No Money in Tennis

The 42nd best tennis player in the world makes the same amount per year as the lowest of Major League Baseball players.

        SOURCE:    http://www.marketwatch.com

Steven Kutz, an editor at Marketwatch,  writes about how little tennis professionals make compared to other major sports in "How much do tennis players earn compared to other athletes?" 

"Of course, players in major team sports are salaried, while individual sport athletes are paid by winnings. But what about golf? At a glance, it seems like the most similar to tennis. Yet the No. 32 earner on the PGA Tour this year, J.B. Holmes, has made over $2 million."

 I often hear the argument that the reason tennis players often make less is because the are paid on how well they do instead of having this salary that many other athletes in other sports have. I felt like this statement really does a good job of refuting that argument because as you can see the 32nd golfer has made over $2 million dollars. It does not say above in the quotation, but in the article it states that the 32nd tennis player made about $750,000. As you can see even when comparing individual sports the numbers are still very significantly different.

"In tennis, players have to pay their own expenses. In addition to paying salaries to his coach and his trainer, Granollers estimates that he spends about $200,000 a year on expenses for the three of them. (They fly business-class on longer flights.)"

The fact that the players have to pay for their own expenses makes the situation even worse. In basically any other sport the team pays for all the travel, hotel room and anything else of that nature. In tennis this is coming directly out of the players income. So 32nd ranked Fernando Verdasco is really only making 550,000 dollars if you use Granollers figure on expenses.

Not only does this mean that the players are making less, but it makes it extremely hard for players who are just starting out to rise to their true potential. For many young players. especially ones without much money, they literally need to win matches to be able to afford to go to the next tournament. If they have a couple bad weeks in a row they might not have enough money to go to the next tournament and have to go back home. Therefore putting a stand still on their career. Tack on top of that paying for expenses and this will often have very good players actually losing money.

'“If you take figures from golf, [Rory] McIlroy has earned approximately $7 million this year, like Novak,” he said. “The No. 30 [golfer] has earned over $2 million this year. If I don’t count my doubles earnings, I made little more than $500,000. That is a 1-to-14 ratio compared to about 1-to-3 in golf.”'

Not only are the top players in other sports making more than the top players in other sports but the gap from the top to lower levels is extremely wider in tennis. It is incredible to me that the ratios of golf to tennis are that much different. It is really unfortunate because tennis is such a great sport and so many people watch and play worldwide, but for whatever reason there isn't nearly as much money in it as in these other major sports. It doesn't seem right to me at all that someone who is so amazing at a very competitive international sport can be paid so little. If somehow they were able to get more money into it I think that the sport would be able to grow even bigger and better than it is. It deserves to grow like this and I hope that in the future it is able too.

FUTURE RESEARCH: Do certain countries help players out more, especially the young ones just starting out, more than others? What is the difference and why from singles players to doubles players?