What old tennis players teach us (2017)
raphkoster.com47 points by surprisetalk 5 days ago
47 points by surprisetalk 5 days ago
An interesting article to revisit 8+ years later.
Now, in 2026, men's tennis is dominated by Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz, both under 25 years of age
Also, I don't think women's tennis has shown the same cartel effect in the top 5 or top 10 as men's tennis has recently. It seems like there's much more churn there, and many more young players, though I haven't measured this and maybe it's just a feeling.
To quote McEnroe, commentating Wimbledon this year: "Father Time, undefeated." Djokovic is mentioned in the article and has only just ended his dominant era, and is still ranked 4th in the world at 38. So we did get some very long runs in there, and I would imagine just 3 years ago or so people would have expected some mid to late 20s/early 30s guys like Zverev or Fritz to be having their turn. Both of whom, some asterisks.
Instead we got this young duo / lightning in a bottle situation; and I expect that both Sinner and Alcaraz are likely to be playing dominantly into their mid 30s barring injury, or maybe Alcaraz buying a nightclub in Ibiza and retiring.
A possible factor on your observation is females athletically peaking earlier.
Edit. A quick investigation shows there is not a significant age difference between men and women for both top 10 player lists and top 100 player lists
Or just that younger women are hotter so they attract more of an audience.
Lol. I didn’t realize how important audience following was to winning tennis matches.
Pretty important! More fans mean more sponsorship dollars, which mean better coaches, food, &c, which means better conditioning and training for the match, and thus a higher chance of winning and getting more fans and more sponsorship cycles.
I actually think it’s great. The level playing field can get a bit overrated. Hungary entrepreneurs will intuitively understand the parallels.
That was my first thought, but then again, players with a large fan base are more likely to get a wildcard into an event they don't directly qualify for.
I know nothing about tennis, but I think the general point still stands.
Any time you have a system with feedback loops and economies of scale / network effects, the natural iterated behavior over time is an increasingly steep power law distribution.
With the digital world where zero marginal costs mean huge economies of scale and social interaction means huge network effects, we are clearly seeing a world dominated by a small number of insanely powerful elites. Seven of the ten richest people in 2025 got there from tech.
Our society wasn't meant to be this connected with this much automated popularity aggregation. It leads to huge inequality until we figure out damping or counterbalancing systems to deal with it.
its possible tennis has become more of an established business now and players are being groomed by cartels as a cog in the machine, compared to the more self made outliers of the past.
A lot of Gregory Bateson’s work warned that if the balancing loops in a system are too weak, the system stops being an ecosystem and starts being an arms race. The interesting bit here isn’t that elite tennis players (or guilds, or platforms) dominate but that dominance reprices the entry conditions and eventually kills the replenishment layer that made the whole thing dynamic. These axioms read like something straight out of a Batesonian case study in runaway.
As far as I can tell, you fix it by adding dampeners and renewal mechanisms, forced churn, diminishing returns on accumulated advantage, periodic resets, or constraints (i.e., keep the system in the ferment zone). How you do that is a much trickier issue. Bateson was also pretty wary of tinkering with complex systems in a top-down way, and history is replete with failed attempts to do so.
Years ago, I recall reading about a Muscogee tradition (the Busk), which may have had this effect; basically a cultural dampener, a periodic, communal reset that interrupted accumulation of grievances, status debt, polluted fire, stale obligations, before it became self-reinforcing. A distinctive feature was a kind of amnesty/forgiveness for wrongs short of murder, and a re-establishing of social relationships. It was basically a ritualized negative-feedback loop: clean house, renew the fire, forgive (almost) everything, start the cycle again; like an engineered anti-runaway mechanism that prevents compounding into schism.
[edit]: found it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46595199
> renewal mechanisms
Conveniently, for individual sports like tennis there's a guaranteed renewal mechanism - the near-term likelihood of 50 year old tennis champions is low, and that of 80 year old champions is not really worth discussing.
I agree that financial inequality in tennis is real and unfair — and the point about “escape velocity” at the top is compelling. Once players cross a certain income threshold, they’re not just better rewarded, they’re structurally harder to displace.
I’d add another layer, though, which interacts with that dynamic rather than replacing it: entry barriers. For players from peripheral regions of the tennis ecosystem (e.g., South America), the climb is not only underfunded but structurally hostile — long travel distances, fewer high-value tournaments, language barriers, and competing almost permanently as the outsider. These factors affect who even gets a chance to reach escape velocity in the first place, and they’ve existed long before today’s prize-money explosion.
That raises a deeper question the article hints at but doesn’t fully address: what do we actually mean by fairness in elite sport?
Is it equal opportunity, or is it preserving a brutally selective system that produces exceptional performers?
There’s a real tension here. Some pressure is clearly wasteful — forcing talented players to play injured, burn out early, or leave the sport before they peak. But some pressure is also constitutive of excellence. Scarcity, risk, and high stakes shape psychology, decision-making, and competitive edge. A system with no tension doesn’t produce champions; a violin string without tension is out of tune.
So the problem may not be inequality per se, but which inequalities entrench incumbents versus which ones meaningfully select for performance. Reducing attrition that destroys talent before it matures is different from flattening the incentives and risks that keep the top level sharp.
For that reason, I’m not convinced the solution is primarily redistributive — “cutting the cake differently.” A more promising direction may be using the top tier to leverage the bottom tier: expanding global sponsorship, regional tournaments, media exposure, and off-court revenue opportunities that help more players reach viability without removing the competitive pressures that define elite tennis.
In other words, grow the cake and widen access to escape velocity — rather than trying to engineer fairness in a system whose excellence is partly forged by difficulty.
Also the wildcard system that means you get easy access to a tournament.
If you country hosts a grand slam Australia,Britain US, and France you can get some good prize money without winning a match.
Having the right flag beside your name removes lots of barriers
The process where resources accrue to those with more resources is called the Matthew Effect. It explains, amongst other things, why the degree distribution of social networks follows a power law.
There's a nice experimental test of this where showing the number of previous downloads a song has makes it more likely to be downloaded (but not to the extent that it entirely overrides the quality of the song. <https://www.princeton.edu/~mjs3/salganik_dodds_watts06_full....>
Fascinating article. I wonder how the next decade will compare to when the Big 4 played. Tennis is now doing a three year trial of guaranteed baseline earnings but only for the top 250 (https://www.atptour.com/en/news/baseline-december-2024).
Tennis players portion of total revenue is the lowest among major sports- 17.5% (https://tennishead.net/tennis-players-receive-smallest-reven...)
I wish there was more funding and support for players below the top 250 and not just in countries with strong central tennis academies.
Is the same mechanism at play with football ? Say Real Madrid gets so much money from champions league that they can buy all the best players and then keep winning ? And then only a small clique of elite clubs end up winning all the time?
( disclaimer : I know nothing about football !)
It depends what you mean by "best players". Real Madrid have twice tried to just buy "Galacticos" - the generally-recognised superstar players - and cram them all into the same team, regardless of what position they were suited for. It didn't really work out like they hoped but it did get them a lot of attention.
They found more success when they bought the best team i.e. the best players in each position. Winning in football is difficult enough that you still need great tactics, management, experience, and luck to have actual sustained success. Money helps buy a lot of that, though.
But beyond Real Madrid your point is correct. More and more money is aggregating at the top, especially the English Premier League, and others are getting left behind.
Its interesting - the salary cap comes into play as well - but this article (and the parent article which is a bit more detailed into the tennis aspect itself) basically summarizes to 'top tennis players can use outsized prize winnings to hire top staff to extend their dominance'.
At the root - surely the same is true - top paid footballers likely pay (themselves or through the team) for top staff (physio, coaches, trainers) except substituting the resulting extension of dominance for whatever happens in that particular sport; whether growing older is more or less of a cost than in tennis.
What is interesting is that in a team sport, the money that Real Madrid makes is probably enough to hire top staff, which then applies to the whole team. (Players themselves may go above and beyond that.)
In tennis (simplifying) - there is no team, Federer gets all the money, Federer reinvests what he deems necessary into his own continued performance, expecting outsized benefits.
Now if the only benefit gained from being at the top is money, all that is necessary is outside funding of some sort to help punch your way into, and to extend your stay in the top 100. Would be curious if the two under 25s now dominating the scene are doing so on physicality, money, or more likely a blend of the two.
Essentially the article sort of describes the precarious-ness of being a top ~1000 player, having a very narrow period of time before finances fun out, or you age out (without the proper support structure, ex. get injured), before you start making the money necessary to fund staying in the sport at a high level. And I guess the argument is the sport would be more fair and balanced if ex. everyone who entered the top 1000 were able to get access to the support that the top 100 (or 10 as mentioned) have.
To an extent, yes.
Rosters have some restrictions in terms of size, in terms of home grown talent, talent from outside Europe, etc. There are also a ton of great football players out there. One team can't buy up all the talent, but a clique of elite teams can.
There is some concept of financial fair play too, but that still rewards bigger teams who are already rich.
There are probably studies written on this topic...
"There are thresholds in systemic complexity that serve the system but do not serve the components of the system well."
Isn't that like Rule #1 from Systemantics, that systems grow to serve their perpetuation, not the features they were originally designed to supply?
Also, pournelle's iron law of bureaucracy
> Systems that don’t destroy their kings on a regular basis end up destroying the kings and the citizenry.
hooray for 4-year presidential terms