"Payments don't make sense" - WTA coach Tim Sommer criticizes aid criteria
Tim Sommer, coach and husband of Luxembourg's Mandy Minella, is dissatisfied with the distribution of Corona help money. He accuses the WTA of neglecting its own young players.
by Florian Goosmann
last edit: May 31, 2020, 10:08 pm
Mr. Sommer, the WTA has decided a corona plan with aid for its players. In your view, however, wrong criteria were used.
When the idea by Novak Djokovic came up, the ITF was looking for feedback from some players on possible conditions. I still believe that this form of support does not really help anyone, it would have made more sense to use the budget to ensure a Challenger and Future tournament landscape when the WTA and ATP tour starts again. But in the end I found it important to find meaningful criteria as to how the money should be distributed if that's the way they wanted it. After talking to two of my wife's colleagues, I created an interactive database that we filled out. You could filter according to the criteria "age", "number of tournaments in the last 12 months", "career prize money" and "number of years on the tour". The database included the top 500 in singles and top 250 in doubles.
Djokovic originally proposed a group of players between 250th and 750th place for the relief funds.
In my opinion, there would have been too many people who were banned or injured because of doping and therefore slipped. These include Grand Slam finalists who have several million in the bank. In addition, it would have left out young, aspiring players at the top 250 who have just made it up through smaller events, but therefore have no money in the bank. It would not have been correct to support everyone the same. So we made our database available to the WTA so they could find a good solution.
Then what happened?
A few weeks went by and suddenly an email came from the WTA that meetings were taking place and the matter was being discussed. Under the premise "We are the WTA and want to support the WTA members" it was divided according to the type of membership. For your understanding: The WTA has "Full Members", "Associate Members" and "Non Members". "Full Members" are players who finished the year before in the top 150 in singles or top 50 in doubles. You pay a membership fee of 1,500 US dollars and can also pay into the pension fund, for example. Everyone can become “associate member”. Here, for example, treatment by physiotherapists is made possible at tournaments. Well, I found this selection quite surprising. Why should one help the “Full Members” at all? After all, they earned well. And then the income criteria were disclosed.
At the lower limit, these say that you must have played at least six tournaments in the past twelve months and earned $ 20,000. The upper limit has been set at $ 350,000 in the past twelve months, 1.4 million in the past four years, and a maximum of 3.5 million over the course of the career. A player must be below all three limits to receive money.
With the six tournaments and the $ 20,000, they wanted to justify a certain level, I guess. They wanted to say: if you are unable to earn $ 20,000 from your sport, your level is not high enough to qualify as a professional. OK. But then the payday came. Now the "Full Members" can receive $ 10,400, the "Associate Members" $ 5,600, the rest something around $ 2,600. “Full members” who have earned well should get the most support. And others only get a quarter of it. It just doesn't help anyone. But something else is bothering me.
What?
This maximum limit of $ 350,000 in earnings over the past twelve months. It punishes especially aspiring players who have just played a successful season. A Cathy McNally, Astra Sharma, or Priscilla Hon have not earned $ 700,000 in their careers and won't receive any support because they have earned slightly above the $ 350,000 mark in the past 12 months. But other players who have earned just under 3.5 million career prize money get help. And that's strange. I wrote to the WTA and made them aware of it, but they ignored it quite successfully. They could have simply chosen the career prize money as a criteria, or the average career prize money per year on tour. You could have played with the numbers in such a way that you supported the players who just didn't have this financial cushion. But it almost seems as if the most important concern was to break the $ 10,000 mark.
Why do you think that?
Because it looks better. In the meantime, the final meeting was held. Now they're about to pay. I still asked: Include an exception, for players under 23, for example, to take at least the emerging talents with them. The WTA was not really interested in that. So I want to address this. I don't like how you boast of what you do - and how you neglect the people you should help.
You are primarily criticizing the WTA, but the decision was also made by the players, right?
It was made on the player's board, yes. The numbers were thrown around, but the top 20 players cannot relate to that. They think: Okay, that sounds pretty good. But no one knows who actually gets money and who doesn't. I sent the WTA again a very descriptive PDF for the last meeting and said: Show that in the meeting, maybe the players want to think about it again. But it wasn't released. But that's not new to me, I have been annoyed with the WTA for 15 years. They don't want to show any weakness there and look politically good.
Did the WTA respond to your criticism in any way?
This is where these politically correct answers come. "You can't please everyone." In this case, that was absolute nonsense. If you give $ 10,000 to a 32-year-old with 3.3 million in prize money and huge advertising contracts and nothing to an 18-year-old with $ 483,000, you should recognize that the criteria chosen are not helpful. For a player who was injured for a few years or is just young and just had her kick-off year, just looking at the balance sheet of the past twelve months is not smart in my opinion.
The discussion about aid, including voluntary payments, has made headlines several times in the past week. Also because Dominic Thiem had said that he wanted to decide who to pay for.
Right from the start, I found it very difficult to think that someone would stop playing tennis for financial reasons. It is probably due to the fact that a Novak Djokovic is too far from knowing the situation of these players. The fact is that a player outside the top 300 loses money almost every week. Without sponsors, parents and league games, everyone writes deep red numbers. In Corona times, many of these players are back at home and cannot travel. Financially, they will now have a better record. Therefore, in my opinion, some things have been incorrectly communicated. I think it's right and important that the top players stand up for their colleagues, but I'm more on the side of Dominic Thiem and John Millman: You have to think about who and how you support, you have to question the prize money structure and the tournament calendar. And make sure that there's a tournament landscape when the tour starts again. The payments that are currently made usually reach the wrong people and are not useful.
Are you surprised that the WTA has advanced and did not announce it at the same time as the ATP - as there are talks about a merger.
The WTA has a good PR and marketing department, but the management team next to Steve Simon ... Many of them were chair umpires and supervisors, slipped into the organization early on and established themselves. Many of them are not able to handle criticism, are quickly on the defensive and are afraid to show weakness if they accept a practical improvement suggestion. The biggest problem: They have no clue about their members, do not understand the everyday life of a player or coach, since almost none of them was one. If you don't understand your product and you don't know the situation of the employees, you do a bad job in my opinion. But the WTA made it clever: In 2005, coaches were still allowed at the meetings, and they often asked critical questions. Then they were kicked out and the meeting now are held in small groups, with around 20 players. When a player gets up and says something, she is turned off. And the other 19 are mostly somewhere else with their thoughts anyway. Unfortunately, many players are often very uninterested in what happens there. That works better for the male colleagues of the ATP. The women would still not earn the same prize money at the Grand Slams if the ATP had not pushed that topic forward.
Would a merger between ATP and WTA be an advantage for the players?
Absolutely. The ATP is the organization that has existed for much longer, has much more experience. For example, if you look at the WTA rule book - why not say: We learn from the ATP, from the mistakes that were made and corrected there. No, there is a separate rule book, special regulations everywhere and you make the same mistakes with a five-year delay. You could benefit from each other. But the WTA will be afraid of losing control. And the ATP does better without the WTA anyway.
Do you think that something will happen in terms of the corona payments?
I hope that the WTA will see their mistakes. And that all other possible financial resources will be invested in securing the tournament landscape for players from the 200th place downwards. Hope dies last, as they say.
The interview was conducted by Florian Goosmann.