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The antitrust lawsuit filed in March 2025 against tennis’ governing bodies by the Professional Tennis Players Association (PTPA) intended 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 2020, 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 alleged. The first version of the lawsuit named 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 labeled 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 said. “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 reopened the controversy around Jannik Sinner’s doping ban, claiming that he was treated leniently by the ITIA.
But since last spring, a huge amount has changed. In September, the PTPA removed the ITF (now World Tennis) and the ITIA, and named the four Grand Slams as defendants. Then in December, it secured a big win, followed by a big blow. Days after the PTPA and Tennis Australia confirmed an undisclosed settlement, Djokovic said he was leaving the organization, owing to concerns over its governance and its representation of him.
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.
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 2020. 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 said in March 2025 that the lawsuit has the full support of the organization’s executive committee, which then included Djokovic, who had been pushing for litigation for two years, Ons Jabeur and Hubert Hurkacz, as well as the singles and doubles players it says it represents.
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.
In some ways everything, in some ways nothing. The 24-time Grand Slam champion was the figurehead of the PTPA, but it holds aspirations to represent tennis players as a collective, and its lawsuit is a class action: it is not in service of one given player.
Djokovic’s standing in the sport has undoubtedly helped the PTPA raise its profile and secure investment opportunities. Its commercial arm, Winners Alliance, has the backing of billionaire investor and tennis enthusiast Bill Ackman. Whether or not Djokovic’s absence reduces the PTPA’s ability to secure funds — which it will need to fund the lawsuit to whatever conclusion arrives — remains to be seen.
Similarly, no other players associated with the PTPA, nor any of the named plaintiffs in the lawsuit, have split from it or commented since Djokovic’s announcement. The ramifications of his departure are yet to be determined, but they should not have any material effect on the possibility of settlements or dismissals for the defendants in the lawsuit. The news may embolden those defendants to find out whether it has weakened the PTPA, but as yet that is not clear.
The defendants are tennis’ two main governing bodies and the four Grand Slams: The ATP Tour, which regulates the men’s season; the WTA Tour, which regulates the women’s one; and the Australian, French and U.S. Opens as well as Wimbledon. They were added to the lawsuit in September 2025, when the PTPA also removed World Tennis and the ITIA.
The suit had originally described the four majors, as well as the owners and organizers of other tennis tournaments, as co-conspirators to the tours. It said they act in concert with the tours “to enrich themselves at the players’ expense, to the detriment of fans and the game.”
After the filing of the lawsuit, the defendants responded to the allegations.
The WTA described the filing as “both regrettable and misguided,” while the ATP said that the PTPA has “chosen division and distraction through misinformation over progress.” Both organizations defended their records in growing, promoting and funding tennis, saying that they would defend themselves against the lawsuit while describing its contentions as without merit.
The ITF acknowledged receipt of the lawsuit but did not comment on its substance, while the ITIA said it “welcomes opportunities to engage” on anti-corruption and anti-doping.
Since the addition of the four Grand Slams, they have taken different approaches. All four initially moved to either dismiss it, or to have it conducted in a different forum. But in December 2025, Tennis Australia — the organizer of the Australian Open — broke from the other three majors by agreeing an as-yet-undisclosed settlement with the PTPA.
The three other Grand Slams simultaneously filed new motions to dismiss the suit.
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 2024. “This is an antitrust fire zone.”
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.
Since the PTPA’s founding in 2020, 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 1000 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 initially quoted 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. It then removed those quotes after complaints from some of the players involved.
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 1000 (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.
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.
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.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
Sports Business, Tennis, Women's Tennis
2026 The Athletic Media Company
Continue reading...
The PTPA, co-founded by 24-time Grand Slam champion Novak Djokovic in 2020, 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 alleged. The first version of the lawsuit named 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 labeled 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 said. “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 reopened the controversy around Jannik Sinner’s doping ban, claiming that he was treated leniently by the ITIA.
But since last spring, a huge amount has changed. In September, the PTPA removed the ITF (now World Tennis) and the ITIA, and named the four Grand Slams as defendants. Then in December, it secured a big win, followed by a big blow. Days after the PTPA and Tennis Australia confirmed an undisclosed settlement, Djokovic said he was leaving the organization, owing to concerns over its governance and its representation of him.
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 2020. 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 said in March 2025 that the lawsuit has the full support of the organization’s executive committee, which then included Djokovic, who had been pushing for litigation for two years, Ons Jabeur and Hubert Hurkacz, as well as the singles and doubles players it says it represents.
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.
What does Novak Djokovic’s exit from the PTPA mean for the lawsuit?
In some ways everything, in some ways nothing. The 24-time Grand Slam champion was the figurehead of the PTPA, but it holds aspirations to represent tennis players as a collective, and its lawsuit is a class action: it is not in service of one given player.
Djokovic’s standing in the sport has undoubtedly helped the PTPA raise its profile and secure investment opportunities. Its commercial arm, Winners Alliance, has the backing of billionaire investor and tennis enthusiast Bill Ackman. Whether or not Djokovic’s absence reduces the PTPA’s ability to secure funds — which it will need to fund the lawsuit to whatever conclusion arrives — remains to be seen.
Similarly, no other players associated with the PTPA, nor any of the named plaintiffs in the lawsuit, have split from it or commented since Djokovic’s announcement. The ramifications of his departure are yet to be determined, but they should not have any material effect on the possibility of settlements or dismissals for the defendants in the lawsuit. The news may embolden those defendants to find out whether it has weakened the PTPA, but as yet that is not clear.
Who are the defendants in the lawsuit?
The defendants are tennis’ two main governing bodies and the four Grand Slams: The ATP Tour, which regulates the men’s season; the WTA Tour, which regulates the women’s one; and the Australian, French and U.S. Opens as well as Wimbledon. They were added to the lawsuit in September 2025, when the PTPA also removed World Tennis and the ITIA.
The suit had originally described the four majors, as well as the owners and organizers of other tennis tournaments, as co-conspirators to the tours. It said they act in concert with the tours “to enrich themselves at the players’ expense, to the detriment of fans and the game.”
After the filing of the lawsuit, the defendants responded to the allegations.
The WTA described the filing as “both regrettable and misguided,” while the ATP said that the PTPA has “chosen division and distraction through misinformation over progress.” Both organizations defended their records in growing, promoting and funding tennis, saying that they would defend themselves against the lawsuit while describing its contentions as without merit.
The ITF acknowledged receipt of the lawsuit but did not comment on its substance, while the ITIA said it “welcomes opportunities to engage” on anti-corruption and anti-doping.
Since the addition of the four Grand Slams, they have taken different approaches. All four initially moved to either dismiss it, or to have it conducted in a different forum. But in December 2025, Tennis Australia — the organizer of the Australian Open — broke from the other three majors by agreeing an as-yet-undisclosed settlement with the PTPA.
The three other Grand Slams simultaneously filed new motions to dismiss the suit.
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 2024. “This is an antitrust fire zone.”
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.
Since the PTPA’s founding in 2020, 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 1000 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 initially quoted 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. It then removed those quotes after complaints from some of the players involved.
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 1000 (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.
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.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
Sports Business, Tennis, Women's Tennis
2026 The Athletic Media Company
Continue reading...
