I think that several things need to happen in order for more of the best players to make a living from Tennis .We are losing so many younger players and players with great potential talent. Why is it that one of the worlds most popular sports can only give maybe the best 150 players in the world a living? It doesn't seem right to me. The more players who can make a living, the more players will be encouraged to start playing tennis which will ultimately lead to better tennis players in the long run. Players mature & develop at different ages and players are quitting the sport before they have reached their best and may never reach their full potential. I want the best players to have a fair chance at making it to the top of tennis. We've seen time and time again how players can suddenly dramatically improve and I want these players who haven't reached their potential to be able to make a living so that when they reach their best, they haven't given up. Below I have outlined some ideas I have had as to how to make the game fairer. Some parts are controversial, some parts are significantly different from the way in which the sport is structured so please approach these ideas with an open mind.

1. Fairer prize money and ranking points for tournaments

For most players, it isn't fair how steep the rankings points and prize money is distributed in tennis tournaments If you loose to Djokovic in the first round of a tournament in 3 tiebreaks you get the same amount of points/money as you would in the same tournament losing in straight sets to an lowly wildcard in the first round. It is also silly how if you loose one game you are out of a tournament. All players have bad days and, other than the very best, good consistency is defined by winning most of your matches, not all of them.  It is also frustrating that only half of players in the main draw play more than one game a week and it isn't fair for them to be judged solely on one game and to travel in many cases a large distance, for maybe an hours experience of competitive tennis. I propose a system that looks something like the following:

Tournaments typically consisting of 32 players divided into four pools based on ranking position (i.e. Pool 1 consists of the top 8 highest ranked players in the tournament, 9-16 in Pool 2, 17-24 in Pool 3, 25-32 in Pool 4.)

In the first stage, everyone plays 3 games against 1 player from each of the other pools drawn randomly (i.e. if you are in Pool 1, you play one game against a player from pools 2, 3 and 4). You award points based on how close the games are. The simplest way of doing this would be to award 3-0 for a straight set victory and 2-1 for a win in 3 sets but you could instead award points based on % of points won, % of games won, difficulty of opponent etc. to make it even fairer. The crucial aspect of this would be to distribute the same number of points in each game. By this I mean that, for example, it will always be three points (either 2-1 or 3-0). This is to ensure there isn't a mutually beneficial scenario.

After this round of games is complete, the lowest scoring 12 players are removed to reduce the field to 20. These remaining players could play another game. This could look something like player with the most points vs player who finished 20th, player with the second most points vs player who finished 19th and so on. This game points-wise it weighted higher than the first stage.

After this round of games is complete, the lowest scoring 8 players are removed to reduce the field to 12. These remaining players could play another game. This could look something like player with the most points vs player who finished 12th, player with the second most points vs player who finished 11th and so on. This game points-wise it weighted higher than the previous stages.

After this round of games is complete, the two highest scoring plays play each other in a final, and the third and fourth highest scorers play in a third-place play-off.

After the tournament all the players have a finishing position 1-32 which can determine prize money and ranking points. This would be much more gradual than the current knockout system which also give players an opportunity to play more competitive games, gives them a better idea of their skill level, and gives a fairer result in terms of how many ranking points they get and how much money they get (i.e. in the current system if you get drawn against a seed you are in a far worse position than you would be in this scenario as over three games against differing skill luck evens out.)

2. More money from the top of the game and from the women's game

More money should come from the top and be distributed into the lower levels (i.e. challengers and futures) to invest in the future.

More money should come from the women's game and be distributed amongst the best tennis players due to the disastrous affect on the game of taking money out of it to fund the women's game. I think it's strange how they didn't forsee that taking so much money of the the sport wouldn't have significant repercussions. I don't see why the best tennis players should suffer so much money being taken out of the game and put into the women's game, despite the lower crowds at each level of the game. I also don't see why the best players in the world get paid as much as the best women. If this is valid, then logically the best disabled people and the best senior players should be paid the same amount as the best players simply because they can't compete with the best players.

3. Tennis leagues

To sustain more players in the game, leagues could be set up at each level. This could look something like:

Top 150 players playing at the ATP level

151-400 playing at what is now challenger level

401-1000 playing at low challenger/high futures

1001-2000 playing at what is equivalent to low level futures

This would involve promotion/relegation between the levels perhaps every 12 months/6 months and players in the top 2-3 levels are paid a wage by virtue of being in those leagues. Again, this would sustain a far higher number of players and would encourage a higher number of younger players to stay on if they could guarantee an income. Play-offs could occur between the bottom 20% and top 20% of consecutive tiers to determine if players can be promoted and relegated. The tournaments prize money could be re-weighted to ensure that it is very difficult for a player at the top of, for example, tier 3 to earn more money than someone at the bottom of tier 2, when the default wage is taken into account.

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I am very interested in your thoughts and opinions including other ways of improving what I have said above.

I appreciate I can't change the structure, but because it's such an important issue, it seems reasonable to discuss this on the forum.

I am also interested in any other ideas that people might have had as to ways of making the sport fairer.