The All England Club is coming under pressure from leading tennis players to deliver a significant prize money hike at Wimbledon, even though the tournament paid out a record pot of £53.5m last summer.
With just over a week to go before Wimbledon reveals its pay scale for the 2026 Championships – which will be announced at a press conference on Thursday, June 11 – Sally Bolton, the AELTC’s outgoing chief executive, met players’ representative Larry Scott at the French Open in Paris on Monday.
Scott’s primary goal is to pressure the four majors into paying 22 per cent of their revenues back to the players, thus matching the rough figure attained on the ATP and WTA tours. The majors are committing around 15 per cent of revenues to prize money, which equated to £3m apiece for the two Wimbledon singles champions last summer.
In response, the grand-slam tournaments – Australian Open, French Open, Wimbledon Championships and US Open – have offered to set up a player council to give the athletes more of a say in their decisions. For the moment, though, this appears to have been rejected as a diversionary tactic, with Scott’s team expressing a greater interest in the bottom line.
Last week, the issue was highlighted when leading players limited their maximum interview time at Roland Garros’s media day to 15 minutes, in a pointed allusion to that 15 per cent figure mentioned earlier. Host broadcasters thus missed out on some of the routine clips they would normally use to pad their TV or radio coverage between matches.
Although the protest was not universally observed, with three-time French Open champion Novak Djokovic among those who declined to take part, Scott’s camp says that it achieved more in bringing the four majors to the table than a year’s worth of letters and media briefings.
There is clear potential for the stunt to be repeated at the All England Club if next week’s prize money announcement is felt to be insufficiently generous.
Although the pay protest is being led by Jannik Sinner and Aryna Sabalenka, the men’s and women’s world No 1s, their messaging suggests that it is primarily intended to support the fringe players on the tour, such as the first-round losers who received £66,000 from Wimbledon last year.
Telegraph Sport has seen a briefing document which puts the case for the tournament organisers in this stand-off, and which points out the four majors contribute a vastly larger percentage of players’ earnings (44 per cent of their annual income, from just eight weeks of the calendar) than the equivalent tournaments in golf (14 per cent). This figure rises to 50 or 60 per cent for players ranked around the 100 to 120 mark.
The document also points out that the prize money supplied by the next tier of tour events – the Masters or WTA 1000 tournaments – has stagnated or declined since 2019, even though these events have expanded to take up an extra month’s worth of calendar.