The U.S. Open, the most lucrative tennis tournament on the planet, is having a moment. Last year, Queen Latifah, Ben Stiller and Bruce Springsteen joined over one million fans who attended in person, up more than 30 percent from the tournament’s prepandemic high. This year’s proceedings look to be at least as jam-packed.
Profits are way up, too. Between 2019 and 2024, the last year for which figures are available, operating profits increased by more than 75 percent.
That’s a lot of Honey Deuces.
For all the attention that’s going to the action at the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, the Open has also received a lot of negative publicity — for increasingly catering to the wealthy, at the expense of the ordinary tennis fans on whom the sport relies.
I am relatively new to tennis fandom, having come to it through the unsporting gateway of pregnancy-induced insomnia. In my third trimester, I lived for the 3 a.m. matches in Beijing. Once my twins were born, the Brisbane International turned midnight feedings into a watch party. Perhaps it is an occupational hazard — I am an economist — but as the United States’ own Grand Slam tournament takes center stage, I can’t help wondering, where does all that money come from? And where does it go?
It has become remarkably expensive to attend the Open. That has angered a great many fans who’d like to go but can’t afford it. It’s even angered the hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, who can definitely afford to go, but who criticized the United States Tennis Association, the nonprofit that owns the U.S. Open, for the $363 price tag on a one-day pass.
That’s a pricey fee, for sure, only the U.S.T.A. isn’t charging it. In fact, the U.S.T.A.’s ticket prices aren’t significantly higher than they were in years past. A one-day grounds pass, the lowest tier of entry, is just $65. The same resale dynamics that plague Taylor Swift concerts and the Super Bowl are at play here: Those affordable tickets tend to get quickly scooped up by bots and scalpers, and then it’s open season for jacking up the cost. The U.S.T.A. does receive a cut, but the vast majority of the gains are pocketed by resellers and platforms such as Ticketmaster.
These aren’t new frustrations. In fact, they’re the reason President Trump issued an executive order last year aimed at “unfair practices in the live entertainment market.” The U.S. Open makes for an unusually interesting case study because it has such clear comparisons with other Grand Slams in Australia, France and Britain. At those tournaments, tickets either cannot be resold, or can be resold only for amounts close to face value. The result is less expensive tickets, lower profits for middlemen and happier fans.
These are issues for the government to address, which is why it’s so frustrating that the Trump administration decided to settle its antitrust lawsuit against Live Nation, which owns Ticketmaster. Still, there are steps that the U.S.T.A. could take on its own. Some musicians have successfully negotiated with resellers to cap ticket prices on these platforms; the U.S.T.A. could do the same. It could make a lot more tickets available to a broader audience at a low price point. And it could let people buy a snack without being charged caviar prices. (Literally: At the Open, six plain chicken nuggets cost $26; you can get them with caviar for $100.)
One way or another, for the sport to continue to grow in the U.S., its marquee event needs to be more accessible.
The tournament did recently release a small number of less expensive tickets, in response to criticism. It also added a fan week with free admission, but not during the main part of the tournament, and this year the available spots got claimed so quickly that a great many people found themselves barred from entry. Many of the Open’s efforts have gone toward expanding accessibility for the high end: Its largest stadium is being renovated to add more luxury seats, which means fewer affordable ones.
The expenses side of the U.S. Open’s ledger could also use some attention. The tournament this year announced the largest compensation package in history for any such event, with a record $108 million going to the players. The winner of the singles title takes home $5.5 million; playing one match (and losing) nets $140,000. That’s not that far from double the median household income in the U.S.
Don’t blame the players for the escalating costs. Their earnings translate to less than 20 percent of the total revenue the tournament generates. By way of comparison, players in the N.B.A., N.H.L. and N.F.L. take home around 50 percent of league revenues.
Tennis is a weird sport, in that you pay your own way: Jalen Brunson doesn’t pay his coach’s salary out of his pocket, but tennis players do. So too the cost of their travel, their trainers and their medical expenses. That works if you’re a superstar with lots of lucrative sponsorships. It works less well if you’re trying to find your footing. At this year’s French Open, the finalist Maja Chwalińska had to compete in qualifiers before winning her coveted spot in the main draw of the tournament. Just getting to that point was so expensive that she would not have been able to keep playing had a new sponsor not stepped in at the last minute to cover her hotel costs.
Players are independent contractors, without a union to bargain for them, unlike athletes in leagues. It’s hard to feel much sympathy for the top seeds making millions of dollars over the course of a few weeks. But for economics nerds like me, the difference between the relatively smaller player rewards in tennis and those in other sports is a vivid example of the ways in which worker power (or a lack thereof) can shape outcomes.
There’s been some progress, with players banding together to call for a fairer deal, and a recently announced Player Advisory Council to give them a direct voice in decisions such as how large the major tournaments’ prize packages should be. But I worry change will be slow and hampered by the lack of any formal structure.
Some unsolicited economic advice for the U.S. Open: It should actively pursue a lower bottom line — less revenue with lower-cost tickets and bigger prizes with more profit-sharing for athletes. That would not be without consequence: The U.S.T.A. is responsible for promoting tennis and nurturing promising American athletes, and 90 percent of its revenues come from the Open. But there is likely room to do more with less.
I’m happy to do my part, too. I have an extra set of tickets for this week. They’re available for face value.
Natasha Sarin, a contributing Opinion writer, is a professor at Yale Law School and the president of the Budget Lab at Yale. She served in the Treasury Department during the Biden administration.
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