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.
Yeah, this article is quite funny in the context of today's men's tennis landscape, where an entire generation of players (90s born) were effectively blocked from the big prizes by being sandwiched between two generations of all time greats. Money is obviously an important factor in the growth and development of most athletes, but the article seems to be downplaying the importance of inherent talent and ability in sport.
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.
"All biological and evolving systems (i.e., individual organisms, animal and human societies, ecosystems, and the like) consist of complex cybernetic networks, and all such systems share certain formal characteristics. Each system contains subsystems which are potentially regenerative, i.e., which would go into exponential "runaway" if uncorrected. (Examples of such regenerative components are Malthusian characteristics of population, schismogenic changes of personal interaction, armaments races, etc.) The regenerative potentialities of such subsystems are typically kept in check by various sorts of governing loops to achieve "steady state." Such systems are "conservative" in the sense that they tend to conserve the truth of propositions about the values of their component variables—especially they conserve the values of those variables which otherwise would show exponential change. Such systems are homeostatic, i.e., the effects of small changes of input will be negated and the steady state maintained by reversible adjustment."
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?
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).
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....>
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.
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[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 31.2 ms ] threadNow, 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.
Bateson (and several associated anthropologists) are fascinating to me, though more by reputation than direct knowledge.
And yes I realise that "a lot of [his] work..." suggests that this shouldn't be too hard to find ;-)
... some early exploratory search suggests Toward an Ecology of Mind, perhaps?
https://ejcj.orfaleacenter.ucsb.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/...
"All biological and evolving systems (i.e., individual organisms, animal and human societies, ecosystems, and the like) consist of complex cybernetic networks, and all such systems share certain formal characteristics. Each system contains subsystems which are potentially regenerative, i.e., which would go into exponential "runaway" if uncorrected. (Examples of such regenerative components are Malthusian characteristics of population, schismogenic changes of personal interaction, armaments races, etc.) The regenerative potentialities of such subsystems are typically kept in check by various sorts of governing loops to achieve "steady state." Such systems are "conservative" in the sense that they tend to conserve the truth of propositions about the values of their component variables—especially they conserve the values of those variables which otherwise would show exponential change. Such systems are homeostatic, i.e., the effects of small changes of input will be negated and the steady state maintained by reversible adjustment."
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
( disclaimer : I know nothing about football !)
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.
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....>
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.
hooray for 4-year presidential terms