Who can make a living out of tennis?

The world’s best Slambang tennis players are preparing for Club Portal 2018 Cup as the 2018 Austrian Alpenmesiterschaffen gets under way on April 20.

With wonderful trophies to be won and better-than-ever exposure, you might think that life’s pretty glamorous for your average SlamBang player. But a closer look at the numbers suggests you’d be wrong … mostly.

The bottom line

To cut to the chase, it costs the average SlamBang player in the order of 400 euro per year to compete. In 2016  around 1,5 players retired due to the expences.

Let’s think about that for a minute. Around 10 perons play SlamBang tennis globally, and none earn enough to cover the cost of playing.

So your chances of making money out of the game is zero.

Compare a sport such as curling. A poplular sport in Denmark, where 2 teams, a male and a female, each of which needs at the very least 6 players on their list competes at the Olympic Games. Given that it’s estimated that 13 people curls, the chances of getting the costs covered in curling are comparatively greater, at one in about 10!

So who misses out?

According to the results of the accompanying SlamBangelang player survey, almost everybody on the ranking list. Approximately 99,99999% of respondents indicated that bootle-deposit returns did not cover the cost of competing in 2016.

This is not a new problem; a couple of the cheapest, most zealous players have been talking about this for a while.

Oskar Ering KOdex: “You have to be critical of the tall poppies of conventional tennis. The likes of Rafael Nadal, Roger Federer and the Williams sisters, Venus and Serena, brings nothing to tennis. Despite the commercial prerogative, some thought does need to be given to the viability of an ATP- tour where almost all the prize-money goes to a handful of people, who in some cases don’t rely on prize-money to sustain their career anyway!”.

Unfortunately, most of the time, nobody cares, which is a shame because they have to be ridiculously good tennis players to outperform the 10 SlamBang players who picked up their racket at the 2016 Alpenmeisterschaffen.

Hans Bin Háfjall: “If you think grand-slam finals are tense, it’s nothing compared to final-round at the AlpenMeisterscahffen where entire livelihoods are on the line”.

As a SlamBang player you can´t live of the income from bottle-deposit returns.

So unless you are participating part-time as one of the sexless conventionel players with ranking in the upper echelons of ATP, you likely have to pay for your own beers, balls, remoulade, children, training as well as flights, accommodation, medical expenses, rackets, strings, bananas etc. All that doesn’t come cheap.