It’s Time for a Tennis Union By Charles McKenna

It’s Time for a Tennis Union

By Charles McKenna

There are 750 Major League baseball players during the regular season. Lowest paid earn $550,000 per year—the league minimum. In addition, travel and accommodation costs are paid for and the player gets per diem payments when the team is on the road. The team provides training facilities and professional conditioning to keep the player in top physical shape. He has health care and a retirement program.

There are 1,696 regular NFL players. The least compensated among them, makes $480,000 per year and, like his baseball contemporary, has all his expenses paid for. I do not begrudge any of these players their money. Even the least of them are incredible athletes who work years to reach the professional level of their sport, and possess incredible talent for which they rightfully should be paid handsomely. As much as each makes, their pay is dwarfed by the owners for whom they toil. They earn millions for their teams and deserve the compensation and perks they receive.

Individual sports are a different animal. In tennis, the top players are incredibly well-compensated. The men’s and women’s winners of last year’s U.S. Open, a two-week engagement, each earned $3.85 million. As much as a top player can make in prize money, it is generally less than the sponsorship money that can be made. Serena Williams, Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, Maria Sharapova, Novak Djokovic, Naomi Osaka and many other top players make incredible money for playing the game they love. They too earn it and deserve it. The problem with tennis, however, is that those riches are reserved for a very small percentage of the player pool. While the 750th baseball player makes $550,000 and the 1696th football player makes $480,000, the 750th ranked tennis player is undoubtedly in debt.

Ilya Marchenko, hardly a household name, is ranked 150th by the ATP, the governing body for men’s professional tennis in the world. The ATP reports that over his professional career, which began in 2006, he has earned just over $2 million which averages out to about $145,000 per year. To the Average Joe, $145,000 is not a bad yearly wage—if it were only for Marchenko. Unlike his football and baseball brethren, he has to pay for his coaching, his travel, his conditioning, and all other expenses. There is no team other than the one he is financially responsible for. He has no medical insurance nor does qualify for a pension. Oh, and if he doesn’t win, he doesn’t get paid. His team, however, does—by him.

By comparison, Marchenko is faring pretty well. The woman ranked 150th in the WTA, Varvara Flink, turned pro in 2012. Her career earnings have been $314,746, for a yearly average of just over $39,000 per year before expenses. Thus, after expenses, her wages are analogous to many minimum wage earners in America, if she’s lucky.

It’s hard to feel too sorry for Marchenko and Flink because they are doing what they love and chasing their

dreams, but so too are numbers 750 and 1696 in baseball and football, respectively. So why are they so differently compensated? There are a number of variables, but the most important one is a players’ union. In football and baseball, and many other team sports, the players are unionized and collectively bargain with the owners. They have at times gone on strike, leaving their stadiums empty in pursuit of a fairer compensation package. Yes, they are highly paid, but given the amount of money the sports they are the key component of generate, they are justly paid. It is their collective voice and actions that gives them the power to compete with the owners. And compete they have. In major team sports, the players get somewhere between 45 and 49 percent of the income stream their sports generate. In tennis, it is estimated that the average take is less than 15 percent of the income generated. That’s quite a disparity.

This lack of a bargaining unit is sorely lacking from many individual sports, tennis among them. Unlike team sports where the owners take the profits for themselves, many tournaments are operated by non-profit organizations who claim, at least, to support tennis with the monies that they take in and therefore do not expend on prize money. But that has not seemed to raise the lot of the professional tennis player who hover in the shadows of the greats. Many of those players do not participate in major tournaments or even any ATP events. They are often found competing in Challenger events where you pretty much have to make it to the semifinals to break even, given your expenses. Players who go out in early rounds of Challenger events earn in the $500 to $1,000 range for their efforts, which do not generally cover expenses. A system which provides a living wage for men and women in the early stages of their professional careers is sorely needed and it won’t come from tournament directors. The only hope for a rational financial blueprint for the sport is through a players’ union which understands that the continued viability of the sport requires a constant infusion of young talent that will fill the ranks. It is, after all, the Cinderella story that makes for a great tournament scenario.

Tennis, like golf, has been viewed as a club sport, generally reserved for those with money. Access to courts, especially in bad weather, is limited and expensive. Generally, one only excels with constant lessons which do not come cheap. In short, there are barriers to excelling in the sport, many of which are financial in nature. That continues into the pro ranks. Without backers with the financial wherewithal to assist a young, promising player, many simply cannot see their way to a professional career. Thus, tennis continues to be a sport for the wealthy. Yes, there are those like the Williams sisters and Frances Tiafoe who come from humble beginnings but they are by-and-large unicorns with families that had a singular desire to see their children excel. The more usual scenario will continue to be either the player from a well-to-do background or those with financial backers willing to fund athletic promise for a piece of hoped-for-gains. Without a players’ union that could bankroll a pipeline through collectively-bargained dollars that can be used to provide a living wage to promising players, regardless of their financial profile, the existing disparity in professional tennis will continue.

The elite player travels with a support entourage that helps him or her maintain a competitive advantage. Thus, in addition to a coach, there is a physio, a hitting partner and a business person to make all the arrangements for travel, housing, and coordinating all aspects of the payer’s off-court life so that the player focuses on his/her game. Players not in the elite ranks are lucky if they can afford a coach, so they are severely handicapped in reaching greater heights. This adds to the disparity in the game and arguably stunts the professional growth of some promising players.

One way in which a professional player hovering around challenger tournaments can guarantee a better wage is to engage in “fixing” a point, a game a set or a match. Many European Sportsbooks permit wagering on each of those aspects of the game and given it is an individual sport, proving that the fix was in is almost impossible. Tennis is one of the top five sports on which to gamble. Thus, a player who is not destined for greatness, or is in need of money because the economics of the sport have been unkind, can resort to other means of remuneration. This is not a theoretical exercise. In a 2014 study, it was estimated that over a two-year span one percent of first-round matches in tournaments were fixed. Given the number of tournaments that are staged each year, that translates to a fair amount of fraud. The economics of the sport promote this activity.

No one is quite sure of the full economic picture of professional tennis because there is no transparency into tournament finances. A players’ union could change this. Like the team sports with collective bargaining agreements, the owners have to open their books so that fair compensation for all the players can be arrived at. While tennis and other individual sports do not neatly fall into the same blueprint as team sports, there is a path whereby players can organize and fairly bargain for an appropriate percentage of the profits they create. Then it will be up to the players to administer the funds to adequately compensate not just the players who presently control the sport, but those who are the future. People bemoaned the formation of players unions when they first came to major sports. Look at them now. Both the owners and the players have flourished under systems that are fair to all.

Tennis needs to change with the times so that finally, it can be: Advantage, Player.

Charles McKenna is a partner at the law firm Riker Danzik Scherer Hyland Perretti, LLC. Prior to that, he served as the General Counsel and Managing Director of Investigations and Compliance at Renaissance Associates, as well as nearly two decades at the United States Attorney’s Office in the District of New Jersey. He can be reached at charlie.mckenna1@gmail.com