Novak Djokovic's players union has mounted its most significant challenge to the governing superstructure of tennis. On Tuesday, the Professional Tennis Players Association, along with one dozen named professional tennis players, filed a sweeping lawsuit in U.S., U.K., and E.U. courts against the four most powerful agencies in global tennis: the International Tennis Federation, which oversees the administration of the Grand Slams and is the closest thing tennis has to an international governing body; the International Tennis Integrity Agency, which runs anti-doping; and the ATP and WTA tours.
You can deduce a good deal about the strange, diffuse ways tennis is run through both the identity and quantity of both plaintiffs and defendants. This legal battle is, at heart, a conflict between labor and management over the latter's control of the former's production, though the PTPA is not technically a union of salaried employees and management is less a cohesive unit than an assemblage of interconnected bodies. The ATP, for its part, is partially constituted of the players themselves. Djokovic is not one of the named players in the suit, though the 585th-best WTA player and 1,099th-best ATP player in the world are.
The number of Grand Slams a player has won will not bear on how a judge sees this case. All that matters is whether or not the agglomerated tennis governing body has deflated player earning power by enforcing anti-competitive business practices. This is crux of the suit:
The Defendants and their co-conspirators have formed a cartel, acquired monopsony power in the market for the services of professional tennis players, erected barriers to entry to lock out competitors and preserve their own artificial market position, and abused their power to the harm of players, the sport, fans, and competition.
The suit gets into the percentage of revenues that players earn, the ways the tours force them to play for 11 months a year, the extralegal and extraordinary power that the ITIA has in enforcing opaque doping regulations, and the alleged data collection and bundling scheme that the tours run through the HawkEye tracking system. The entire suit, which is 163 pages long and can be found here, is a fascinating read, both for the level of detail it presents but also for the way it reframes many seemingly standard practices of tennis in terms of bare worker exploitation. The new, allegedly heavier tennis balls, for example, are brought up as a worker-disciplining mechanism because they lead to more wrist injuries. The PTPA constellates its efforts alongside those of other professional athletes to get their fair share, and they say they're pretty far behind:
Compensation for professional tennis players also lags far behind what professional athletes earn in comparable leagues. Unlike other professional sports leagues, such as MLB, the NBA, and the NHL, each of which splits approximately 50% of gross revenue with its players, upon information and belief, the Tours split less than 20% of their gross revenue with players.
That 20-percent figure is stark, though it speaks less to the core exploitation of tennis players and more to the steep gradient between the lavishly paid best players in the world and the precarious rank-and-file. The response from tennis organizers and governing bodies would be that the overlong schedule represents a great field of opportunity, as an 11-month schedule that is largely prolonged by the extremely lucrative winter swing through East Asia and the Middle East means that more players have more chances to win at more tournaments. While players would like fewer tournaments with better prize pools, which would be the theoretical result of competition between Masters 1000s (Larry Ellison would happily pay more for Indian Wells if he could), that also means fewer overall paydays and a possible steepening of the income curve.
A good analog, then, is not the sports leagues cited above, but rather golf. Like tennis, it's an individual sport with a stark difference of earning power between its wealthiest and poorest players. Golf has just gone through its own organizational war, one that ended with two separate tours and a Balkanized system of competition. Something like that is faintly possible in the case of tennis, especially since the wedge (sovereign wealth fund money) is the same in the case of both sports. Fans would probably hate to see tennis's most interesting players spread more diffusely through the calendar, but any system where they get paid more and have to bust their ass circling the globe would be great for them.
This case will almost certainly not go to trial, beause neither side wants non-stakeholders to decide on a new system for how tennis is run, so I think this should be read as the opening negotiating position for the players. Though only 12 players are named here, one of the organizing plaintiffs made clear that the base of support is much broader. "We spoke to over 300 players prior to filing and everyone was extremely supportive," Vasek Pospisil wrote on Twitter. "Including the top players. The ATP/WTA has spread so much fear over the years that it’s not easy to put your name on this publicly. Player support for this initiative is undeniable."
Ultimately, something will change here, and it's admirable that Djokovic cares so deeply about his fellow players that he's expending time and energy at this stage in his career to try and change the system. The timing of this suit makes a strong implicit case for its thesis, as it comes between Indian Wells and Miami. The former is beloved by players for its great organization, player-friendly approach, and overall environment, while the latter draws annual complaints for its shoddy organizing. Both are worth the same amount to players, with zero incentive or ability to compete with each other, and both are mandatory for the top players. You can see, in how these two particular tournaments are run, why the players are fighting.
