The antitrust lawsuit filed Tuesday, March 18, against tennis’ governing bodies by the Professional Tennis Players Association (PTPA) intends to completely remake the sport and transform how its athletes are treated and remunerated.
The PTPA, co-founded by 24-time Grand Slam champion Novak Djokovic in 2019, filed the 145-page document in New York City, London and Brussels, setting out how players are abused and exploited by the leaders of the sport, it alleges. The lawsuit names the men’s (ATP) and women’s (WTA) tours, the International Tennis Federation (ITF) and the International Tennis Integrity Agency (ITIA), which runs anti-doping operations in the sport, as defendants and labels its four Grand Slam tournaments as “co-conspirators.”
Players “are forced into a playing environment where they have no voice and no control over their bodies, as their athleticism and fame continues to generate more and more money and notoriety for the Defendants,” the lawsuit says. “None of this would happen in a competitive market, where the Player Plaintiffs, the PTPA’s members, and members of the Classes, could receive competitive choices and enjoy freedom of movement.”
The document also reopens the controversy around Jannik Sinner’s doping ban, claiming that he was treated leniently by the ITIA.
Here, The Athletic breaks down the key questions arising from the PTPA’s lawsuit, why it has been filed and what it means for tennis.
What is the PTPA and who are the plaintiffs in this case?
The PTPA is, for all intents and purposes, a union for tennis players, but it is not formally recognized as one because they are not classed as employees. It is, though, part of the World Players Association, a global collective of the unions and associations that represent professional athletes across sport.
Djokovic and Canadian ATP veteran Vasek Pospisil, who is a named plaintiff in the lawsuit, co-founded the organization in 2019. It later hired its executive director in Ahmas Nassar, who described professional tennis as “broken” in a statement announcing its antitrust litigation.
Not every tennis player is part of the PTPA, which does not keep a list of its members or charge players dues to be part of it. It purports to represent the top 250 men’s and women’s singles players and the top 100 men’s and women’s doubles players.
The plaintiffs in its lawsuit are 11 professional players, male and female, some of them established on tour and some of them newcomers from all over the world. The PTPA itself is also a plaintiff.
Named players include Nick Kyrgios of Australia, Reilly Opelka of the United States and Zheng Saisai of China. The PTPA says that the lawsuit has the full support of the organization’s executive committee, which includes Djokovic, who has been pushing for litigation for two years, Ons Jabeur and Hubert Hurkacz, as well as the singles and doubles players it says it represents.
The Athletic reported earlier on Tuesday that according to people involved with the litigation — who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect relationships — Djokovic agonized about putting his name on the lawsuit but ultimately declined, they say, to focus the action on tennis players as a collective, rather than make this a more direct battle between the greatest male player of the modern era and the organizations that control his sport.
Djokovic co-founded the PTPA six years ago. (Getty Images)
Who are the defendants in the lawsuit?
The defendants are tennis’ four main governing bodies: The ATP Tour, which regulates the men’s season; the WTA Tour, which regulates the women’s one; the ITF, which regulates and oversees professional tennis tournaments, including the four Grand Slams (Wimbledon, the U.S. Open, Australian Open and French Open); and the ITIA, an independent body established in 2021 by the ATP, ITF, WTA and the Grand Slams to oversee anti-doping and corruption.
The suit also describes the owners and organizers of tennis tournaments, including the four majors, as co-conspirators, who act in concert with the defendants “to enrich themselves at the players’ expense, to the detriment of fans and the game.”
The governing bodies were not immediately available to comment because they had yet to review the PTPA’s filings.
What does the lawsuit accuse the tennis governing bodies of doing?
The PTPA’s lawsuit centers on the following areas: anti-competitive practices; prize money; ranking points; the tennis schedule; player welfare and anti-doping and anti-corruption investigations. Taken together, the lawsuit alleges that the governing bodies of tennis deprive players and fans of the full benefits of competition, while locking the sport’s athletes into a system that is bad for their bodies and bank balances.
Antitrust laws are designed to prevent organizations and businesses from suppressing competition in their fields, either through working together (colluding) or through imposing prohibitive structures on participants in those fields.
The PTPA’s lawsuit says that the tours and Grand Slams have prevented other events from increasing their prize money, as well as highlighting that the proportion of revenue that tennis players earn is much lower than their counterparts in other sports. This is true: athletes in golf, NBA and NFL receive as much as 50 percent of revenues, while the proportion for tennis’ Grand Slams hovers around 15 percent.
It also says that the tournament schedule, which runs for 11 months of each year, both damages players’ bodies and prevents other events from competing with the main tournaments on the ATP and WTA Tours, thus depressing its participants’ earning potential and restricting competition. It adds that players who are out injured or want to rest are made to suffer for it by losing the opportunity to earn ranking points, or by being fined if they miss mandatory tournaments.
Players, as independent contractors, do not receive a regular wage or benefits, as an employee might do, but they also, the PTPA lawsuit argues, are denied the freedom to choose what jobs they take.
One of the biggest issues the lawsuit raises is how much players are paid. It points to the huge disparity between top- and lower-ranked players and argues that unless they reach the quarterfinals of a tournament, players typically make a net loss once expenses are taken into account.
“You look at tennis and how it treats players, and it’s basically pre-Neanderthal,” antitrust lawyer James Quinn, who is attached to the lawsuit, told The Athletic in October last year. “This is an antitrust fire zone.”
The lawsuit also subjects the ITIA’s anti-doping practices to stinging criticism, alleging that “there is ample evidence of investigators unlawfully seizing players’ cellphones, harassing players and their families at tournament hotels, bombarding players with dozens of drug tests with no basis and at odd hours, interrogating players for hours at a time, and threatening additional punishments for failing to ‘cooperate’ with investigative requests.”
The PTPA has criticized the ITIA in the past. It leveled similar accusations in a letter in October, to which the ITIA responded through a spokesperson. “It is currently our belief that ITIA investigators work according to the rules, with respect and reflecting our values,” it said.
The lawsuit also directly cites men’s world No. 1 Sinner, who is currently serving a three-month anti-doping ban.
“Unlike its dogged pursuit of other players, however, it (the ITIA) quickly accepted Sinner’s explanation that his physical therapist had accidentally applied a banned substance to Sinner’s skin during treatment. As a result of its immediate acceptance, the ITIA concluded that Sinner bore ‘no fault or negligence’ for his positive test and permitted him to compete in the 2024 U.S. Open, which Sinner won.
“There was no investigation that dragged for over a year into a prominent player who had not vocalized any issues with the cartel,” the lawsuit says.
Why has this lawsuit happened?
This has been building for some time.
In 2021, the PTPA pushed to delay a vote on a 30-year strategic plan from the ATP, claiming that it had not sufficiently taken players’ best interests into account. At that time, the organization lacked support outside the ATP Tour, with some of the biggest players in the sport, including Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal, offering no comment on its activities.
Then in October 2023, 21 leading players from the women’s tour, including a majority of those ranked in the top 20, submitted a list of requests to the WTA covering four areas: the schedule, qualification rules and standards for tournaments, pay, and representation. “These questions have been brewing for years and now we are seeing the results of not answering them,” said Bethanie Mattek-Sands, an original executive committee member of the PTPA and a former member of the WTA Players’ Council.
“We’re putting Band-Aids on things instead of creating real changes.”
At the time, Steve Simon, then the chief executive of the WTA Tour, refused to allow a PTPA representative to be part of a meeting between him and the top 20 women’s players, more than half of whom were members of the PTPA.
The WTA has since introduced a maternity fund for players who take a break from the sport to have a baby, funded by Saudi Arabia’s state Public Investment Fund, but most of the gripes remain — as outlined in Tuesday’s lawsuit.
WTA players like Belinda Bencic, pictured, have pushed for maternity pay for some time. (AFP via Getty Images)
Since the PTPA’s founding in 2019, changes to tournaments and efforts by various organizations to take control of the sport have transformed the calendar. While prize money has mostly risen, the cost of that rise — at least at the ATP and WTA 1,000 events — has been playing more tennis. In response, the four Grand Slams launched the idea of a so-called ‘premium tour,’ with a streamlined schedule. Top players, the ones who routinely go deepest in tournaments, were in favor, but financial clarity on how it would all work never arrived.
In that time, tennis matches have continued to get longer, finishes to a day’s play have gotten later and, the lawsuit argues, players have suffered greater risk to their health. The lawsuit quotes leading players such as Coco Gauff, Carlos Alcaraz and Iga Swiatek, who have criticized the schedule in the past but are not part of this filing.
As reported by The Athletic last October, the PTPA brought on law firm Weil, Gotshal and Manges, which has worked on NFL and NBA antitrust litigation, to represent the organization and to explore potential challenges to tennis’ governing bodies. The firm was copied on the letter to the ITIA in October, as were the ATP, WTA and ITF.
The lawsuit is, in that regard, not a surprise.
How does the business of the tours currently work?
The ATP and WTA Tour operate separately but have a number of joint events. In total, there are around 60 tournaments on each tour per year.
The four Grand Slams are separate from the ATP and WTA Tours, though the players’ results at the majors contributes to their overall ATP and WTA ranking points.
Otherwise, tournaments spend millions of dollars on licensing agreements to be part of the ATP and WTA Tours. There are different tiers of tennis events, from 1,000 (one rung beneath the Grand Slams) down to 500 and then 250, with commensurate ranking points and prize money.
Overall in tennis, including the four majors, prize money amounts to only around a quarter of the revenues generated at the tournaments, which the PTPA argues is manifestly unfair — compared to about 50 percent in some leading team sports. In November 2023, to try to mitigate this, the ATP introduced a new arrangement that meant any net profits (before income tax) above base prize money across the Masters 1,000 events were split 50-50 with the players.
The lawsuit claims that the caps the ATP and WTA put on total prize money that can be awarded by a tournament is a further injustice suffered by the players.
In the 2010s, Larry Ellison, the tournament director of the BNP Paribas Open in Indian Wells Calif., wanted to improve its prize money but was blocked from doing so by the tours during a vote on the potential increase.
What happens next?
The PTPA is seeking a jury trial, according to its lawsuit. The suit demands that tennis’ governing bodies be stopped from “continuing to operate their unlawful monopsonies over the services of professional tennis players” and that the players are properly compensated for the injuries they’ve suffered.
As well as other concessions, the PTPA asks that “the Court issue a declaratory judgment that all female Player Plaintiffs and PTPA members are employees of the WTA, the ITF, and the ITIA and are entitled to the rights and remedies inherent to employee status, including the ability to organize, unionize, and designate a bargaining agent on their behalf.”
The most likely outcome in reality is that this is a starting point for negotiations and a settlement will be reached that is more favourable to the players, and where they have a say in the sport’s structure.
Essentially, the players need to convince judges and regulators on two continents (Europe and North America) that the foundations of professional tennis — the rankings system, a schedule that largely controls the number of tournaments, the amount of prize money they offer, and who can compete in them — violate the fundamental tenets of law.
In the immediate term, tennis’ governing bodies will review everything in the lawsuit and issue a response.
That could take some time though, as they process the first meaningful steps taken in what promises to be a lengthy legal battle.
(Top photo: Ilya S. Savenok / Getty Images)
