Professional tennis is vastly lucrative these days because it’s a huge sport in Europe, but most of the money goes to the tournament organizers and most of the rest to the top players, who also get huge endorsement contracts.

From the New York Times:

A Few Tennis Pros Make a Fortune. Most Barely Scrape By.

The superstars of pro tennis get paid staggeringly more than everyone else. Can a new players’ association help level the court?

By Michael Steinberger
June 29, 2021

… At the U.S. Open, for instance, prize money amounts to around 14 percent of gross revenues; by contrast, around half of the National Basketball Association’s total revenues goes to the players, and the same is roughly true in the National Football League, the National Hockey League and Major League Baseball.

… What especially bothered him, though, was a sense that the A.T.P. was failing at its most basic duty: to promote the interest of the players. “There’s no way that tennis shouldn’t have 300 players making decent livings,” he said. Pospisil was acutely aware of how much better middle-of-the-pack athletes in other sports had it. The N.H.L. was his reference point: The league had roughly 700 players and, in 2019, a guaranteed minimum salary of $700,000. More than half the players were earning more than $1 million per year. Coaching and travel were free, as was health care, and players were paid even when they were out with injuries, which was not the case in tennis.

Pospisil recognized that a team sport could offer benefits that an individual sport could not. “Tennis is its own animal,” he said. But the share of revenue that the players received from the tournaments — around 17.5 percent across the two tours and the four majors — struck him as inexcusably low. Players were the ones pulling in the fans and driving the revenue, and in his view, they were being exploited. And when he thought about why the 300th-best hockey player was making seven figures while Chris O’Connell, the 139th-best tennis player, was barely solvent, the answer was self-evident. It wasn’t because N.H.L. team owners were inordinately generous; it was because N.H.L. players had a union and tennis players did not.

For some reason, the article doesn’t mention golf, the most obvious comparison. Tennis is a bigger money sport than golf because tennis is huge on the European continent while golf is more peripheral.

Men’s golf appears to be somewhat more egalitarian than men’s tennis, with 108 players earning $1 million or more in prize money so far this year. Expenses out on tour are not insignificant, but almost anybody with one of the guaranteed 125 spots on tour will do okay.

One difference is that women’s tennis is a very big deal, while women’s golf is only a medium-sized deal.

Another is the difference between a stroke play tournament (like almost all pro golf tournaments) and a match play tournament (like all tennis tournaments). In a typical weekly men’s pro golf tournament, 60 to 80 players make the cut and compete in the last two rounds on Saturday and Sunday in front of the main television audiences, with usually 10 or 20 starting the final round with some chance to win.

In a tennis tournament, only 4 male singles players make it to the semifinals on the weekend. That fundamental structural difference no doubt contributes to why tennis is more inegalitarian than is golf.

Moreover, tennis is less random than golf, so the same people win over and over again: The Big Three of Nadal, Federer, and Djokovic have won 59 of the last 71 men’s major championships. This makes it easier for casual fans to get excited over tennis, where the final almost always involves somebody they have heard of, than golf where Tiger and Phil have won 21 of the last 100 or so major championships, and Rory McIlroy and Brooks Koepka have each won four.

Fans like it when the same legendary figures battle all the time. In men’s tennis, it’s Ali vs. Frazier vs. Foreman vs. Norton or Spinks in practically every major tournament semifinal. In 1970s women’s tennis, there weren’t very many good players, but that just meant it was Chrissie Evert, Martina Navratilova, Billie Jean King, Evonne Goolagong, or Margaret Court every week, which made women’s tennis more interesting to non-hardcore fans.

You could cut the men’s tennis tour to the top 32 players and only hard-core fans would notice the impact on who wins, but the golf tour would be notably less competitive without its >32nd players.