Mention the word ‘Wimbledon’ to anyone and a few things instantly pop to mind. History, tradition, all-white kits, lush lawns, status and so on.
Wimbledon is undoubtedly the most unique tennis tournament – if not sports event – in the world and it takes a monumental effort and planning to deliver that kind of experience to both visitors and the rest of the globe.
But while organisers strive to take the tournament from strength to strength and have been spending millions in refurbishments, expansions and considerable prize money increases for the players, it must be equally important for them to make money.
Last year, the Championships recorded a surplus of £32 million (Dh182m) and it is these funds that are helping sustain their stature.
In this day and age where everything you can think of is branded and sponsors fight over ways to maximise their exposure at sports events, the sight of a bannerless Wimbledon Centre Court always raises many eyebrows.
There is minimal branding around the grounds as well, outside Centre Court, yet many global brands are committed to sponsor the tournament.
How do the All England Club pull it off?
“We don’t have sponsors. We have what we call official supplier partners,” Mick Desmond, the commercial and media director at The All England Lawn Tennis Club (Championships) Limited told Sport360.
“If you look out on court, you’ll see the ball boys and ball girls and umpires dressed in Ralph Lauren. Our timepieces are Rolex, IBM are providing all the data, the balls are Slazenger, the water on the court is Evian.
“Whilst our partners don’t have banners everywhere on court, we present their product as you’d expect to see it at Wimbledon.
“We deliberately don’t want to have a long tail of partners, it’s quite an exclusive group that we want to work with. So unlike a lot of other sporting events we have 13 partners. If you look at the other grand slams, there are a lot more than that. A group of partners somewhere between 10 and 15 is optimum for us.”
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Some of those partnerships have been going on for decades. Slazenger have been with Wimbledon for a staggering 110 years, Robinsons barley water for 80 years, Rolex for 25 and IBM for 30.
“All the research that they do shows that the consumer knows who our partners are and the consumer gets what they do with us,” explained Desmond.
“Obviously they have minimal presence on the grounds, but what they do is they celebrate our brand on a global basis. So Rolex will have TV commercials, they’ll be in magazines, they’ll be on posters. Jaguar launched TV commercials celebrating Wimbledon.”
Sponsors, or like they prefer to call them, supplier partners, are not the largest revenue stream for the Championships.
Selling their broadcasting rights brings in the most money and it is the area of biggest growth for them in recent years.
Over the last five years, the number of countries Wimbledon broadcasts to has gone up from 185 to 200 countries and that figure will continue to rise. They’ve also increased the number of televised courts to 15, which means fans can get to watch many of the players who don’t usually get the show court treatment.
“Whether it’s through traditional broadcasting, video on demand or IPTV, that’s our growth and that has been growing dramatically over the last 10 years,” said Desmond of their broadcasting reach.
“We like, wherever possible, to have arrangements of five years. Just in the last 12 months we’ve signed a five-year agreement with Star India, Fox and Fox Sports in Asia, Channel 7 and Fox in Australia, NHK in Japan, GloboSat in Brazil and we are in the middle of a tender process for the Middle Eastern rights between Abu Dhabi Media and beIN Sport, that will be settled in the middle of this week.
“What we want from our partners is not just the financial return, we want the coverage, the reach, live, multi-court selection being available. It’s also about how they promote us, how they market us, and how they tell the narrative.
“The biggest revenue stream is broadcast. The second biggest revenue stream would be our debenture programme and our supplier partners. So those three are by far the biggest part of our income.”
Wimbledon’s debenture programme brings in huge sums of money. Debenture tickets are sold over a five-year cycle with the most recent 2016-2020 series of Centre Court Debentures raising £105 million.
These funds are mostly used to cover capital expenditures. Post World War II, it was these funds that helped repair the premises, and now the money goes to club renovations.
A Wimbledon debenture that entitles a person to 1 Centre Court ticket on each day from 2016-2020 cost $78,735. Works out to $1,125 a day.
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“There are 2,500 seats in Centre Court and 1,000 seats in Court 1 (for debentures) and effectively we sell a pair of tickets in debentures,” said Desmond.
“Debentures is a ballot, so people can go into the ballot to say they want to buy it. There is a prospectus that is sent out, and the cost of the debentures is in the public domain. We effectively sold the Centre Court Debentures six months ago for a five-year period for £100,000 for a pair of tickets.
“Those debenture tickets are a tradable commodity, so somebody can either buy the full debenture out, so it’s traded on the stock market or is traded in the market. So somebody could buy the debenture programme out for the next four years and pay that holder a sum of money, or the holder can sell the tickets because they’re tradable.
“Whereas if you buy tickets in the normal ticket ballot, if you bought them then you have to use them. If you don’t use them then they are null and void.
“We try to be egalitarian. If you add up how many seats are available for debenture holders, for corporate hospitality and our members, it’s about 25 per cent of the tickets at Wimbledon. So 75 per cent are available to the general fans in the ballot.”
In terms of costs, the investment they put in the site along with the prize money, are the biggest two expenses for the tournament.
Prize money has seen a steep hike over the past few years and a singles champion today wins £1.88million compared to £1m just five years ago and £477,500 ten years ago.
“We want to value the players and the competitive nature of tennis in general but also looking at other sports and what other senior sports stars are getting paid in terms of prize money,” said Desmond.
“And I think also to value the fact that there is a main draw here and whilst we all look at the success of people like Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer and Andy Murray and Novak Djokovic, we have to also realise that there are people at the other end of the draw who need to make a living from this, otherwise the draw won’t remain competitive.”
So far, the Championships have been clearly profitable but there is a constant struggle to maintain tradition as a brand while keeping up with the modern times.
“I think the challenge is how we keep that balance between tradition whilst at the same time having innovation. But I guess the biggest challenge for us is complacency. The attention to detail we have, and the ambition to keep raising the bar every year is something that Wimbledon has always put in the forefront.”
