Cathy Boulter's loss on Saturday meant Britain was not interested in singles heading into week two. Photo: Reuters/Toby Melville
Second week of Wimbledon, and no domestic interest in any of the single draws. The Lawn Tennis Association, the £80 million national governing body, will wear tin hats.
And yet LTA can hardly be called Robinson Crusoe here. Neither the French nor the Australian reached the 1/8 finals. With the three Americans still clinging to victory, 2023 is destined to be the second worst Wimbledon in history for Grand Slam nations.
All those clipboards. All those PowerPoint presentations and brilliant learning centers. Thanks to the special finances of tennis – a sport in which two-thirds of the income comes from large companies – these are four federations with large budgets and a large staff.
And yet, based on Wimbledon's mid-weekend, the three Grand Slam nations are inferior to Tunisia and Colombia. Last year's finalist, Ons Jabeur, seems to be doing just fine without staff members in tracksuits arranging for her hitting partners and posting footage on social media.
At this point in our analysis, you can expect to be viciously attacked by Scott Lloyd, who spent almost six years as LTA chief executive without doing anything particularly striking. But the broader context suggests that it's hard work, especially when it comes to transforming results. As one wise man said, “You can make money with tennis players, but you can't make tennis players with money.”
My problem has more to do with the Messiah complex that these big federations are developing. As they grow, year after year, expanding their empires until they hover over cottage businesses that actually teach little kids how to hit tennis balls.
At the end of the 2000s, LTA employed about 270 people – a figure that has now grown to 325 – and yet, despite the fact that the staff of the efficiency department has increased to 64 employees, the results continue to be unpredictable.
Yes, last year Wimbledon may have brought an all-time harvest of 18 home wins. But this anomaly certainly has more to do with the lack of ranking points – and therefore the haphazard attitude on the part of most visiting players – than with the advent of any golden generation.
Year after year, Wimbledon winners from host countries Grand slam tournamentsIn private, many British tennis insiders will tell you that the main goal of the LTA, like its sister organizations in other major countries, is to keep the feeder going. These are gigantic operations, utterly intolerant of criticism and desperately trying to maintain the status quo.
Why not? Follow the money trail and you'll find that tennis's greatest accomplishment lies not in promoting the sport and expanding its global presence, but in creating this powerful bureaucracy.
Who earns the most from tennis other than the talents of a generation like Roger Federer, Serena Williams and Novak Djokovic? These are certainly no ordinary players, many of whom need private sponsorship to fund their journey. It's people like David Haggerty, who makes £500,000 a year running a largely pointless International Tennis Federation. Or Lloyd, whose last published pay package, including bonuses, was £649,000.
class tennis talent or just a feeder ? Credit: John Taylor for the Telegraph
One analysis suggests that the Big Four countries employ around 2,000 people behind the scenes of their tennis operations, while perhaps 300 players make their living from world tours.
So what to do, you ask? Of course, we need federations to run public courts, organize events, and fund training costs for those with little pockets. Of course yes. But it would be nice to see a little more humility rather than administrators who think they can change the world in the style of the Wizard of Oz by manipulating levers and dials.
Five years ago, then-LTA chief executive Simon Timson opened national academies in Stirling (now defunct) and Loughborough with the promise that they would make the UK the envy of the tennis world. We are still waiting for it.
I must reiterate that this is not an easy business (unless you are the Czech Republic, which leads the world in quality coaches and has four players in the last 32 Wimbledon tournaments). Each person needs something different from the other, so there is no economy of scale and no reliable alchemy to turn base metals into gold. Even the most simple and clear policy – support the best juniors, for heaven's sake! – sometimes turns out to be strangely counterproductive. The elect calm down; outsiders are bitter and demoralized.
One solution is to let the market do all the work and stay as far away from itself as possible. As an example, consider a bonus scheme launched by the LTA in the mid-2010s that took the money earned by lower-ranked players from winning the Challenger and Futures tournaments and then doubled it.
Here was such a scheme. a simple and effective system in which there is no subjectivity that causes hostility. But over the years, his influence has waned. In 2015, LTA's hardcore performance director Bob Brett changed the rubric so that the bonus scheme only applied if you were 19 or under in the Futures tournaments, or 26 or under in the Challengers. And then, in 2023, Timson's successor Michael Bourne halved the rewards of the scheme, so that the bonus for winning a $25,000 futures title dropped from £3,000 to £1,500.
Slowly, clear policy was undermined . . In a self-perpetuating bureaucracy like this, it probably seemed half too easy.
An earlier version of this article stated that the LTA-managed player bonus scheme had been discontinued. This was incorrect as the bonus scheme is still in place. We are happy to clarify.
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