The All England Club (AELTC) is questioning the players’ claim that they receive 22% of tournament revenues in prize money from the men’s Association of Tennis Professionals and the Women’s Tennis Association tours as the row over their remuneration and welfare rumbles on.
Sally Bolton, the AELTC chief executive, said on Monday it had requested “financial information” from the players shortly after they announced they had cancelled a planned protest in limiting media activity for the first week of Wimbledon. Bolton declined to go into further details, but the Guardian has learned the AELTC is querying whether the prize money awarded by the tours is as generous as the players claim.
The first request for information is understood to have been made to the players’ main representative, the American Larry Scott, in a meeting at the French Open last month but has yet to be passed on.
A further request was made during talks with some of the players’ agents last weekend, which led to them calling off their planned protest.
AELTC sources insist it remains committed to the players sharing in Wimbledon’s growth and has consistently increased prize money over the last few years, but wants to analyse the other side’s data to ensure it matches its own.
The players ultimately want all the grand slams to allocate 22% of their revenues in prize money, but at Wimbledon this year had asked for 16%, which would have led to a fund of £71m.
The AELTC ultimately settled on a pot of £64.2m, a 20% increase from 12 months ago and 14.4% of its revenues, which rise significantly every year.
Debbie Jevans, the AELTC chair, irritated the players further this month by saying that it made “no sense” to use revenue as the main metric when assessing prize money, which led to an announcement last week that a protest that began at the French Open in May would continue at Wimbledon.
While the AELTC is questioning their numbers, the players are understood to be standing by the 22% figure. The matter is complicated by the confidential nature of contracts at individual ATP and WTA tournaments, with the players lobbying them for full disclosure.
Despite this week’s truce there is lingering resentment on the players’ side at what they perceive as stalling tactics from Wimbledon and the other grand slams, as the dispute has been going on for 15 months with little progress made.
