Tennis wants to cut doubles in half — and the reason is a share of money, not a lack of fans

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The men's ATP Tour has proposed halving doubles draws from 2028 and cutting doubles' slice of prize money from 20% to 10%, moving the rest to singles. Doubles players call it a plan to end their profession.

Key takeaways

The ATP Tour has proposed halving professional doubles from 2028 and cutting doubles' share of prize money from 20% to 10%, shifting the rest to singles.
The reason isn't that doubles is unpopular — it's that a shared money pool gets split, and the people who decide the split are mostly the singles stars the tour is built around.
It's part of a wider tennis fight over how a fixed pile of money is divided, with singles players also pushing the Grand Slams for a bigger cut.

The men’s ATP Tour has proposed cutting professional doubles roughly in half. In a meeting at Wimbledon this week, the tour floated halving the size of doubles draws from 2028 — down to 16 teams at the biggest events and just 8 at smaller ones [1]. It also proposed cutting the share of prize money that goes to doubles from 20% to 10%, and moving the freed-up money to singles players [1].

A group of leading doubles players hit back hard. “Doubles isn’t a carnival sideshow,” they said in a statement, calling the plan “a plan to end doubles as a viable profession, dressed up as a cost-saving measure” [1].

What’s actually being decided

The tour isn’t saying doubles is unpopular. It’s saying doubles costs too much for what it draws. The ATP’s own words: it’s “assessing the doubles product, draw sizes and player compensation distribution with the aim of creating a more sustainable long-term model” [1].

Here’s the number underneath the fight. A tennis tournament earns its money from a single pool — broadcast deals, tickets, sponsors — mostly pulled in by the singles stars. That pool then gets split. Right now doubles players take about 20% of it. Many inside the sport think 20% is far more than doubles’ share of the actual interest [1]. So the tour wants to reset the split closer to where the attention is.

The gap is stark at the top. At Indian Wells this year, Jannik Sinner earned $1.151m (£860,000) for winning the singles [1]. The pair who won the doubles took $234,000 (£175,000) each [1]. Cut doubles’ pool in half and the players ranked outside the top 30 — the ones who play only doubles for a living — say the maths stops working entirely. “It will be impossible to make a living,” their statement read [1].

Why two groups now, not one

There’s a structural reason this is happening now. It used to be normal for a top player to enter both singles and doubles at the same event. That’s largely gone. There are now, in effect, two separate groups of players — singles specialists and doubles specialists — which even puts extra strain on the locker rooms and player facilities at each tournament [1].

That split matters because of who gets to vote. The ATP is run by its board, its tournaments, and its players — and the players with the loudest voice are the singles stars, the ones the tour is built around. The doubles specialists are the smaller group. When the body decides how to divide a shared pot, the majority’s priorities set the terms. The tour frames the change as helping “more players at the highest level” — specifically, funnelling money into early-round singles prize money so lower-ranked singles players can afford to travel and compete [1].

The bigger money fight around it

This lands in the middle of a wider argument about who gets paid what in tennis. Separately from the ATP’s internal split, the leading singles players have been pushing the four Grand Slams to hand a bigger share of their revenue to prize money [1]. Just this week, players ended a boycott of Wimbledon media duties after what were described as “constructive meetings” with the All England Club [1]. They also want the Slams to fund welfare — pensions, maternity leave — not just prize cheques [1].

So the doubles cut isn’t a one-off. It’s one front in a sport-wide fight over how a fixed pile of money gets divided among people who all feel underpaid.

What we still don’t know

Nothing is settled. The ATP calls this a review and says any change would come “through close consultation with players, tournaments and the ATP board” [1]. The doubles players say the opposite — that it’s “being pushed through with almost no transparency and almost no consultation” [1]. The 2028 timeline gives room to fight it. Whether the cut happens, and at what size, is still open.

02 · Lesson · why it matters

When you share the pot but don't hold the vote

A shared pool of money always drifts toward the people who decide how it's split — and "you don't earn your keep" is the sound that drift makes.

The fight isn’t about whether doubles is good

Read the tennis story quickly and it sounds like a quality argument. Is doubles worth watching? Do fans care? The players insist doubles is “one of the most successful parts of tennis,” and the tour never really disputes it. Nobody is claiming the matches are bad.

That’s the tell. When a fight looks like it’s about worth but nobody actually attacks the worth, the fight is about something else. Here it’s about a split. There is one pot of money at a tournament — from television, tickets, sponsors — and it gets divided. Doubles takes about a fifth of it. The tour wants to cut that to a tenth and hand the difference to singles.

The question underneath isn’t “is doubles any good.” It’s “who gets to decide how the pot is carved.”

One pot, two groups, one vote

There used to be one kind of tennis player, entering both singles and doubles at the same event. That’s mostly over. Now there are two groups: the singles stars the whole tour is built around, and a separate set of doubles specialists who live outside the top 30 and play only doubles for a living.

Two groups. But not two equal seats at the table.

The tour is run by its board, its tournaments, and its players — and the players who carry weight are the ones who fill the stadiums and the broadcast slots. The doubles specialists are the smaller, quieter group. So when the shared pot gets re-divided, the people doing the dividing are, for the most part, the ones on the other side of the line. The group being cut is not in the room where the cut is decided.

This is the shape to hold onto. It isn’t unique to tennis. Any time a fixed pool of money is shared by one set of people but split by a different set, the money leaks toward the deciders. It doesn’t take a villain. It takes a vote that a minority can’t reach.

”Doesn’t earn its keep” is the sound the drift makes

Watch the language the tour uses. Doubles takes 20% of the money for less than 20% of the interest, so the split should move to match “the attention.” Twenty percent is “disproportionate.” The goal is a “more sustainable long-term model.”

Every word of that is reasonable. And that’s exactly why it works. “You take more than you bring in” is the most respectable sentence a majority can say to a minority it wants to pay less. It doesn’t sound like taking. It sounds like fairness — like simply lining the money up with the value.

But notice who owns the ruler. The value is measured by broadcast money and ticket sales — which the singles game generates and the singles game gets credit for. Measured by that metric, of course doubles looks like it takes more than it earns. A group that pays for the whole thing will always be able to prove that the smaller group is a cost. The metric was never neutral. It was the majority’s metric all along.

The pool that only exists together

Here’s the part the split hides. There is only one pot because there is only one tournament. Doubles is played on the same courts, sold under the same tickets, wrapped in the same broadcast deal as the singles it’s now being measured against. The fifth that doubles takes isn’t drawn from a separate doubles economy. It’s a share of a shared thing.

The moment you decide how much each part “earned,” you’ve already pretended the parts were separate — that you could pull the singles revenue out clean and see that doubles contributed almost nothing to it. But you can’t run the experiment. Nobody knows how many people bought a ticket, or kept the broadcast on, partly for the doubles. The number that says “doubles earns its 20%” and the number that says “doubles earns only 10%” are both guesses dressed as facts, and the tour gets to pick which guess becomes the rule.

Where this reaches past tennis

You are in a version of this more often than you’d think. Any shared budget — a company’s, a household’s, a country’s — is one pot split by some people and drawn on by others. The part of it that’s easy to measure gets credited. The part that’s hard to measure — the quiet work, the thing that only matters when it’s gone, the group without a seat — gets asked, sooner or later, to justify its keep against a ruler it didn’t choose.

And the reader is somewhere in that pot too. Sometimes you’re the singles star, and the split moving your way feels like justice. Sometimes you’re the doubles specialist outside the top 30, watching a reasonable-sounding sentence quietly close your profession. The uncomfortable truth is that the same words — let’s line the money up with the value — carry both. What decides which one you get isn’t whether your work is good. It’s whether you were in the room when the pot was cut, and no single seat can see the whole pot well enough to be sure its own share is fair.

03 · Lab · your turn

You Hold The Ruler

Rehearse splitting a shared pot by choosing which metric counts as "value" — and feel the same reasonable split land as justice or as ruin depending on which seat you sit in.

04 · Hope · carry this

The doubles players didn't wait to be cut quietly — they wrote it down, named the number, and made the whole sport look at the split. A pot is easier to carve when no one at the small end speaks; the fact that they did means the room isn't as closed as it looks.