The proposed merger of men’s and women’s professional tennis has been put on hold indefinitely, according to the Guardian, after the WTA rejected the share of revenue the ATP was prepared to offer. It is the most consequential thing to happen in tennis this week, and it happened in a boardroom.
The two tours had spent the best part of two years working towards a pooling of their commercial and media rights — not a full corporate merger, but a single entity selling the sport to broadcasters and sponsors as one product rather than two. By 2025, under the then WTA chair Steve Simon, the sides were close enough that the ATP’s chief executive, Eno Polo, said publicly in January that a deal was “quite close”.
It is not close now. Simon’s successor as WTA chair, Valerie Camillo, examined the revenue-share terms on the table and concluded they were unacceptable. The WTA has pulled back. There is no timetable for resuming talks.
The arithmetic that killed it
The numbers explain the impasse better than any statement will. The WTA reported revenue of roughly $142 million in 2024. The ATP reported roughly $294 million — more than double. Any pooled entity would have divided its income according to some formula, and the ATP’s negotiating position rested on the simple fact that it brings more money to the table.
That put the WTA in front of a genuinely difficult trade. Pooling rights would almost certainly have delivered women’s tennis more money in absolute terms — a bigger slice of a much bigger pie. But it would also have written the WTA’s junior status into a contract, fixing its share below the ATP’s for however long the agreement ran.
Camillo’s judgement, in effect, was that women’s tennis should not sell its claim to parity for a short-term revenue bump. It is a defensible call. It is also an expensive one, and the WTA is not in a position to absorb expensive calls easily.
A sport cutting costs
The context is a sport under financial strain at exactly the moment it looks most healthy. The ATP has already cut its doubles programming on cost grounds. The WTA has so far resisted anything so visible, but has begun trimming elsewhere — including, according to the Guardian, sending fewer staff to the majors. Wimbledon has just concluded a fortnight in which the tournament’s own prize fund reached a record, the finals filled Centre Court, and the two tours that own the other fifty weeks of the year were quietly economizing.
That is the tension the merger was supposed to resolve. Tennis sells itself to broadcasters in fragments — four majors owned by four separate national bodies, two tours, a team-event calendar answering to a third organisation, and a Saudi-funded exhibition circuit hovering at the edge of it all. Almost every serious analysis of the sport’s commercial underperformance reaches the same conclusion: the fragmentation costs it money. Pooling the tours’ rights was the one structural fix anybody had got close to executing.
What happens now
Nothing, for the moment — which is the point. The talks are not dead so much as parked, and parked without a date. The two tours will continue to sell their rights separately, into a market where the buyers can play them against each other. The doubles cuts will stand. The cost-trimming will continue. And the question the merger was meant to answer — how does tennis stop leaving money on the table? — goes back into the drawer.
There is a longer-term risk for the WTA in that. Having declined a deal on the grounds that the share was too small, it now has to grow its own revenue to strengthen its hand, in a market it is selling into alone. If the gap between $142m and $294m widens rather than narrows over the next few years, the terms on offer next time will be worse, not better.
Neither tour has commented publicly on the report.
