Tennis antitrust lawsuit: PTPA, co-founded by Novak Djokovic, sues ATP, WTA tours

The Professional Tennis Players Association (PTPA), the organization co-founded by 24-time Grand Slam champion Novak Djokovic, has labeled the biggest governing bodies in tennis as a “cartel” which suppresses wages, player opportunity and rival tournaments “to the harm of players and fans alike.”

In a lawsuit filed Tuesday March 18 in New York City, London and Brussels, the PTPA names the men’s ATP and women’s WTA tours, the International Tennis Federation (ITF) and the International Tennis Integrity Agency (ITIA) as defendants. The suit, filed in those three cities to reflect the four bodies’ global remit, accuses them of several antitrust violations, with the goal of overturning the fundamental structure of one of the most popular global sports.

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The filings “reveal how tennis’ corrupt governing bodies systemically abuse, silence, and exploit players to drive personal profits through monopolistic control,” a spokesperson for the PTPA said in a statement announcing the litigation.

The governing bodies were not immediately available to comment, because they had yet to review the filings.

Named plaintiffs include several well-known players from across the world, including Nick Kyrgios of Australia, Sorana Cirstea of Romania, Reilly Opelka of the United States and Zheng Saisai of China.

A spokesperson for the PTPA said that over 250 professional players across all tiers of the sport, as well as the organization’s executive committee, which includes Djokovic — who has been pushing for litigation for two years — as well as former top-10 players Ons Jabeur and Hubert Hurkacz, support the action.

“Players don’t have the luxury of waiting indefinitely for meaningful change. Despite repeatedly voicing concerns and speaking up, we have been met with empty promises. The current conditions — demanding schedules, financial uncertainty, and inadequate support — are unsustainable,” Cirstea said in a statement.

According to people briefed on the litigation — who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect relationships — Djokovic debated putting his name on the lawsuit. He declined, they say, to focus the action on tennis players as a collective, rather than a more direct battle between the greatest male tennis player of the modern era and the organizations that control his sport.

The lawsuit names the four Grand Slam tournaments, Wimbledon and the Australian, French and U.S. Opens, as co-conspirators alongside the ATP, WTA, ITF and ITIA. The Grand Slams, it says, act in concert with the defendants “to enrich themselves at the players’ expense, to the detriment of fans and the game.”

Antitrust litigation is designed to prevent organizations and companies from restricting competition in their fields. It has defined fundamental tenets of American sports, including the annual player drafts in the NFL and NBA and MLB free agency, as well as other global sports.

Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta, Oracle and other software firms, for example, would never be able to create a draft of the top computer-engineering graduates each year, complete with a salary scale. Yet the major North American professional sports leagues are allowed to do it because they have negotiated terms through collective bargaining with their players’ unions, sometimes as a result of antitrust litigation.

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Tennis players are currently independent contractors, with no formally recognized union, despite the existence of the PTPA, though the organizations that run tennis have been speaking with the PTPA on and off since its founding in 2019, often with the hope of trying to ward off an action like Tuesday’s filing.

“Players are demanding the same rights, protections, and fair treatment that athletes in other major sports — like the NFL, NBA, MLB, WNBA, NWSL, international football and international cricket — have fought for and won,” a PTPA statement announcing its lawsuit said.

The PTPA’s lawsuit alleges that the ATP and WTA Tours engage in price fixing, by setting the compensation professional tennis players may earn from their events while stopping competing tournaments from existing by limiting sanctions and licenses.

“Defendants do so by capping the prize money tournaments award and limiting players’ ability to earn money off the court,” the lawsuit says. “Rather than being determined by market forces, players’ earnings are instead subject to limitations agreed upon by the defendants and their co-conspirators.”

The lawsuit cited the tours’ 2013 rejection of efforts by the BNP Paribas Open, at Indian Wells, Calif., to raise its prize money. The ATP’s player representatives and WTA board approved the move, but other tournament owners on the ATP board declined. “Put another way, defendants denied players compensation the market was ready and willing to provide,” the lawsuit says.

Each tennis tournament has an owner, but the tours are in control of the sanctions and licenses for those events. The tours have sold hundreds of sanctions at all different levels. The more prestigious the tournament, the more expensive it is to sanction. The ATP Tour is currently nearing a deal to sell a top-level-event sanction to interests in Saudi Arabia for what is expected to be several hundred million dollars.

The ATP Tour has been in discussions with Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, the PIF, over staging a tournament. (Getty Images)

The sanction and license system, the lawsuit says, means events’ owners cannot act in “their own economic self-interest and optimize their respective tournaments by scheduling them at dates and times most attractive to players, fans and other business partners.”

Instead, the tournaments tacitly agree not to compete with one another, allowing the tours to select their preferred events, the lawsuit says. This extends to the tours’ and the ITF’s control over competition from external tournaments, presently limited to events such as the Laver Cup and Six Kings Slam. The Laver Cup is an ATP-sanctioned competition; the Six Kings Slam, held in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, was not.

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Events external to the tours can only take up a limited number of consecutive calendar days, while players who withdraw from certain tour events, or do not play enough of them, are subject to fines and ranking points penalties. This system saw Iga Swiatek lose the women’s world No. 1 ranking to Aryna Sabalenka overnight last year, with little notice. The lawsuit argues that those penalties unlawfully restrict players from earning money outside of tour-sanctioned competitions, as well as preventing other parties from trying to get into the tennis-tournament business.

The ranking points system is at the heart of the lawsuit. It states that the system dictates “which tournaments players can compete in, how much compensation they earn, and whether they receive certain sponsorship opportunities. Defendants award ranking points to players only if they play in tournaments produced by defendants’ co-conspirators.”

Because players, with few exceptions, have to obtain those rankings points to qualify for the four Grand Slams as well as other top-level tournaments, they can’t become elite professional players and so maximize their potential earnings by competing in alternative events that have not purchased a sanction from the tours to award rankings points. This, the lawsuit argues, violates antitrust laws.

Finally, the lawsuit targets the ITIA, which is the anti-doping and anti-corruption unit for tennis.

The lawsuit argues that some of its investigative techniques are abusive and violate basic terms of due process. Named practices include searches and seizures of their phones, interrogations without defense attorneys present and what the lawsuit calls “harassment by unaccountable and ill-trained investigators.”

After the PTPA sent a letter alleging similar conduct to the ITIA in October last year, the latter body issued a statement to The Athletic through Adrian Bassett, its chief spokesperson. This characterized the allegations as “serious, yet generic” and said that it would investigate any specified allegations of improper behavior. “It is currently our belief that ITIA investigators work according to the rules, with respect and reflecting our values,” it said.

The PTPA’s lawsuits mark the first significant player intervention in a long-simmering battle between the tours and the Grand Slams to control the future of tennis.

The ATP and WTA license and sanction tournaments at all levels, sell media and sponsorship deals and collect the revenue they generate. The Grand Slams do the same, but on a bigger scale, accounting for around 80 percent of the revenue in tennis alongside the nine largest 1,000-level tournaments — the next rung of prestige down from the slams.

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In recent years, both groups have scrambled to court the players who make their tournaments what they are with increased prize money and benefits. Tennis players see athletes in North American team sports such as the NBA and NFL receiving roughly 50 percent of those sports’ revenues, while they earn significantly less than that, especially from the Grand Slams.

But at tour level, that increased prize money comes with a catch, and most of the time that is playing more tennis, most notably at those 1,000-level tournaments which now run for nearly two weeks instead of one, with a few exceptions.

The ATP and WTA made those moves as part of an effort to dissuade star players from breaking away to form a rival tour, as dozens of the world’s top men’s golfers did in recent years when they broke with the PGA to form the Saudi Arabia-backed LIV Golf tour. That has always been far and away their biggest fear. But when they started making more tournaments longer, players began complaining about the impact of a season which runs for almost a full year and, according to the PTPA’s lawsuit, is “burdening their bodies with an ever-expanding, unreasonable schedule of tournaments.”

Grand Slam prize money — and its proportionality with tournament revenue — is a key topic for players. (Emaz / Corbis via Getty Images)

As a result, the leaders of the respective tours, Andrea Gaudenzi for the men and Steve Simon (now Portia Archer) for the women, spent much of 2024 pushing back an attempt by the four Grand Slams to partner with the leaders of the 1,000-level tournaments on a slimmed-down tour similar to motor racing’s Formula One. The top players were largely in favor of such a move. Many were hoping the plan might lead to the changes they have been seeking: a more lucrative but also streamlined schedule.

But the Grand Slams never managed to substantiate the plans. They presented the idea, but no defined financing, at the BNP Paribas Open at Indian Wells a year ago; it has developed little since.

In response, the tours moved to entrench their lucrative partnerships with other sources of funding, most notably the sovereign wealth of Saudi Arabia — its Public Investment Fund. The tours believed they had seen off the biggest threat to their primacy — until the arrival of this class-action lawsuit that challenges that primacy and threatens to remake the structure of their sport.

During a small gathering with journalists during the ATP Tour Finals in Turin in November, Gaudenzi, a former player who has become chairman of the ATP Tour, brushed aside player complaints about the schedule and their share of revenues as showing a lack of understanding about how to build value in the sport. He and his staff have made similar arguments in face-to-face talks with leaders of the PTPA, and Gaudenzi is yet to engage in serious discussions about reform.

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In recent weeks, some tournament owners in the U.S. have implored Gaudenzi to take the PTPA more seriously. It has been signaling its intentions for at least a few months, having engaged antitrust lawyers, including James Quinn, who has worked with player organizations in the NFL and the NBA, in October last year. Quinn represented NBA Hall of Fame member Oscar Robertson in the lawsuit that helped bring free agency to professional basketball in the 1970s.

“Professional tennis players face some of the most troubling conditions I have ever seen,” Quinn said. “I’ve spent decades working with athletes across global sports, and the complete disregard for tennis players’ welfare by the powers at large is unlike anything I’ve ever encountered.”

In his statement announcing the litigation, Ahmad Nassar, the executive director of the PTPA, called professional tennis “broken”.

“What should be a thriving, globally respected sport has instead become a system that prioritizes selfish interests over the athletes and their fans. The ATP and WTA have strayed from their original purpose and now suppress fair compensation, deny basic protections, and leave players without a voice.

“These legal actions are about accountability and real reform — now. Fixing these systemic failures will not just benefit players, it will elevate the entire sport. This is not about disrupting tennis, it is about saving it.”

To achieve its aims, the PTPA will have to convince judges and regulators on two continents that the pillars that have held up professional tennis for decades — the rankings system, the tournaments, the amount of prize money they offer and who can play in them — violate the fundamental tenets of law unless players have an equal say in the sport’s construction. Or, it will have to convince the governing bodies of tennis they don’t want to find out what those judges will decide.

The goal, the PTPA says, is not necessarily to have the courts create a new structure for the sport. Rather, it is to force its leaders to negotiate.

To begin, they have a long document to digest that has roiled tennis in its creation.

(Top photo: Tnani Badreddine / DeFodi Images via Getty Images)

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