos and entered the top 100 for the first time. The ATP now credits him with more than $500,000 in career prize money across singles and doubles. (ATP Tour)
That obliterates the caricature of the hopeless brother simply exploiting his connections.
But then the question becomes: how much does access matter in building the ranking that will eventually make that little helping hand unnecessary? A dog chasing its own tail: ranking produces access, and access produces ranking. In doubles, it also produces the money needed to keep travelling, training and playing.
Tsitsipas is hardly an isolated case. Marko Djokovic, Novak’s brother, received eight wild cards into ATP tournaments without winning a match. In 2021 Emma Navarro, then ranked No. 492 in the WTA rankings — this is the WTA, but the principle is the same — received two consecutive wild cards into tournaments in Charleston owned by her father, Ben Navarro. (The Guardian)
Navarro is a paradigmatic case precisely because she later became a world-class player. A wild card awarded because of a privileged position does not prove that the person receiving it lacks talent. Someone was simply given the chance to pre-empt the ranking’s verdict. A wild card can function as an investment in a player — if you happen to be in a position to guarantee them one. Once that player reaches a certain level, nobody talks any more about the opportunities they were given, family connections or commercial relationships.
And then there is outright fraud.
In November 2025, the International Tennis Integrity Agency sanctioned David Marrero, a former world No. 5 in doubles, after he admitted paying or offering money to obtain wild cards for himself and/or his partner on four occasions between 2022 and 2023. Malek Jaziri admitted his involvement in one of the violations. (ITIA)
Do the outright abuses and the paradoxes described above define the system as a whole? Generally, no.
In its most visible part, the system seems to work reasonably well and in a fairly straightforward way. The wild card is a small measure of discretionary power that tennis has deliberately chosen not to hand over to the rankings, for good reasons. At a Slam, that power is exercised in full view; in the singles draw of a major tournament, it is discussed. In the doubles draw of a 250, a Challenger or an even smaller event, it can pass almost unnoticed.
And the lower the visibility, the lower the risk and the cost of a bad or borderline decision.
Abolishing wild cards would be absurd. It would be equally foolish to attack federations for inviting their own young players, or to prevent a tournament from using one of its places to attract a star.
Perhaps all we need to do is look at the sunlit side and the shaded side in the same way. The problem is not that a tournament director can choose someone ahead of the rankings: tennis has deliberately given them that power. But if they do it repeatedly, for no sporting reason, and almost nobody even knows it happened, that is a problem.
