Mixed doubles is the wrong hostage
In the standoff between the players and the Slams one thing has to be said up front, because everything else follows from it: on the substance, the players are right. It's on method that they got it wrong, and on 27 July we saw just how badly.
That day the US Open released the initial entry list for the mixed doubles. At the top: Aryna Sabalenka and Novak Djokovic. A few lines below, Jessica Pegula with Jack Draper. Sabalenka is the player who said in May that sooner or later a boycott would be the only way to be heard. Pegula is the one who, on 4 July in London, led the players' delegation in the meeting with USTA president Brian Vahaly and tournament director Eric Butorac. Six of the top ten on both rankings filed an entry. Absent, for now: Jannik Sinner, Carlos Alcaraz and Coco Gauff.
Entries close on 17 August, so technically nothing is settled. But the signal has already gone out, and it's the wrong one.
On the substance, it isn't close
The players' demand has been public since March 2025, when a letter carrying twenty signatures landed on the desks of all four Slams. It asked for three things: a guaranteed share of revenue set aside for prize money, structural contributions to pensions and healthcare, a say in decisions. The figure has been known since then: 16% now, 22% by 2030. For the US Open the group added four million dollars a year for welfare and a players' council with an advisory role over scheduling and operations.
These are numbers that stand up against the accounts. Wimbledon raised its 2026 prize money by 20%, to £64.2 million: that is still just under 16% of the £406.5 million in revenue from the All England Club's latest filed accounts. Roland Garros went up to €61.7 million, almost 10% more, and lands in the same place. The US Open handed out $90 million in 2025, a record, with five million to the singles champions, against revenue that had reached 560 million in 2024: a little over 16%. In 2018 that revenue was 291 million. Turnover has nearly doubled in six years; the share going to the people who produce the show has not.
The Slams, in other words, are not denying the players a raise. They grant one every year, with triumphant press releases, while holding the percentage still. That is the difference between a gift and a right, and the players have worked out that as long as it stays a gift it depends on the mood of the giver.
You only threaten what you're willing to lose
This is where being right ends and the mistake begins.
The mixed doubles event reformatted in 2025 is a USTA creation: two days before the main draw, sixteen pairs, sets to four games except in the final, no-ad scoring, one million dollars to the winning pair against two hundred thousand the year before. It was built to attract the singles players, and it worked — even if it was then won by two specialists, Sara Errani and Andrea Vavassori, against Iga Swiatek and Casper Ruud.
But precisely because it is recent and optional, it is the least valuable hostage the players could have picked. Nobody's season is compromised if the mixed doubles falls through. The USTA, worst case, fills the draw with sixteen other pairs and sells the same tickets. What the players lose instead is something you can't buy back: the credibility of the next threat.
A threat not carried out costs more than a threat never made. As of yesterday, anyone sitting on the other side of the table knows that this group announces and then enters. The USTA's next offer can be lower, not higher.
The most serious objection, and why it doesn't hold
There is an honest objection to all this: the players cannot boycott the singles. Anyone outside the top fifty lives on Slam prize money, and one tournament missed means a year compromised. The mixed would have been a symbolic strike at almost zero cost, and a symbolic strike is better than nothing.
It doesn't hold, for a structural reason. Tennis players are self-employed, not unionised employees: there is no collective bargaining, no duty to negotiate, and each Slam bargains on its own. In that context a symbolic gesture that then isn't carried out is not a first step, it's a display of weakness dressed up as a display of strength. Sam Querrey put the odds of a boycott actually going the distance at under 5%, and it didn't take an econometric model to work that out.
There's more. The levers that produced concrete results were already in the players' hands and made no noise. The partial blackout of media obligations moved the negotiation more than any announcement: press conferences compressed into a quarter of an hour at Roland Garros, then the protest called off at Wimbledon after a meeting with the All England Club and the club's commitment to bring forward specific proposals. Hiring Larry Scott, the former head of the WTA, as an adviser to the group gave the players a counterpart able to read the accounts as an equal. And Roland Garros, according to what emerged in July, was the first to say it was open to discussing a revenue-linked model. These are slow, opaque, unphotogenic steps. They are also the only ones that have worked.
The problem isn't courage
The USTA comes to this moment with a chief executive who took office on 20 July, Craig Tiley, after thirteen years running Tennis Australia. It is the moment when a counterpart is most fragile and most inclined to concede something in writing. The players could have shown up with a single demand, verifiable and binding: a formula set down in black and white, not a figure announced in a press conference.
Instead they put on the table a two-and-a-half-day event that they themselves helped make valuable, and then they entered it.
Tennis does not have a courage problem. It has an architecture problem. Without collective bargaining every conflict comes down to individual reputation, and no player can afford to be the only one who pulls out. As long as that holds, the four Slams will keep signing ever bigger cheques while leaving the percentage where it is. And every summer someone will announce a boycott, just in time for the entry deadline.
