Prestige and Pride: What Wimbledon embodies
Wimbledon, formerly known as The Championships, is one of the four Grand Slam tennis tournaments that awards its players the most ranking points and prize money. Distinguished not only by its distinctive grass courts, Wimbledon is infamous for its royal patronage and the absence of commercial advertisings on courts, representing the pinnacle of tennis excellence and heritage. But something significant took place during the 2022 Wimbledon…
What happened?
Back in 2022, AELTC (All England Lawn Tennis Club) and LTA (Lawn Tennis Association), the governing bodies of Wimbledon had issued a ban on Russian and Belarussian players from competing here following the political complications between Ukraine and Russia to protect the Championships from being misused to promote Russian’s political agenda [1]. In response, the ATP and WTA (the global regulating bodies of both men and women’s professional tennis) decided to strip off Wimbledon’s ranking point (meaning that players will no longer get points for winning/progressing in the tournament), saying the tournament undermined the integrity of the tour and also to balance the playing field with the absence of many notable Russian players. Would this affect ticket sales for the tournament?
The implications
a. Ticket system
Wimbledon’s ticket system involves ballot ticket and physical queuing, where tickets are sold on a one-per-person basis and are non-transferable. This means that people who value the tickets the most will be willing to line up for them, despite the unusual hot weather. However, tickets are down 11% from 2021, suggesting that fans’ enthusiasm and satisfaction with the tournament has dropped significantly, whether it’s due to Covid or the proposed ban of Russian players [2].
Tennis enthusiasts and Russian-background fans would be less inclined to attend Wimbledon since their home players are not participating; the decrease in fan attendance is the product of political drama since majority of fans disagrees with the exclusion and stripping off points from the tournament. The ballot ticket system creates potential revenue loss since tickets will not be allocated to those who value them the most. And for physical queuing, although this ticket system allocates tickets to those with highest valuation, Wimbledon will be missing out on potential profit from potential buyers who are willing to queue up but end up missing out on their tickets to ticket scalpers. Furthermore, ticket scalping is more likely with random draw, therefore the tournament might be missing out on potential profit, resulting in deadweight loss.
b. Prize money
Similarly, since the tournament is generating lower revenue from fan attendance, their prize money for players decreased from £2.3m in 2019 to £2m in 2022 for Men and Women’s Singles as an effect of anticipated lower ticket sales. Keep in mind, Wimbledon’s main source of revenue is ticket sales, since they do not rely on sponsorships and advertisements as heavily as other Grand slams. Lower prize money demotivates players from putting in their best efforts to compete and thus leading to a lower competitive outcome.
If the ban is not lifted for Wimbledon 2023, this mechanism is likely to continue and players will be discouraged from participating, creating a lower playing level at the tournament.
Let’s also look at match upsets to figure out if competitive outcome is affected. Compare the upsets during the first rounds of 2022 and 2019 (probabilities of a higher seed’s loss to a lower seed/unseeded player). The probabilities of upset will be calculated on the basis of how many seeded players are out after a round, i.e. if 5 out of 32 seeds are out after the first round of men’s single then upset probabilities would be 15.63% (5/32). Calculating the amount of upsets is essential in this scenario, since there were 4 Russians in the top 25 at that time (Medvedev, Rublev, Khachanov and Karatsev).
Wimbledon website and OlympicTalk (2022) [3] are used to calculate the following statistics.
The general observation is that as the tournament plays on, the probability of upsets decreases, as expected. However, the average percentage of upsets in 2022 is higher than that of 2019 (18.55% to 11.77%), indicating that higher-seeded players tend to lose more than before. Although the data might be distorted since upsets are heavily weighted in the later rounds of Wimbledon, this calculation allows us to see that there are significantly more upsets in 2022 than in 2019. An increase in upsets might discourage fans in a way since unpredictability is not always favoured in Grand slams. Would you spend the same amount of money to see 2 unseeded players in a Semi-final, when you can see two top 10 players in the other Semi-final?
Conclusion
Although with the expectation that viewership/attendance would go down as a result of the ban on Russian/Belarussian players, Wimbledon has increased its total prize money by 15% over 2021. This has resulted in a lower an operating profit, with a decrease to $58.7m USD in 2022 from 2019’s $62.7m USD. Regardless of the profit loss, this is a savvy move by Wimbledon since this will retain players’ enthusiasm to compete and their playing level amidst the political dramas, thus upholding Wimbledon’s prestigious status and retaining their player pool for future tournaments.
To tackle the anticipated loss in ticket sales, Wimbledon can abolish random draw and issue more tickets for physical queuing and online queuing, similar to the Australian Open. This would discourage ticket scalping since tickets are acquired by those who has the highest valuation of them, ultimately a more efficient allocation of resources in the market [4]. Fans are then more encouraged to attend Centre Court matches and fill out Ground Passes, watching their hometown heroes like Andy Murray or Emma Raducanu.
[1] Hamilton, T. (2022). All England Club chairman Ian Hewitt explains Wimbledon’s banning of Russian, Belarusian players as “beyond the interests of tennis alone” - ESPN. ESPN.com. https://www.espn.com/tennis/story/_/id/34155443/all-england-club chairman-ian-hewitt-explains-wimbledon-banning-russian-belarusian-players interests-tennis-alone
[2] Pompliano, J. (2022). Breaking Down Wimbledon’s $350 Million Business. Huddle Up. https://huddleup.substack.com/p/breaking-down-wimbledons-350-million
[3] OlympicTalk. (2022). 2022 Wimbledon men’s singles draw, results - Tennis. OlympicTalk | NBC Sports. https://olympics.nbcsports.com/2022/07/10/wimbledon-mens-singles draw-scores-results/
[4] Leeds, M. A., & Von Allmen, P. (2016). The Economics of Sports. Routledge.
