Name: Why most tennis players struggle to make a living
Uploaded: 2025-07-03T22:55:17.000Z
Duration: 9 min 45 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Many of the people in the top 100 are barely breaking even, sometimes in the red.

If you're not playing at Grand Slams consistently and doing well, you're struggling.

So watching William's Sisters and everything, my sister and I, we grew up playing together.

And so I always wanted to be like Venus and Serena.

So I come from Poland, which is, you know, not a huge tennis culture, I would say.

My mom used to play tennis and then that's, you know, how I started when I wanted to, you know, become one of the best players in the world.

I was the first number one junior in 37 years, female, and kind of all my dreams started coming true.

The perception versus the reality, like tennis does look very glam and it looks so polished.

The highest paid this and these big purses and these big prize money tournaments.

That was something that I didn't really understand until I got to that level.

And then once I got to the top 100, then my ranking fell to 400.

And then that was the time when I had to go back to playing like the really low level events.

And I didn't know how I was going to pay my bills.

I told my coach, like, there were times like, hey, I can't pay you or can't pay for training this week.

And then, you know, I got you when we get to the slam and like when we get to the bigger tournament.

So the structure of tennis is pretty unique in the sports landscape.

There's a men's tour, the ATP, there's a women's tour, the WTA.

There's four grand slams, which are each really independently owned and operated.

There's the International Tennis Federation, which is like the global governing body that governs things like the Olympics and some of the more global aspects of tennis.

And you have this really disjointed structure.

When you add it all up, it has left not only the players behind and made it something that is not anywhere close to where it should be in relation to other sports.

I think the total revenue of tennis could be better.

The percentage that the players are getting, I think that that's also some issue.

The tournaments are sharing about 18 percent of the revenue with the players.

In many of those other sports, hockey, American football, soccer, you see a revenue share that is much closer to 50 percent.

As a player, sometimes it is frustrating because you know that you're the talent and you know that you're bringing this certain level of entertainment to all of these different places around the world and not being compensated for it.

And so, if anything, that revenue share should be higher in tennis, given the fact that people are coming to see player A play against player B.

Carlos Alcaraz made the most money on either the men's tour or the women's tour last year, about $10 million, who is, by the way, a generational talent who won an incredible amount of matches last year.

And let's asterisk that for a second, because that's gross.

That's before he pays his own travel, his coaches, his physios, all the expenses that tennis players bear alone, that no athlete in a team sport or other sports like F1 have to bear.

And if you look at $10 million, how that translates in basketball, that's roughly the 150th highest paid player in the NBA.

And then you look at football, American football, that's 202nd highest salary.

In baseball, it's a similar story where it's in the hundreds out of a 6-700 player community at the major league level.

That graphic is like tattooed in my head because it's astonishing to me.

There are a lot more players that are struggling than the ones that aren't.

A good friend of mine, Dustin Brown, a very, very good player.

He was stringing rackets for the players at the tournament to make money.

And sometimes the amount that he was making to string rackets was more than he made in his prize money.

And he beat Nadal at Wimbledon, played one of the most excellent games in the NBA.

And the pressure always gets spun around and put onto them.

Well, if you just won more, you'd be fine.

Well, if you weren't in the 200s or 300s, well, then you'd have nothing to complain about.

In all these other global sports, if I'm in the 200s, 300s, I'm actually well entrenched as a professional athlete.

It's one of the only sports where we're not salary based players.

The way those other sports are structured, the players are employees.

And so when you're an employee, you have a minimum salary.

And part of the problem with tennis is that the players, despite working 11 and a half months a year and traveling the globe, are treated as independent contractors.

I guess people who don't have endorsements, they only make their money from tournaments.

And I don't think that that should be a thing.

I think we should make like salary for the year.

I'm fortunate to have a couple of great sponsors.

Also, I'm playing with a Yonex racket and a Yonex outfit and having a patch on my sleeve of Easyposts.

They send you a package of clothes to wear at different tournaments.

That's based on your ranking and also your profile as a player.

And if you're 200 in the world, maybe, you know, maybe there's a local company from your country that wants to help you, wants to support you.

But if you're outside of top 50, you will have a clothing deal.

But it would be tough to have a real source of income outside of a tennis court.

And in my particular situation, I don't have any sponsors.

So like all of my expenses come out of my prize money.

In traveling with a couple of people around the world, you know, you fly always last minute and you sleep in the hotels, you eat in the restaurants.

Those expenses are really, really significant.

Maybe a coaching year is around $75,000 without expenses.

So for hotel flights, all that, it could add up.

There's so much emphasis on the Grand Slams because these four times a year, only four, are where you get basically the biggest payout.

When you're at the lower rankings or you're like trying to break through, like you kind of have to go everywhere because you need to get points, you need to get money.

I mean, that's how our rankings are determined.

And every tournament has a certain point value and every round has a certain point value.

So at the Grand Slams is where you can make the most points and the lower level tournaments like the 250s or even like Challengers, the lower you drop down, the less point opportunities that you have to make.

So it's just back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.

Oftentimes, the expenses outweigh the pay.

The sport hasn't kept pace with other sports.

The players and what they generate from an income standpoint hasn't kept pace.

What happens if you want to take a break?

What happens if you want to have a child?

There's no mechanism for that other than putting 100 percent of that burden on the player.

Fortunately, my parents were able to help me a lot with my career.

If you don't have support, it's really, really challenging.

The risk is that we can miss out on really unique and amazing talents and people who are very, very good because they can't afford to play.

Players like Ance, Chabour, didn't have those opportunities growing up in Tunisia.

I mean, those are players who made it despite those challenges made it.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

Why most tennis players struggle to make a living

literally

struggle

incredible

gross