\u201cIt\u2019s completely out of order. You don\u2019t do that just at the start of the tournament. I understand it\u2019s a tactic but it\u2019s not very elegant, and elegance is important,\u201d said Joel Assoun during an interview on the Roland Garros grounds. Assoun was just one of the fans who packed the sun-kissed outside courts \u2014 and Suzanne-Lenglen, the venue\u2019s second show-court \u2014 to watch players from the lower 100s and 200s of the world rankings fight for a place in one of the four most prestigious tournaments in the sport.<\/p>\n
In the interview rooms, the biggest stars in the game, who shortened their duties to 10 minutes of news conference and a five-minute video interview just for Friday, said that their protest over Grand Slam prize money<\/a> is designed to support those very players.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not about me,\u201d women\u2019s world No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka<\/a> said in her news conference. \u201cIt\u2019s about the players who are lower in the ranking suffering. It\u2019s not easy to live in this tennis world with that percentage that we are earning. As the world No. 1, I have to stand up and fight for lower-level players.\u201d<\/p>\n Many fans who attended the third round of qualifying here had not even heard about the players\u2019 protest.<\/p>\n The top men\u2019s and women\u2019s players are pushing for the Grand Slams to increase prize money allocation<\/a> from roughly 15 percent of revenue to 22 percent, which matches up with combined tournaments on their respective ATP and WTA tours.<\/p>\n The French Open<\/a> has this year increased its total prize money by 9.5 percent, to $72.3 million (\u00a353.8m), but the players say their argument is largely about proportionality, not quantity. Some fans, Assoun included, don\u2019t see it that way.<\/p>\n \u201cGiven how much the top players earn, I don\u2019t think it\u2019s right for them to go on strike or ask for more money,\u201d he said. \u201cThey\u2019re already very, very well paid. Even if the tournament brings in more revenue, I don\u2019t think that\u2019s the point. If anything, I\u2019d be fine with the early rounds being better paid, but for the top 10 to get more money \u2014 I don\u2019t think that\u2019s right.\u201d<\/p>\n The French Open and the other three majors, the Australian and U.S. Opens and Wimbledon, have largely focused prize-money increases on those earlier rounds in recent years.<\/p>\n Mohayou Nikiema, who has paid over $115 to return next week for the main-draw action, felt the players\u2019 demands were reasonable. \u201cThat\u2019s fair,\u201d he said during an interview. \u201cThey are the main actors. If they generate more money, they need to be paid more.\u201d<\/p>\n Fellow fan Stephen Cook can see both sides of the argument. \u201cThe tournament invests the money back into the game as well. I\u2019m sympathetic to that,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n \n Stephen Cook (left) and Sasha Morozow (right) traveled from London for French Open qualifying. (Charlotte Harpur \/ The Athletic)<\/p>\n The four Grand Slams are organized by their respective national tennis federations. The All England Lawn Tennis Club stages Wimbledon, but it passes on 90 percent of its profits from each tournament to the U.K. Lawn Tennis Association. Much of the hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue each tournament generates each year goes back into the events, as well as into the development of tennis in those respective nations.<\/p>\n The players say that the Grand Slams should be putting more of that revenue toward development of the players who play at them, including welfare contributions, which the ATP and WTA already pay.<\/p>\n \u201cOf course, we talk about money,\u201d said men\u2019s world No. 1 Jannik Sinner during a news conference at the Italian Open this month. \u201cThe most important (thing) is respect, and we just don\u2019t feel it.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThey\u2019re not protesting because they think the top 100 are underpaid,\u201d Assoun said. \u201cThey\u2019re talking about themselves. I think it\u2019s rubbish.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Some other fans, including Evan Lamy from Paris, said they would be more sympathetic if the push more clearly benefited players beyond the sport\u2019s elite, but most prolific players in the top 10s on the tours are leading the charge because of their platform. When they speak, their voices are heard.<\/p>\n Sabalenka, Sinner, Iga \u015awi\u0105tek, Carlos Alcaraz and Coco Gauff are among the players who last year sent two letters to the Grand Slam organizers, proposing reforms. The media-day protest is an escalation of that strategy. Some of the players have suggested they could boycott a major in the future, including Gauff and Sabalenka<\/a> at the Italian Open.<\/p>\n \u201cI can\u2019t see that happening,\u201d said Cook, while Nikiema suggested it would be \u201cgoing too far\u201d.<\/p>\n As for Assoun? He will return for the tournament\u2019s final weekend next month, on which he\u2019s spent $754 for tickets. He and the rest of the fans will hope to see the best players in the world do what they do best. \u201cIt does cost a bit, but it\u2019s worth it because it\u2019s a real spectacle,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Just the logic that the players would like the Grand Slams to follow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"PARIS \u2014 \u201cYou can always have more, but what\u2019s the point?\u201d Friday at the French Open, one lifelong…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":663650,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[72],"tags":[99,1794,428],"class_list":["post-663649","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-sports","tag-sports-business","tag-tennis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/663649","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=663649"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/663649\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/663650"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=663649"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=663649"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=663649"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Tennis-French-Open-Fans-scaled.jpg\")
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