Rafael Nadal’s old “if, if, if… doesn’t exist” line has become part of tennis folklore. These days, however, the “if” is everywhere.
If the Slams paid 22%. If revenues were calculated transparently. If the new money really reached the less wealthy players. If the top players were ready for a show of strength. If the boycott became something more than a word left hanging in the air.
For now, the fact is something else. The players are not boycotting Roland Garros. They are not giving up points, prize money, visibility, sponsors or the chance to win a Slam. They are reducing their media commitments to the mandatory minimum: 15 minutes of press conference, no additional interviews with some tournament partners, no extra content. The players say they receive around 15% of revenues, against the roughly 22% they identify as their target and as the benchmark set by the highest-tier ATP and WTA events.
It is a protest. But it is a protest at almost no cost.
That does not mean the demand is unfounded. The Slams are vast economic machines and they need to explain more clearly how much they take in, how much they spend, how much they reinvest and what share actually returns to the players. The question of transparency is legitimate. Indeed, it is necessary. The point is that, as soon as the battle is presented as a battle for the world No. 150, 250 or 300, the percentage is no longer enough. We need to know who really receives the new money.
We had already written this in The Winner Takes It All: the famous 17.5% cited in the PTPA debate works as a flag because it simplifies a much messier reality. First, one has to understand which pie is being measured: ATP, Slams, ITF, ATP Media, Tennis Data Innovations, betting, Sportradar, PIF, tournaments owned by billionaires or funds, separate companies, rights that are not consolidated into a readable set of accounts. That piece put the business of professional tennis in the region of 2.1 to 2.2 billion dollars a year, but above all it showed that the real split is not only between players and institutions. It is within the players themselves. In 2024 Jannik Sinner was around 23.6 million dollars when prize money and bonuses are included, while the world No. 100, Vít Kopřiva, was on 674,433 dollars, the No. 250, Murkel Dellien, on 144,659 and the No. 330, Moez Echargui, on 119,745. In other words: Sinner earned around 35 times more than the No. 100, 163 times more than the No. 250 and almost 200 times more than the No. 330.
That is the figure that should govern any serious discussion about redistribution.
Not the fact that Sinner earns a lot. Champions generate value. They sell tickets, move audiences, bring in sponsors, fill stadiums, turn a match into an event. The point is another one: when the very top takes tens upon tens of times more than the middle-lower tier of the professional game, the formula “more money to the players” becomes too broad to be taken seriously.
More money to which players?
If the Slams raise the share from 15% to 22% and that money enters the same distribution curve, the system simply becomes richer in the same direction. The winner earns more, the finalist earns more, the semi-finalists earn more, the top 10 earn more, and the bonuses continue to reward those who go further and those who are already firmly established at the top. The player in whose name the noblest part of the protest is being constructed receives something, perhaps, but remains inside the same architecture.
This is the missing table.
How much of the requested increase would go to the early rounds? How much to qualifying? How much to players outside the main draw? How much to pensions, healthcare, maternity, injury protection, travel support, minimum guarantees? How much to the Challengers? How much to the ITFs? How much, instead, would remain within tennis’s ordinary logic, where new money ends up above all with those who win more and therefore with those who already have much more?
Without this table, the protest against the Slams remains split in two. It is strong when it demands transparency. It is weak when it speaks in the name of tennis’s base.
Also because the Slams are a strange target, if the issue is really players outside the elite. Not because they are innocent. Not because they are certainly paying the right share. Not simply because their accounts are transparent. The reason is simpler: in absolute terms, they are already the tournaments that pay best precisely the tiers they are said to be defending.
The Slams are already a redistributive system, not a pure market. They are so when they pay men and women the same in equivalent draws, even if the audiences and revenues generated by the two products are not always identical. They are so when they raise the prize money for qualifying and the early rounds significantly. They are so when, through the federations, they fund wider parts of the movement. This is why the question cannot be only: “how much do the Slams retain?” It has to be: what kind of redistribution do we want, according to what criteria, and who should pay for it?
Roland Garros 2026 will distribute 61.723 million euros in prize money. The singles champion will receive 2.8 million. A player losing in the first round of the main draw will receive 87,000 euros. A player losing in the third round of qualifying will receive 48,000 euros, 33,000 in the second and 24,000 in the first.
One can argue that the revenue share is low. One can argue that the tournament takes in far more than it gives back. One can demand that the line items be opened up. All true. But one fact remains: for a player outside the top 100, reaching a Slam means entering, for one week, an economy that the ordinary circuit almost never offers him. Losing early in Paris can be worth more than weeks or months of Challengers. Losing in qualifying can be worth a significant part of a season in the undergrowth of the professional game.
So, if the cause is the average player, the question also has to be turned elsewhere: what happens in the other eleven months?
A player ranked between 150 and 300 in the world does not live for two weeks a year. He lives an entire season. He travels, pays for hotels, a coach when he can afford one, a physio, fitness preparation, taxes, flights, entry fees, weeks without prize money, defeats that cost more than they bring in. His economic life is not consumed mainly by the four Slams. It is consumed by the ordinary calendar.
And it is precisely the ordinary calendar that the top players are not hitting.
A Masters 1000 without the best players changes face much more quickly than a Slam without one or two big names. Wimbledon remains Wimbledon. Roland Garros remains Roland Garros. The US Open and the Australian Open have an autonomous strength that no 1000 possesses in the same way. If Sinner does not play a Masters 1000, that tournament loses a huge part of its immediate value. If Sinner does not play Wimbledon, Wimbledon loses Sinner, but it remains Wimbledon.
This is not a strategic detail. It is the heart of the matter.
If the players wanted to hit the most vulnerable interlocutor, they would probably look at the ordinary circuit: ATP, WTA, 1000s, 500s, ranking, bonus pools, obligations, media rights, data, betting, calendar. Instead, the public conflict is focused on the Slams, the richest events, but also the hardest to blackmail. And when the word boycott has to become an act, the act becomes much smaller: shortened press conferences.
It is understandable. Giving up the Slams costs the players a great deal too. It costs points, money, sponsors, history, career opportunities. Nobody really wants to be the one who skips Wimbledon or Roland Garros while the tournament goes on anyway. It is one thing to wave the threat around. It is another to discover that the public keeps buying tickets, television keeps broadcasting and the title remains a Slam title even without you.
So things have to be called by their name. For now, this is not a union rupture. It is symbolic pressure.
The difference matters, because the language being used is that of redistribution. The players are asking for more money, but also more welfare, more pensions, more protections, more voice in decisions. The Guardian has reported that Wimbledon is trying to prevent tougher protests by opening dialogue, including through Tim Henman, and that the dispute involves prize money, player welfare, pension contributions and representation.
These are serious issues. Precisely for that reason, they cannot remain suspended in the generic formula “more money for the athletes”.
The ATP itself, in its own way, has already recognised that the problem exists. Baseline was created to guarantee a minimum threshold for players down to No. 250. In 2024 the programme distributed 1.3 million dollars to 26 players; for 2025 the ATP raised the thresholds to 300,000 dollars for the top 100, 200,000 for the 101-175 bracket and 100,000 for the 176-250 bracket, on condition that players compete in at least 15 events.
It is a useful step. But it is also a confession. If a minimum-guarantee programme is needed down to No. 250, it means the ordinary tennis market is not enough to make professional life sustainable for many players who already belong to a world elite.
In the same ecosystem, however, the ATP distributed 18.3 million dollars in profit sharing on the Masters 1000s relating to the 2024 season. The programme involved 186 players, but the mechanism remains linked to performance in the Masters 1000s, so it mainly rewards those who go further and those who already have full access to the top tier of the circuit.
The ATP also announced that profit sharing brought 2024 player compensation to 261 million dollars for the ATP circuit and to 378 million including Slam prize money. For 2025, it also indicated 28.5 million dollars earmarked for the Challenger Tour and an ATP 500 bonus pool of 3 million.
Here the contradiction becomes visible: on the one hand, a social programme that puts a few million beneath the pyramid; on the other, funds, bonuses and profit sharing that continue to distribute heavily towards those who are already inside the highest level. The system tries to put a cushion at the bottom while continuing to feed the top.
The Winner Takes It All reached exactly this point: if tennis wants to talk seriously about unionism, the top players have to stop presenting themselves only as victims of the system. They are also enormous beneficiaries of that system. The article proposed a concrete route: a progressive membership or licensing fee, a levy of between 2% and 10% on the million-dollar prize cheques of the top earners, based not on ranking but on actual earnings, managed by the union to fund welfare and support for players ranked between 150 and 400. With the 2024 numbers, the fund could have raised 7 to 9 million dollars a year.
This is the point that becomes even stronger today.
If the top players had gone to the Slams saying: we have already created an internal fund, we have already accepted that part of our million-dollar cheques should go to the base of the circuit, now we are asking you too to allocate a greater share of revenues to welfare, qualifying, early rounds, minimum guarantees and cost support, the protest would have a different force.
Instead, for now, the sequence is different: the richest players are asking for more money from the richest events, they say they are doing it also for those below them and they choose a protest that touches almost none of their central interests.
They are not giving up the Slams. They are not giving up prize money. They are not giving up points. They are not giving up visibility. They are not giving up bonuses. They are not putting a progressive levy on their own earnings on the table. They are cutting short the least expensive part of their week: time with the media.
One can understand it. One can even consider it an intelligent tactic. But it cannot be sold as if it were already a redistributive battle.
The women’s issue makes the picture even less linear. In the Slams, equal prize money has been a reality for years, while across the circuit as a whole the path is still being built. This means that the Slams, precisely in the most important places, already apply a strong political criterion: equal pay for men and women. In a sport in which the men’s circuit often continues to generate more commercial revenue, more paying spectators and larger television audiences, this cannot be ignored when discussing shares and redistribution.
It does not mean that women should be paid less. It means that tennis has already accepted, at least in the Slams, that distribution should not be a mechanical photograph of the turnover produced by each segment. So the redistributive principle already exists. The question is why it is invoked so forcefully towards the Slams and with much less clarity within the group of the richest players.
In the end, the dispute over the Slams contains three different levels that are often mixed together.
The first is transparency. Here the players are right. The Slams must open up their accounts far more.
The second is the revenue share. Here the issue is real, but technically less simple than it is often made to sound: one needs to know a percentage of what, with which costs, within which perimeter, with which transfers and against which comparison.
The third is redistribution. Here the protest is still weak. Because it is not enough to ask for more money to enter the “players” block. One has to say how that money will be divided, who will receive more, who will receive less of the possible increase and how much the top is prepared to leave to the base.
Until this third level is there, the word “players” remains too convenient. Inside it there is Sinner at 23.6 million and the No. 250 at less than 150,000. Inside it there is the player who travels with a full team and the player who has to decide whether a trip is worth it. Inside it there are champions who speak from the top of the system and players living in the zone where professionalism can become a cost.
Putting them all in the same sentence may work in a press conference. It is not enough to build a policy.
That is why the boycott that is not happening matters more than it seems. It shows the limit of the revolt. The players want pressure without rupture, a greater share without yet showing the table, union language without a visible sacrifice from the top.
The Slams must respond. But if we accept that, in the Slams, money can be distributed according to political, historical and developmental criteria for the good of the sport, then it is hard to see why the same principle should stop in front of the prize cheques of the top players.
Because if the battle really is for the world No. 150, 250 or 300, the first credible gesture is not walking out of the press room after 15 minutes. It is putting real money into a real fund, with clear criteria, and then asking the Slams to do the same.
Until then, it remains a legitimate protest on transparency, fragile on redistribution and very cautious on conflict.
More than a revolution, for now, it looks like a pay rise request from the strongest people in the system.
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