Wimbledon Announces Huge Prize Money Increase

Written by: Staff on 23rd April 2013

Wimbledon Announces Huge Prize Money Increase |

This year the two Wimbledon singles champions will receive $2.4 million (£1.6 million), a 39% increase on 2012 but the biggest leap is for losers in the first three rounds of the singles competition with increases in excess of 62%. A player granted a wild card entry who then goes on to lose in the first round will depart London Sw19 with $35,859 (£23,500) in his pocket.

All England Club chairman Philip Brook announced the changes at the annual Spring Press Conference but insisted the rises were not in response to any pressure from the ATP World Tour or WTA and firmly made the point: “We have made the increases because we wanted to. Not because we had to.

“We live in a world where we compete with other international tennis events and we have chosen to make a step-change in prize money this year because we felt it was the right thing to do. Our aim as ever to is to maintain the Championships at the premier tennis tournament in the world.”

Brook insisted: “This is the largest single increase in prize money in tennis history. And this is the largest amount of prize money ever announced in tennis. But this is not about bragging rights and I hope people will notice that the cheques paid to the champions is not the biggest ever. If we wanted to, we could have raised it to that level.”

Brook was at pains to point out that spectators will not bear the brunt of these increases and ticket prices for the 2013 Championships will not show a marked increase on last year. The All England Club has however increased several lucrative television deals in the last year and the most notable this year is a deal with CCTV5 in China which stands to quadruple the number of potential households in the nation watching Wimbledon from 85 million to 250 million.

When asked directly how the All England Club will fund the increase, Brook said: “We will do it as we always do, through internal resources.”

Richard Lewis, All England Club chief executive, acknowledged the increases were ‘ staggering’ and insisted: “Let’s be certain this sort of thing is not going to happen every year.

Doubles players will also benefit from the pay-rise with a 22% increase and there is a 41% increase for the singles qualifying rounds, bringing that up to a two year-increase for that that part of the tournament to 71%.

Topics: British tennis news, Sports, Tennis News, tennis prize money debate, Wimbledon