Midway through a Masters 1000 event—and days after another wrapped—most of the chatter has not been about tennis but about the lawsuit the Professional Tennis Players Association brought against tennis’s various institutions in the three different jurisdictions. Read it here.
This suit is a players’ rights manifesto and an attempted shot across tennis’s bow. It’s being sold as a “courageous challenge to the status quo.” And the status quo does need challenging. Even the ATP’s recent PowerPoint to the majors is titled “The Future Won’t Wait for Tennis.” The question is whether this lawsuit is the way toward meaningful change.
Let’s take a break from conventional tennis talk and dig into the suit …
• Think of this lawsuit as a session with the ball machine. This was not a shot. This was 100 shots, a barrage of attempts, a total emptying of the chamber.
There were some excellent, clean, line-licking shots. And there were some embarrassing shanks. In the end, you’re left with a scattered mass of balls that now need to be cleaned up.
• My brief-in-support would go like this: If there’s one point of agreement in tennis, it is that if somehow the sport were to start anew today, nobody would vote for the current business and governance model. It is lousy with conflicts of interest. It incentivizes personal preservation at the expense of the good of the sport. It is studded with what I call “built-in growth stunters.”
• Maybe above all, the structure of the tours as partnerships between labor and management (players and the events that pay them) is deeply problematic. Labor—at least sports labor—works best when the talent (athletes) sits on one side of the table, capital (those dispensing checks) on the other. And they can negotiate everything from length of season to draw sizes, to prize money allocation, to a drug policy. Inasmuch as this lawsuit represents progress in the players having a collective voice and forming some kind of monolithic body that lets them negotiate, if not collectively bargain, this is a step in the right direction.
• For too long the players have been screwed over by the tours (and, critically, majors) which have preyed on their disorganization, short careers, the fact that they are tennis players and not lawyers, whose time is best spent practicing, not sitting in conference rooms. This has allowed “management” to run rampant. The lawsuit nails this. The majors do pay an intolerably low percentage of revenues as prize money. The tennis calendar is a joke. The season is sadistically, laughably long. Small and irrelevant tournaments do have too much voice and power. The mandatory events, the prize money ceilings and the restrictions of everything from exhibitions to individual gambling partnerships do present a form of anticompetitive behavior. Though it is required for Olympic eligibility, the anti-doping policy that pops players and imperils their careers for trace amounts of sleep medication is problematic. Players do need a voice in basic equipment like the balls. We can go on. But, full stop here: PLAYERS DESERVE—AND NEED—MORE EMPOWERMENT.
• So, good on the players and good on the PTPA for using their leverage. Until players are actually prepared to boycott playing the biggest events, their gripes are just that. Gripes. And the administrators roll their eyes, knowing full well that when the majors roll around, 128 players will crawl on glass to be in the main draw. Likewise, the ATP and WTA know that the stars will show up at the Masters 1000s. And if occasionally a Vasek Pospisil pops up and pops off, speaking out against the system, the worst result is a bad news cycle.
This lawsuit strikes a blow against that complacency.
• If the tours have been “coercive” to players for effectively trying to organize—and that can be demonstrably proven, not just alleged—there must be consequences.
• As for the suit itself, there are some interesting tidbits (amid a lot of strange, even self-defeating, points). Perhaps most notably, Larry Ellison’s willingness to increase money to the players at Indian Wells only to be restricted by the tours is both absurd and, rightly, enraging to the players. (You are effectively taking money out of my pocket in order to artificially depress the market? I thought you were my advocate!) This is adjacent to a related point I bang on about: Players get repped by management agencies who also own the tournaments and have employees on tour boards, seeking to cap prize money. (You say you are trying to make me money and increase my earnings, but your colleague at the vending machine is trying to limit and reduce my potential earnings? How is that kosher?) It’s the most obvious example of conflict of interest, the most obvious case of a market being manipulated to the players’ detriment.
• My brief in opposition would be both macro and micro. The macro? Days after this suit was filed, the four majors, not coincidentally, rejected a proposal for working with the ATP and WTA. How can the tours be a “cartel” when the majors—who are far more powerful, influential and well-capitalized, etc.—are slapping them down? How can there be a monopoly when you have all these defendants and entities competing against each other? The majors want a Premier Tour … the ATP wants the Saudi moneybag and a 10th major … doesn’t this alone frustrate a Sherman Act (monopoly) claim?
• “Cartel,” “corruption” and “illegal” make for voguish terms—muscular, integrity-undermining hinting at conspiracy and deep state and institutions in need of smashing. But can’t a system be flawed, bloated or even filled with conflict without being, de facto, “corrupt”? Can’t a policy change (no management agency employees on the boards, no restrictions if tournaments want to pay more prize money than required, more player voice) solve this problem? I asked a series of sports lawyer friends and sports law professors to weigh in on the suit. Some knew tennis well, others did not. The overarching responses: A) It sounds like a messed-up system, but I am not sure what is illegal. B) What is the better alternative? Do the players really think they’ll end up in a better place if they are successful?
• Not unrelatedly, Andy Roddick and I had the PTPA on the Served podcast last fall and, speaking for Roddick, we were happy for the conversation but frustrated by the lack of specifics. The most basic bullet-point FAQs could not/would not be answered. How many players are PTPA members? Who are they? What is the ideal number of players who should be able to make a living as pro tennis players? How does the for-profit arm work? Who is funding all this? It was a lot of air guitar but little substance and few straight answers. Similarly, apart from the ready-fire-aim onslaught approach, the suit is light on remedy or concrete solutions to problems. What is it you seek? What are the better mechanisms that would improve the ecosystem?
• Micro: On the one hand, don’t get too caught up in the names of the plaintiffs. This is a class action that is really about alleged systematic practices and not the specifics of Player X or Player Y. But from an optics standpoint? It’s curious that not one player who is part of the ATP Player Advisory Council—and would see firsthand the alleged “corruption”—is a named plaintiff. And it’s curious that no top players attached their names—that includes Novak Djokovic, who co-founded the organization leading the charge. When asked about this in Miami, top player after top player didn’t exactly offer full-throated support. Especially in a star-driven sport, it’s going to be hard to make meaningful change when the stars effectively say, Me? Nah, I’m good.
• Yes, at some level, this is circular. At some level, this is intentional. At some level, this is how bad systems persist. Make it work for the folks at the top, and they are disincentivized to change anything. Still, one imagines the defendants going down a list and saying, If Carlos Alcaraz and Coco Gauff and Jannik Sinner etc. aren’t banging their endorsed shoes on tables, we’re gonna be okay here, folks.
• I don’t blame Djokovic here. Especially at this point in his career. Especially with all he’s done to get the PTPA started (including—I’m told—donating more than $1 million of his personal funds.) Especially given his other commitments. But his declining to be a named defendant has not been lost on the defendants’ counsel.
• Likewise, Reilly Opelka (who has had a nice run in Miami) is a named plaintiff. He also recently called for “greedy” doubles players to be eliminated from the workforce. I’m not sure that’s the guy I want headlining my lawsuit that seeks more player rights and opportunities. Likewise, Noah Rubin (full disclosure: someone I know and like) hasn’t played an ATP match since 2022 but is a named plaintiff. Are we to infer that this suit seeks a remedy for retired players as well? Having Nick Kyrgios as the most prominent named plaintiff is a choice as well.
• The suit’s fixation on ranking points strikes me as bizarre. Surely, this is intentional and a legal mind believes that this unlocks a winning argument. But, in a competitive industry there must be some way to rank performers and come up with cutoffs. I kept reading page after page about point distribution and rolling systems and thinking, Okay, fine. Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer’s biggest dispute once came over the ranking system. But how do you propose draw cutoffs? Or signifying that, say, Alcaraz has won more matches than Jordan Thompson, who has won more matches than Tennys Sandgren. And, again, how is the current ranking system—defective as it might be—an illegal restraint of trade?
• There are bizarre and cutting (unnecessarily so) asides, most notably Holger Rune catching strays. If I am a players’ association, don’t I like that exhibitions can depart from rankings to reward marketable players? Is this not a sign of player empowerment, a new market that undercuts a claim of cartel-like behavior? In the past, the PTPA seems to have taken some veiled digs at Sinner, as well. But, again, wouldn’t a players’ empowerment association like that he was approached for, essentially, a settlement offer for his doping suspension?
• The players, I fear, missed their window. Even without their explicit support, this was much more effective at the time of Serena Willams, Federer, Nadal and Djokovic. Now, tournaments (“management”) are bracing for an era of parity, when the events sell themselves, not the players. Not unrelatedly …
• The references to “the market” should scare the players, not embolden them. Want to know what the tennis market looks like in the absence of circuits and mandatory draw sizes? Eight or so stars get paid $2 million per week to play each other in exhibitions. The rest of the players are essentially minor leaguers. Are there not enough indications out there (the endorsement market; the exhibition market; the sparse crowds on side courts; the doubles conundrum we’ve discussed; the proposed Premier Tour) to suggest strongly: without the ATP and WTA, the job market would shrink, not increase. Richard Williams used to joke (or not joke), provocatively, that the WTA should stand for the Williams Tennis Association, not Women’s Tennis Association. Why? Because, he explained, Venus and Serena were propping up the entire enterprise, and they could make more money playing each other every week on their own tour, stopping only to beat the competition at the majors. Strictly as a market-maker, he was not wrong. If the ATP and WTA are cartels hoarding value, where are the promoters offering Pospisils and Anastasia Rodionova bank for offseason playing opportunities?
• Again, if we are letting market forces do all the work here, what happens when promoters say, All tour rules and requirements are off? Great! Hereafter, my event will have no doubles. No qualifiers. And no 96-draw but rather a draw of 16. My balance sheets will improve dramatically.
• This is not a criticism, but, overall, this suit scans a little desperate to me. We are still excluded from big decisions. The tours don’t take us seriously. The U.S. Open changes its entire mixed double format, and the players hear about it on social media. We are mocked for advertising luggage bags and Hilton points as wins. We need a moonshot. Every grievance in one sweeping, scattershot suit. And fling around the word “illegal” without ever really explaining clearly what’s illegal and what is merely messed up.
• Where does this go next? Foolproof prediction: Lawyers will bill lots of hours. This is unlikely to get to trial. The settlement terms seem obvious. More revenue from the majors. There should be more player input on decisions, so blights like the man-spreading Masters events that everyone hates cannot get ratified. A new board structure. Guardrails against conflicts. More mutually agreed-upon terms and conditions.
• If this lawsuit is the change agent that gets players in the door and gets the PTPA’s emails and phone calls returned, great. That’s a win.
• My advice to the players: Good for you for getting the attention of the Tours. (I wish the majors were implicated more, but you can’t have everything.) Keep using your voice. Keep demanding better deal terms, wages and working conditions. Keep fighting the rot that is conflicts of interest. But until you can articulate a better, concrete model, be careful what you sue for. You might just get it.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as What’s at Stake in the PTPA Lawsuit.
