Carlos Alcaraz celebrates winning his second round match against Britain's Oliver Tarvet on Tuesday. Alcaraz is the top-earner in tennis this year, sitting at US$7.42-million.Isabel Infantes/Reuters
Carlos Alcaraz is far and away the most successful player in tennis right now. He’s made US$7.42-million from the tour this year – nearly twice as much as the No. 2 men’s earner, Jannik Sinner.
Alcaraz’s sharky grin is so omnipresent at Wimbledon that you’d think he was putting the thing on. If everything goes absolutely perfectly for him from here on in, he’ll top out around US$15-million in prize money this year.
That means that Toronto Raptor Immanuel Quickley, best known for promoting a Canadian online car reseller and functionally invisible outside the city he plays in, makes more than twice as much as him.
Cristiano Ronaldo just re-upped in Saudi Arabia to play in a league zero people watch. His new salary – US$337-million a year, tax free. The Saudis also gave Ronaldo access to a private jet, as well as a brigade of servants. Like every tennis player, Alcaraz organizes his own travel and, for all we know, does his own dishes.
This disparity between dollars earned versus consumers influenced may be the thing that sets tennis most apart from other global sports.
Everyone, everywhere is determined to achieve a 24/7/365 content churn and to create must-see events. Tennis is incredibly successful in both regards. It has the glamour, plus it has the brand recognition over multiple properties.
Its best players are some of the most famous people (forget about athletes) on the planet. But compared to others, tennis players don’t get much of the pie. About a fifth of total revenues on average, whereas NBA, NFL and NHL players get half.
Obviously, tennis players think that’s a problem. I would suggest that it is tennis’ greatest strength, and the thing that will see it through the shocks to come.
In other leagues, most of which are as dull as dishwater outside the playoffs and growing duller every year, everybody gets fat regardless of their contribution.
The Milwaukee Bucks just agreed to pay once-was-a-star player Damian Lillard US$115-million to go away, so that they can find cap space to sign never-was-a-star player Myles Turner for US$107-million. There is a term of art for this sort of business – cookoo bananas.
Oliver Tarvet had US$136,000-worth of winnings at Wimbledon, but as a NCAA athlete, he cannot collect prize money over $10,000.Kirsty Wigglesworth/The Associated Press
These inefficiencies are tolerated only because of growing team valuations. The Lakers just sold for US$10-billion. The people who own the Bucks bought them for US$550-million. What’s a hundred million blown here or there when you’re talking this sort of baked-in profit?
But then one wonders why the Lakers were sold, as well as the Boston Celtics, and the Minnesota Timberwolves, and the Dallas Mavericks, and the Charlotte Hornets. That’s all happened in just the last two years.
None of the owners of these teams were in financial distress. If sports is such a can’t miss investment, why sell?
Because some of the richest, most well informed people know a bubble when they see one.
It’s possible that the valuation of the average NBA team will continue to grow at 15 per cent annually – which is what it’s done over the last decade – but is it likely?
That’s what’s happening in a well-established league. In the WNBA, the same rate of growth is 180 per cent from last year to this one. That’s for a league that doesn’t sell out most of its games.
Everyone else has the fever for the flavour. By contrast, tennis plays it cool.
You want to be a professional tennis player? Great. You may even get there, but unless you get to the very top, you will not become fantastically rich. You will only be moderately rich.
In sports generally, any sort of fiscal reality is treated like a sort of crime. It’s the players in second-tier leagues and on small national teams who complain when they have to fly premium economy.
To pick on one particular guy, take Oliver Tarvet. Despite being British, he had to qualify for this Wimbledon. He won his first-round match. He lost to Alcaraz on Wednesday.
He’s due US$136,000, but there’s a problem. Tarvet attends the University of San Diego. The NCAA won’t let student-athletes collect prize money over $10,000.
“I think I deserve this money,” Tarvet said before the tournament started.
So do I. Take it, and lose your college eligibility. Bet on yourself.
These are the sorts of choices real people make all the time, but for much lower stakes. Only in sport does the attitude prevail that everybody should get everything they want because … I don’t know why exactly. Because they worked hard? Because they missed prom?
Only tennis (and, to a lesser extent, golf) creates these Mephistophelian choices. Do I pay to go to X tournament knowing it will cost me a bundle, but also knowing I need the ranking points to qualify for bigger tournaments? Can I afford a personal physio? Can I not afford a physio?
Unlike nearly all of their contemporaries who’ve made it to the top, tennis players eat what they kill. They are the truest competitors, because if they lose, they go without.
If an NHL player loses, he says, ‘Gotta be better next time’ knowing that he absolutely does not got to be better next time. His deal is guaranteed.
In this life, you’re paid what you can get, not what you deserve. If the latter were the case, we’d all know the names of Canada’s best moms, rather than Canada’s best soccer players. There is no fairness in this life, only what fairness you can wring from it.
In some future world, the sports behemoth will suffer a major setback. It’s inevitable because everything that can happen will. It’s only a matter of timing.
When it does, the big four North American leagues plus international soccer will be in chaos. If there isn’t enough money to pay the existing contracts because, let’s say, people lose interest all at once, how do you adapt on the fly? The answer is that you can’t. That’s how every league that’s ever collapsed collapses.
That can’t happen to tennis. There is no sunk labour cost. There’s just what you can make today.
Contemporary players don’t take this macro view, because why would they? But we spectators operate on a much longer timeline. This system prevails because, unlike every other major sport, it is designed to service the customer, as well as the participant.