A tennis players trade association backed by hedge fund titan Bill Ackman is ready to formally begin advocating for the sport’s top pros—armed with a new pool of money, a new leader, and a new commercial venture.
The Professional Tennis Players Association has raised $26 million, co-led by Ackman’s foundation, to launch a for-profit entity called Winners Alliance that will help pro men’s and women’s tennis players monetize their stardom. The group has also hired OneTeam Partners CEO Ahmad Nassar to be the PTPA’s executive director and Winners Alliance CEO.
They’re the first major moves for the PTPA, which was launched in 2020 by Novak Djokovic and Canadian pro Vasek Pospisil, but so far has done little in terms of organization and impact. The group met with players in midtown Manhattan on Thursday evening ahead of the U.S. Open, and plans to hire a full team to formally begin operations in the coming months.
Those efforts will be overseen by Nassar, who’s well-versed in helping athletes in licensing, marketing, media and investing. Nassar worked for a decade at the NFLPA’s commercial arm, and in 2019 became founding CEO of OneTeam Partners, which works with players unions and athletes from sports across the country. Nassar sold his OneTeam equity earlier this year.
“Tennis has more total viewers worldwide than baseball and football combined, but just 10-ish% of their revenue,” Nassar said in an interview. “And the athletes only see about 17% of that revenue, whereas football and baseball are hovering around 50%. It’s just an order of magnitude off.”
The PTPA plans to advocate for improvements in player benefits, safety, rules, tournament schedules and compensation. More than 40 men’s and women’s players attended Thursday’s two-hour meeting, led by Nassar and Ackman. (Djokovic, a high-profile absence from the U.S. Open due to vaccine mandates, was obviously unable to attend.)
An avid tennis fan and player, Ackman learned about the sport’s internal economics six or seven years ago when he backed a tennis prospect named Matija Pecotic. He said the experience showed how difficult it is for talented young players to advance in the sport without significant resources.
Over time, he said he began to view the sport’s problems less through a philanthropic lens, and more through a business lens. Professional tennis, Ackman said, is similar to the companies he invests in–an enterprise with untapped potential that can be realized given a few critical changes.
“If you make it more profitable for the players, you’re going to recruit a much larger pool of talent,” Ackman said in a phone interview. “The game would be more competitive if the economics were more favorable for players. I also think the overall revenues of the sport are well below what they should be, in light of its popularity. So if you can grow the overall pie, everyone in the ecosystem wins.”
Pro tennis players have long discussed the possibility of a union or trade association—the PTPA is the latter—but the fractured and global nature of the sport has always made organization a challenge. The PTPA believes that the pairing of Djokovic, the most dominant tennis player of the past decade, with Ackman, one of Wall Street’s most prominent billionaires, is enough to help it forge consensus.
It’s a model that worked for OneTeam. In 2019, the NFLPA and MLBPA united alongside a prominent financial backer, Gerry Cardinale’s RedBird Capital, to launch a new firm to help athlete monetize their celebrity. The group later expanded to work with MLS, WNBA and U.S. women’s national soccer team members. (RedBird is currently looking to sell its 40% stake in the venture, which was recently valued at roughly $2 billion).
The Winners Alliance’s $26 million raise, enough to immediately fund the program for a few years, came primarily from Ackman’s Pershing Square Foundation and growth equity firm Prysm Capital, with additional investment from Nassar.
The PTPA’s success will likely hinge on how successful it is in uniting the pro tennis community– a tall order, given the sport’s many tiers, its international footprint and the dramatic difference in financial reality between the mega-stars and everyone else. Tennis players are responsible for much of their own costs, and while many earn a more than comfortable living, the sport’s rank-and-file generally hold down second jobs and grind their way to meager (if any) profits.
One of the group’s biggest challenges will be the fractured nature of the sport. Global tennis has an international governing body (ITF), national bodies (like the USTA), and global tours (ATP and WTA), plus powerful Grand Slam events. The ATP originally started as a player advocacy group, but now operates the top men’s tour and has its own business objectives.
The PTPA, which had no full-time employees, no offices and no real staff prior to Nassar’s hiring, has yet to conduct serious outreach to those organizations. Nassar said he believes a more unified player front could be additive financially for all tennis stakeholders, and doesn’t anticipate those conversations will be adversarial at the start.
“This isn’t a zero-sum game,” he said. “We’re not looking to pound the table and demand that tournament owners take less. Tennis should be making way more money than it is. So how do we do that? How can the players help? And how do we split those dollars? Because more so than any other sport, tennis players can directly help grow the revenue.”
Winners Alliance, the for-profit venture, will immediately get started on new player revenue streams. Top of the list is group licensing—multi-athlete deals for trading cards or video games—which doesn’t currently exist in pro tennis.
The prospect of making additional money through the Winners Alliance could help the PTPA attract more men’s and women’s players to join. That’s also true for agents, who hold a lot of power on the player side, and are frequently at odds with organized unions in major U.S. leagues.
Professional tennis players are independent contractors, not tour employees, so the PTPA is a trade association and not a formal union. There are no union dues, for example, and no official regulation for agents, but the group also can’t organize a formal strike.
Ackman, a high-profile tennis fan, will chair the Winners Alliance board. He will be joined by Christina Francis, president of Magic Johnson Enterprises and a former NFLPA exec; Prysm co-founder/managing partner Jay Park; and Prysm co-founder/partner Muhammad Mian.
