It is a good idea but I thought the article makes a good point in that if the tournament hosts are just instructed to play more, many will not be able to do so and there'll be less tournments. It is a tricky one, a player out of the top 100 or so is woefully underpaid as far as being a pro goes but, is not playing at a level that generates anybody any money as, the only interest there is from people like us! The money has to come from somewhere, the top pro's, the slams....maybe???

This is all very worthy stuff, but as I have mentioned (more than once ) tennis is no different from many other occupations where there are massive rewards for getting to the top, and next to no rewards for those who don't.

The prime examples apart from sportsplayers are actors and musicians (and of course drug dealers, hence the famous chapter in Freakonomics called "Why do drug dealers live with their moms?"). In the absence of anything apart from anecdote, I don't really accept the Andy Murray hypothesis that the low rewards at the bottom result in a lack of new contenders, with a consequent decline of the talent pool.

In any case, even if there was a decline of the talent pool, would anyone actually notice? I think that almost nobody could tell the difference in standard between Djokovic and (say) Liam Brody if they watched them playing in separate matches.

(And yet millions are prepared to pay handsomely to watch Novak, while you couldn't give away tickets to watch Liam - which in itself is an interesting take on human nature. My hypothesis is that a major part of the enjoyment of going to Wimbledon, or Glastonbury, or wherever, is telling all your friends about it afterwards ... surely nobody actually enjoyed standing in the cold, busting for a pee, while watching a pale shadow of Mick Jagger murdering the Stones' back catalogue). 

There needs to be a subsidy from the GS,s or something similar, not going to come from gate money.

The way I'd look at it is, even if you take away the assumption that the smaller events don't pay for themselves i.e no revenue/ pure cost, the fact that these prize money pots haven't risen for 20 odd years, they do in real terms now cost a helluva alot less to run, with obviously the biggest still being the prize money, although I suspect all the other costs are catching up fast, thus if federations were prepared to fork out £***** 20 odd years ago they should be able to fork out a little more in today's money by raising the prize money pool.

Interesting 1/2 hour on 5live between 10 and 10.30 tonight discussing the whole topic, lots of insight from Jamie Baker and a little bit from Liam B. about the costs and the financial viability of being a professional tennis player purely playing future events.

Its nice to know that Andy cares about the struggling futures players lets hope his clout makes a difference 

 

Perhaps with over 2,200 ranked men's singles players and gawd knows how many more regularly trying to achieve a ranking there are just too many players trying to make some sort of living from professional competitive tennis.

The number does maybe need weeded down a bit, but clearly much better that that is by quality rather than resources.

Maybe a bit of amalgamation of tournaments with fewer, but more lucrative futures ?

It does look as if in today's market that if these sort of numbers are to remain sustainable, there needs to be some top down redistribution within tennis. Noone outside tennis owes these players a living, though tennis could maybe do more to entice interest and more general support.