For years the air in the global tennis world was becoming tense: on one side, players were demanding better prizes and fewer tournaments, and on the side of the organizers, such as the ATP, the WTA, the Tennis Federation, and the Grand Slams, there were more meetings than actual changes. This ended up exhausting the players' association co-founded by Novak Djokovic, known as the PTPA (Professional Tennis Players Association), which on Tuesday filed an antitrust lawsuit against these organizations.
The legal action, which also includes the sports integrity agency, was jointly filed in New York, London, and Brussels, accusing professional tennis tournament organizers of being “a cartel.”
What does the demand of Djokovic’s players' association say?
The presentation on behalf of the Professional Tennis Players Association (PTPA) states that the organizations that govern the sport have “total control over players' salaries and working conditions” and that their structure constitutes “violations of state and federal law that immunize professional tennis from ordinary market forces and deny professional tennis players and other industry participants their right to fair competition”.
The lawsuit seeks a trial by jury and wants the players to have access to higher earnings.
They argue that the organizations overseeing the four Grand Slam tournaments —Wimbledon, the US Open, the French Open, and the Australian Open— and other professional events “limited the prize money that tournaments give out and restrict players' ability to earn money off the court.”
What is Djokovic’s role in this “tennis civil war”?
The PTPA was founded by Novak Djokovic and Canadian Vasek Pospisil in August 2020, with the aim of providing representation to players who are independent contractors in a largely individual sport. One of the goals that was made clear along the way was to become a kind of full union that negotiates collective bargaining agreements like those that exist in team sports.
The PTPA seeks better conditions and a collective agreement, similar to the ones that the NFL, NBA, WNBA, NHL, and Major League Baseball have in the United States.
“Over the past few years, the PTPA...has made countless efforts to collaborate with the tours in the hope of achieving positive change for the players. Despite these efforts and attempts to engage in constructive dialogue, we have encountered resistance and a lack of significant action,” Pospisil posted on social media. “For too long, players have been forced to accept a broken system that ignores our well-being, undervalues our contributions, and leaves us without real representation.”
Although he is the founder of the PTPA, Djokovic is not one of the players listed as plaintiffs. Instead, the names of Australian Nick Kyrgios, Romanian Sorana Cirstea, American Reilly Opelka, and Chinese Zheng Saisai appear.
The PTPA stated that they met with over 250 players, both women and men, including a majority of the top 20 in the WTA and ATP rankings before going to court.
“The tennis is broken,” said the CEO of the PTPA, Ahmad Nassar, in a press release. “Behind the glamorous facade that the defendants promote, players are trapped in an unfair system that exploits their talent, suppresses their earnings, and jeopardizes their health and safety.”
What are the players of the PTPA looking for?
Some of the main demands of the Professional Tennis Players Association (PTPA) are:
- The points system that requires playing certain tournaments, the most important ones, without receiving enough financial compensation.
- The obligation to play a minimum number of tournaments.
- The limited number of external tournaments on the tour in which one can participate.
- The investigative techniques of the integrity agency (which oversees anti-doping and corruption cases) are accused of being abusive and violating due process.
- The long and exhausting calendar, which lasts almost the whole year.
At the beginning of last year, the organizers of the Grand Slam tournaments tried to partner with the nine Masters 1000 tournaments (including Indian Wells and Miami) to create a more streamlined and lucrative tour, similar to the Formula One calendar. Players were in agreement, but the ATP and WTA managed to stop it.
The demand for the PTPA revives fears that a new tour might be created, similar to when the LIV Golf (backed by Saudi Arabia) split from the PGA Tour and the European Tour in the “civil war” that still divides the golf world.
This is just the first battle of a long conflict that will change the world of tennis as we knew it.