“The winner takes it all”

Tennis, the NFL and the union of the top ten: why 17.5 per cent is an alibi

In today’s debate about professional tennis there is one number that keeps being waved like a flag: 17.5 per cent. That is supposed to be the share of global tennis revenues that ends up in the players’ pockets, men and women, mainly in the form of prize money, compared with, for example, the roughly 48 per cent that the NFL guarantees its athletes through its collective bargaining agreement. This is the core of the narrative promoted by associations such as the PTPA (the independent union founded by Djokovic to represent professional tennis players): tennis players, the argument goes, receive a much smaller slice of the pie than their colleagues in American football, the system is unfair, what is needed is a strong union and an NFL-style model.

This story works because it is simple. It is simple precisely because it cuts out half of reality. Once you put all the pieces back in – the numbers in tennis, the extreme concentration of prize money among the top twenty, the role of betting money and Gulf funds – the picture becomes a lot less comfortable for everyone: for the ATP, but also for those who, from the penthouse of the rankings, present themselves to the world as the injured party.

There is one image that sums up this scenario better than any slogan: the “The winners take the most” graph. At the top, a handful of names that take an enormous slice of the cake. Below, a long tail of players who are progressively poorer, down to a zone where, at the end of the year, the balance sheet is basically at zero.

In this article we focus mainly on the men’s circuit, where the “17.5 per cent” theme intersects with a concentration of prize money among the top twenty that has no equivalent in any other major league. We use it as the model: the WTA, with some discrepancies, does not substantially diverge from it.

“Tennis Incorporated”: what sits inside that 17.5 per cent

To understand what that 17.5 per cent really amounts to, you first have to define what “cake” we are talking about. Drawing on ATP’s published accounts, economic analyses of the Majors and ITF data, the order of magnitude is this: in 2022 the ATP Tour recorded central revenues of around 259.5 million dollars. To that you add the revenues of the four Slams, which various analyses put somewhere between 1.7 and 1.8 billion dollars a year in total, plus a share of ITF revenues attributable to men’s professional tennis.

What you get is an order of magnitude for the overall business of professional tennis of around 2.1–2.2 billion dollars a year, using estimates that combine ATP, Slams and a portion of ITF revenues. In this framework, the famous 17.5 per cent cited by the PTPA is the share of these revenues that flows back to the players in the form of prize money. In this article I use that figure as a rough benchmark also for the men’s circuit, knowing that in the original estimates men and women are counted together.

However, as soon as you try to look “at the ATP alone”, the picture does not become more reassuring; it simply becomes murkier. The last readable snapshot is the 2022 financial statement of the ATP World Tour: 259.5 million dollars in declared revenues and around 180 million paid out to players across ATP and Challenger prize money and bonuses, plus 28 million set aside in the pension fund. From that point on, the money disappears into a chain of nested shell companies. The TV rights for the ATP circuit are centralised in ATP Media, the ATP’s media arm, which produces and sells the broadcast rights globally as a package. Data and betting rights are managed by Tennis Data Innovations, the ATP–ATP Media joint venture that has a global agreement with Sportradar to distribute official data and live streaming to bookmakers and betting operators worldwide.

Above this structure sits the money from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), which is a strategic partner of the ATP, naming partner of the men’s rankings and sponsor of tournaments such as Indian Wells, Miami, Madrid, Beijing, the Turin Finals and the Next Gen Finals in Saudi Arabia, as well as bankrolling the new Masters 1000 planned in the Kingdom from 2028.

Around it, many Masters 1000 events are directly controlled by billionaires or investment vehicles: Larry Ellison owns Indian Wells, Ben Navarro’s Beemok Capital has bought Cincinnati, while a new company created by Ari Emanuel, MARI, has taken over Madrid and Miami with investors such as Apollo, RedBird and Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund inside it.

What the published accounts do not show is what these deals are actually worth: neither the ATP nor the tournaments publish precise figures for what comes in from Sportradar, PIF, Qatar Investment Authority and the other funds. All you see is what goes out in prize money and bonuses; when it comes to what comes in, the system has become complex and deliberately opaque.

Paradoxically, the Slams are a little more legible: their overall revenues show up in the federations’ accounts and in the business press, and we know they allocate only 12–16 per cent of what they take in to prize money. Within that 12–16 per cent, however, it is precisely the Majors that have raised first-round and qualifying pay-outs more than anyone else: a first round at a Slam today is worth, on its own, what a player outside the top 100 can struggle to put together in months of Challengers. Saying “tennis pays badly” is an average that lumps together this fragmented, opaque architecture and allows everyone, from tournaments to top players, to talk about percentages without ever having to say clearly who is cashing what and who, in practice, is keeping the base of the rankings alive.

The comparison with the NFL does not hold up

The comparison with the NFL changes colour once you fix the orders of magnitude. The football league is a closed competition with 32 franchises, roughly 2,200 players under contract and a turnover estimated between 20 and 23 billion dollars. The collective agreement guarantees players about 48 per cent of the pie, but it does so in a salary-cap system and within a structure where the average career lasts three and a half years.

Tennis does not have a single league, it does not have a CBA, it does not have 2,200 employees to support. If we took the perimeter of “Tennis Incorporated” (2.1 billion) and imagined a theoretical world with 2,200 salaried tennis players, we would end up with total player compensation close to 49 per cent. But tennis is not built like that. It is a Darwinian free market. So the question stops being “why don’t we get to 48 per cent like the NFL?” and becomes: what happens, within that 17–20 per cent, to the 250–300 who actually live off tennis?

The ATP, OneVision and the disappearance of the 250s

The ATP has tried to respond with the OneVision strategy: longer Masters 1000 events, expanded draws and profit sharing. There have been results, such as the Baseline programme that guarantees a minimum income. But the underlying logic always rewards the top: profit sharing is linked to ranking points, so it ends up in the pockets of those who go deep in tournaments (the usual suspects). Meanwhile, the expansion of the “thousands” and the arrival of the future Masters in Saudi Arabia are squeezing the space for the 250 tournaments, the real lungs of the circuit where the middle tier can pick up points and money, as ATP chairman Gaudenzi said at the 2025 ATP Finals and as we have already discussed here , in Gaudenzi’s own words.. The risk is that of building an even more rigid circuit, where the elite are protected and the middle class disappears.

Ironically, in 2024 the ATP made a big show of Baseline, the “social” programme that guarantees a minimum to the top 250 in the rankings: 1.3 million dollars distributed to 26 players.

In the same ecosystem, any Masters 1000 champion earns around a million on his own in a single week, and bonuses and profit sharing for the players at the top exceed 38 million.
Add it all up and less than three per cent of OneVision’s new cake goes to those who are struggling to stay on Tour; the rest is fuel for those who are already at the top. It is hard to call that a revolution; it looks much more like a cosmetic operation.

And it rewards the best, not the “little guys” or the young.

But as we have already argued here , the ATP is no longer reformable from within. It is the players who should act.

“The winners take the most”: the elite and the rest of the world

Even if we do not know exactly how much tennis brings in overall – is it 17, 15, 25 per cent that gets redistributed? – in the end that matters relatively little: the real fault line emerges when you look at how prize money is distributed, and those numbers are public. The main inequality is not just between players and institutions, but within the group of players themselves.
Here we look only at on-court prize money because it is the only flow that is fully traceable and collectively redistributable. Sponsorship is a different game, an individual one.

In 2024 Jannik Sinner ended the season with about 19.7 million dollars in prize money alone (and almost 24 with ATP year-end bonuses), Alexander Zverev with over 11 million, Carlos Alcaraz with just over 10. Adding up just the top ten in 2024, you go well beyond 80 million dollars in prize money. In other words, in a single season the very best absorb an enormous share of the money tennis distributes to players in prize money.

Lower down, the figures collapse. The most serious studies (ITF, FiveThirtyEight) indicate that the break-even point – the ranking you need to finish the year at zero costs – lies roughly between 300 and 350. Above the top 200 you can genuinely make a living from tennis; below 300, professionalism is technically an activity that loses money or that is financed by third parties. In a typical year, around 300 players worldwide break 100,000 dollars in gross prize money, from which you then have to subtract 150–200,000 dollars in direct expenses (flights, coach, tax). Throwing into the same pot someone who wins Slams and someone who earns less than an office worker is a rhetorical choice, not a neutral fact.

But it cannot become an Abba model: “The winner takes it all”. If you want a union, the system is you (and your manager is wrong)

If we genuinely want to talk about a union, you need at least some minimum form of internal redistribution.
This is where the 17.5 per cent narrative crashes into reality. If you use the word “union” seriously, you need the courage to look not only at tournament revenues, but at the bank accounts of the top players.

This is where the classic objection kicks in. The manager of a top-five player gets up and says: “My client fills stadiums, sells TV rights and generates hype. Nobody knows who the world number 150 is. Why should my player share his earnings with him?” It is a standard capitalist objection, but in tennis it does not hold. Sinner, Alcaraz or Zverev earn eye-watering sums exclusively because they sit at the top of a system. A phenomenon playing on an empty court, without a circuit of 100 tournaments, without opponents to fill a draw and without the narrative of the climb, is not a sellable product. If you remove the “system” – the other players, the smaller tournaments, the competition – Sinner or whoever stands in his place is just a talented kid in his underwear hitting balls against a wall. Nobody buys a ticket for that. The economic value of the world number one exists only because there are many players ranked No. 100 and below. The middle-tier pro is the infrastructure that allows the champion to shine and monetise.

In 2024 ten players – less than 1 per cent of professionals who earn ATP points – took home just under 100 million dollars between them, around a quarter of the prize money distributed in men’s tennis in a season (counting prize money, bonuses and profit sharing).

#1 Jannik Sinner (ITA): ≈ $23.6 Million (The benchmark)

~#100 Vít Kopřiva (CZE): $674,433 (Prize Money) (Earned ≈ 35 times less than Sinner)

~#250 Murkel Dellien (BOL): $144,659 (Prize Money) (Earned ≈ 163 times less than Sinner)

~#330 Moez Echargui (TUN): $119,745 (Prize Money) (Earned ≈ 197 times less than Sinner)

The idea of sending Sinner, Alcaraz or whoever in their place to negotiate with a Slam for “more money for the players” is scenically powerful, but conceptually hard to believe. The ones sitting at the table are precisely those who, on their own, absorb an enormous share of all the money that tennis distributes in prize money: every extra dollar that comes into the system, if it is not accompanied by an internal redistribution mechanism, ends up fattening them most of all. Calling it a battle “for the players” is convenient, but until the top ten commit to putting a share of their own takings back into circulation, it remains above all a battle to increase the weight of those who are already at the top.

A concrete proposal

One possible model for a genuine union is that of progressive membership or a licensing fee. Not a tax, but a structural contribution for access to the elite circuit, managed directly by the union to fund welfare services. A small deduction (between 2 and 10 per cent) from the million-dollar prize cheques of the highest-earning players – based on prize money, not ranking – would be enough to create an annual fund of 7–9 million dollars. That would be sufficient to cover costs and structurally change the lives of the average professional and emerging youngsters, turning tennis from a gamble into a profession. Below we set out the idea of an algorithm.

A structure of this kind would make demands towards the ATP and the Slams much more credible. The players at the top could sit down and say: “We have already set up an internal solidarity system because we recognise the value of the circuit; now it is your turn to do your part.”

With the 2024 numbers, a progressive deduction from the million-dollar prize cheques of roughly the top 30–50 earners would be enough to create an annual fund of between 7 and 9 million dollars. Money to be redistributed mainly between positions 150 and 400, that is, where today being a professional is almost a loss-making job.

Until that happens, the 17.5 per cent remains above all a smokescreen: a number to wave against “the system” that allows the top ten to put themselves on the same level as number 250 without ever touching the real point.

The question is not only how much tennis should pay players, but how much those at the top are willing to put into a common pot so that a tennis players’ union is not, in practice, simply the union of the top ten.

• Professional Tennis Players Association (PTPA). “Understanding PTPA Principle Tenet #2: Fair Share of the Business.” 31 May 2023.
• NFL.com. “NFL Player Vote Ratifies New CBA Through 2030 Season.”
• Cause IQ. “ATP World Tour” organization profile.
• FiveThirtyEight. “Tennis Has an Income Inequality Problem.”
• Berkeley Economic Review. “The Biggest Unforced Error in Sports.”
• Forbes; Front Office Sports. Articles on NFL revenues and major sports business figures.
• NFL Players Association (NFLPA). “NFL Economics 101.”
• Luxus Plus. “Roland-Garros: an Economic Eldorado.”
• Tennis.com. “Jannik Sinner Dominates ATP Prize Money Leaders for 2024.”
• AS.com. “2024 Tennis Prize Money Rankings.”
• ATP Tour. “Baseline, ATP’s Pioneering Financial Security Programme.”
• ATP Tour. Press releases on prize money increases and expanded Masters 1000 events.
• ATP Tour. “ATP’s Baseline Programme Distributes $1.3 Million…”