Wimbledon: Tennis players want more money ... they're just not willing to fight for it

Here was the world's No. 1-ranked men's tennis player, Jannik Sinner, on the eve of Wimbledon with the stage to himself.

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Since before last month's French Open, Sinner has volunteered to be one of the faces of a player protest — if you can really call it that — over the percentage of revenue the four Grand Slam tournaments are allocating for prize money. So you'd think that as defending Wimbledon champion, the pre-tournament press conference would be an opportune time for Sinner to pound his fist on the table and talk about how unfairly players are being treated and what the next steps might be if they don't get what they want.

And then, when the subject inevitably was raised Saturday, Sinner came up even smaller than he did at Roland Garros last month when he collapsed from two sets up in the Paris heat.

"I think we talked enough about this at the moment," Sinner told reporters. "The Grand Slams know what we ask, and then [we'll] see how that goes.

"I'm here now to talk about tennis."

That's some powerful protest movement you've got there, Jannik.

As Wimbledon begins on Monday, the hilarity of the ATP and WTA's top tennis players crusading for more prize money will once again be part of the story, as it was in Paris and promises to be in New York when the U.S. Open begins in August.

Do the players deserve more? You can argue they do. Despite Wimbledon upping total prize money by 20 percent over last year — the singles champions will each take home roughly $4.75 million, decreasing all the way down to about $105,000 for first-round losers — it's still a few percentage points short in total revenue from what a collection of top-10 players on both tours asked for last year.

Jannik Sinner is looking to defend his Wimbledon championship, which would be his first Grand Slam victory this year.ADRIAN DENNIS via Getty Images

In a letter to the Slams last September, they said they wanted the Slams to devote 16 percent of total revenue to prize money in 2026, escalating to 22 percent by 2030. That may or may not be a reasonable request. But given how the Slams have become money-printing machines (just try buying a ticket to Arthur Ashe Stadium this year, never mind the $23 they're charging for a Honey Deuce cocktail), it's understandable why the players think they deserve a bigger slice of the pie.

But as always with tennis players, it comes down to this: What are they willing to sacrifice?

Imagine a world in which Sinner showed up Saturday and, instead of turtling when the prize money topic came up, he threatened to boycott the tournament unless Wimbledon agreed to meet their demands in 2027. What kind of shock waves would that have sent — not just throughout the grounds at the All England Club but all over the sports world?

Maybe other top men's players would have been bold enough to join him. Imagine the pressure from the BBC, ESPN and other major financial stakeholders for Wimbledon to cave to their demands. That's a statement. That's a protest.

But here's the ultimate advantage the Grand Slams have: They know it's never going to happen. Certainly not with this generation of siloed multimillionaires who have trained their whole lives to pursue Slam titles and get a relatively small career window to win them. Someone like Sinner isn't just trying to collect trophies, he's chasing history. Boycotting even one Wimbledon would be a massive sacrifice, which is exactly why it's impossible to believe he'd ever do it.

Especially if he's not even willing to talk about it before the biggest event in tennis.

That's not to say the players are doing nothing. At both Roland Garros and Wimbledon, players are limiting their media obligations as a protest avenue. While that sounds trivial on the surface — some of them would just as soon not do interviews anyway — it's a hit to the TV broadcasters who have laid out big money for the rights and aren't getting as much player access as they paid for. At Wimbledon, the players who signed on to the protest will limit their total post-match media availability to 15 minutes for the first week of the tournament.

It's worth noting Larry Scott — yes, the same Larry Scott who put the Pac-12 on a path to oblivion — is the consultant pulling this together. But before his time in college sports, Scott was a well-regarded commissioner of the WTA and played an instrumental role in the pressure campaign that got both Wimbledon and Roland Garros to join the Australian and U.S. Opens in awarding equal prize money to men and women.

In this world, Scott knows what levers to push and the difficulty of getting star athletes in an individual sport aligned on anything. It's certainly harder than it used to be.

Back in the early days of professional tennis, players were frequently willing to sacrifice for a greater cause if necessary. Billie Jean King threatened to boycott the U.S. Open in 1973 if they didn't offer equal prize money. Also in 1973, 12 of the 16 men's seeds boycotted Wimbledon in protest of the tournament upholding the suspension of Niki Pilic by Yugoslavian authorities over Pilic's decision to play a tournament for money rather than representing his country in a Davis Cup match. In 1974, Jimmy Connors chose to sign a contract with World Team Tennis, triggering a ban from the French Open — the only Grand Slam he didn't win that year.

In each case, player power won in the long run, paving the way for someone like Sinner to earn $65 million in prize money before his 25th birthday.

But with that level of financial comfort for top players, not to mention the sponsor obligations that go into overdrive around the four big tournaments, there are massive structural barriers to players organizing in a way that would truly make the Grand Slams feel threatened.

Even if they firmly believe players should have access to more money from the Slams, the only ones who actually need it are players ranked outside the top-100. Those are the folks who might make more money from a first-round U.S. Open loss than they do the rest of the year combined. But are the likes of Sinner or Aryna Sabalenka going to miss a Slam for their lower-ranked colleagues? Get real.

Given those realities, Sinner passing on an opportunity Saturday to talk about what the players want and why they deserve it suggests they may not understand what it's going to take to fight this fight — if they're even serious about it in the first place.

It's easy to understand why Sinner would want to spend the next two weeks focusing solely on defending his Wimbledon title. But throughout the history of sports, fights between labor and management have been decided on leverage. What good is having it if you're not willing to use it?

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