NEW YORK — The hum of the 2026 U.S. Open is a roar of commercial excess, from its soaring ticket prices and $100 caviar-topped chicken nuggets to the new luxury suites rising as part of an $800 million transformation of Arthur Ashe Stadium.
But away from the din at the crammed Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Queens, a quieter labor-management battle is unfolding over who controls the sport’s money and how much should go to players. The campaign has played out in backrooms, private hotel suites and discreet dinner tables in Midtown Manhattan. And helping orchestrate the players’ push against tennis’ most lucrative tournaments is a familiar face: Larry Scott.
Five years ago, Scott left the Pac-12 after a controversial, increasingly tumultuous tenure. A decade of ambition that had initially pushed the West Coast Power Five league to the forefront of college sports had unraveled in a blizzard of criticism. Two years after his departure, the century-old conference itself began to collapse.
Today, Scott has returned to the sport where he made his name, first as a top executive with the ATP Tour and later as the chief executive officer of the WTA Tour. This time he arrives not as a front-facing executive but rather as a behind-the-scenes adviser to tennis’ elite players. He’s swapped the sweeping grind of a public commissionership for the surgical precision of strategic advocacy.
To some, it’s a natural, if lower-profile, evolution. The savvy former WTA boss, who once successfully fought for women’s equal prize money, now shadow-leads an unexpectedly unified player effort to restructure the relationship with the sport’s longstanding economic pillars — the U.S. Open, Wimbledon, French Open and the Australian Open.
“He’s super smart and understands the sports ecosystem,” says Ilana Kloss, a longtime sports executive and business partner of Billie Jean King, who is not involved in the talks. “He’s probably a good choice for the players.”
Scott, who met with players, agents and Grand Slam executives in New York last week, declined to discuss his involvement, though it is widely known in tennis circles. Others interviewed for this story spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the talks.
Finding leverage
Whether the 61-year-old’s return to tennis as an éminence grise can herd the sport’s notoriously scattered stakeholders together and strengthen the players’ position is the question du jour. Many past efforts have met with little headway.
But the roughly 18-month initiative has so far yielded new avenues of progress.
Shortly before the tournament began, the U.S. Open raised its prize pool 19% this year, from $85 million to a record $101 million, with total player compensation reaching $108 million after stipends and a new $2 million Player Support Program, split evenly between the men’s and women’s tours.
The four majors also agreed to create a permanent Grand Slam Player Advisory Council, giving players a formal voice in tournament decision-making. The Grand Slams and players are now working out how the council will be selected and structured, with further details expected soon. Those moves followed prize-money increases at Wimbledon and the Australian Open after player protests and a potentially more significant shift at the French Open, which in July became the first major to formally propose tying player compensation to tournament revenue.
“I think 100% we’re moving in the right direction in terms of prize money increases [and] in terms of the tournaments’ willingness to have a player council and allow us to have a voice moving forward,” said ninth-ranked American Ben Shelton during a pre-tournament news conference.
The Scott playbook
Scott, a history major at Harvard University who captained the tennis team and played professionally after graduating, rose quickly through the ATP ranks in the late 1980s as the men’s tour was consolidating control over the economics of the game. As chief operating officer in the mid-1990s under then-CEO Mark Miles, Scott co-authored a commercial playbook to buy back television and commercial rights from sports marketing giant IMG and package the top nine “Masters” events as a unified property. The pinnacle of that effort was a massive contract with Swiss marketing giant ISL. “They were both big plays, outside-the-box thinking,” Miles said in a recent interview.
Although ISL’s 2001 bankruptcy exposed the risk of relying on a single partner, the ATP survived because Miles and Scott had secured a $200 million Swiss letter of credit. “We were successful in keeping the credit line out of bankruptcy, so that was really important,” said Miles.
Two decades later, Scott applied this same playbook to college athletics, securing a blockbuster 12-year, $3 billion ESPN and Fox deal in 2011 soon after he became the league’s commissioner. But its duration locked schools in while rivals renegotiated shorter, more lucrative deals. Simultaneously, his gamble on a self-owned Pac-12 Network failed to land a DirecTV deal, starving member schools of cash. What initially looked like a home run became a long-term contract the team couldn’t unload. “With hindsight, would you form your own media company without a partner … who could guarantee distribution? If you could do it over, you would,” said one former staffer who worked closely with Scott in both tennis and college athletics.
The ambitious commercial strategy eventually created friction on campuses, too. “It didn’t seem like the flow from the bottom up was important,” said former University of Utah athletic director Chris Hill, who viewed Scott as attentive to university presidents but disconnected from athletic directors and the day-to-day realities of campus life. Hill added that Scott became known as “aloof” and wanting to be “the smartest person in the room.”
The conference had deeper problems as well, including frequent turnover among the presidents and chancellors Scott reported to, a lack of marquee football and basketball success and crippling NCAA sanctions against USC football tied to the Reggie Bush scandal.
Back in the game
Since parting ways with the Pac-12 in 2021, Scott has operated largely unseen without completely stepping away from sports. He advised longtime associates King and Kloss during the early formation of the Professional Women’s Hockey League and served as a strategic adviser in securing investment and ownership for the Billie Jean King Cup, a nation-versus-nation women’s tennis competition. The assignments drew on his deal-making experience at the ATP, WTA, and Pac-12 years and allowed him to work behind the scenes, a shift that has carried into his efforts with tennis players today.
That effort grew out of elite players’ frustrations with the majors. As they looked for someone to help advance their cause, former WTA board member Lisa Grattan reached out to Scott, whose six years leading the women’s tour included helping secure equal prize money at all four majors by 2007 and a groundbreaking $88 million Sony Ericsson sponsorship deal in 2005.
Backed by player groups, Scott was hired as a strategic adviser in late 2024. By March 2025, he had organized a coalition of top-10 players behind a letter of demands to the four Grand Slams, a rare show of alignment among the sport’s biggest names. That unity has shown some cracks, with superstar Carlos Alcaraz, one of the original signatories, recently withdrawing from the effort.
The money question
At the heart of the players’ strategic offensive is a high-stakes debate over tournament accounting and overall compensation. The majors have historically distributed only 12% to 15% of revenues to players.
At the 2026 U.S. Open, the USTA’s $101 million prize pool amounts to 18% of its $559.7 million in 2024 operating revenue. Scott and the players prefer a revenue-linked formula that rises incrementally with a goal of 22% by 2030, borrowing a model long established in major U.S. team sports, where player compensation is tied directly to league revenue.
Craig Tiley, the new chief executive of the USTA, which runs the U.S. Open, explicitly rejected the metric in a media conference on the eve of the tournament. “We don’t use that number as a form of calculating how we compensate, because it can be fairly arbitrary,” Tiley said.
In other words, the players and Scott can expect pushback.
Another sticking point is what counts as revenue. Players want a share of overall revenue, while the majors have generally favored formulas based on what remains after expenses. As nonprofit governing bodies, they reinvest heavily in the sport and their facilities, reducing the amount potentially available to players.
Under such a formula, projects like the $800 million Arthur Ashe Stadium renovation could shrink that pool. Sports Illustrated journalist Jon Wertheim said on the podcast Served, which he co-hosts with Andy Roddick, that the formula could become a Trojan horse. “It is all about the accounting and … what counts,” he said.
The hard part
It’s far too early to know whether Scott can turn the players’ newfound leverage into lasting change. Tennis has a long history of confronting big issues only to kick them down the road unresolved.
“Tennis is very fractionalized in a lot of ways,” said Jessica Pegula, the top-ranked American and No. 3 seed at the U.S. Open, in pre-tournament remarks. Pegula, who also is a representative on the WTA Players’ Council, added that “getting everyone on the same page is a step forward.”
For Scott, the advisory council is the ultimate structural play. He has long argued that tennis’ fragmented governance holds the sport back and once envisioned himself leading a combined men’s and women’s tour. He sees the council not merely as a vehicle for larger checks, but also a way to force lasting cooperation between the Grand Slams and players and improve overall welfare.
It could also bring Scott’s own role to a natural conclusion. Once the council is established, the top-player effort he has advised is expected to wind down, with a broader group of player representatives taking over direct negotiations with the Grand Slams. Once up and running, potentially within weeks or months, he could step away as well.
Scott’s track record of big aces and occasional double faults has followed him from tennis to college sports and back again. Whether his high-stakes sequel can alter the economics of professional tennis remains to be seen. But if the new player council takes hold, the shadow maverick may have helped force the sport’s gatekeepers to pull up a seat at the table, then made his own seat unnecessary.
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