EXCLUSIVE: Q&A With PTPA CEO Ahmad Nassar On Ultimatums, Exhibitions And Anti-Doping - UBITENNIS

EXCLUSIVE: Q&A With PTPA CEO Ahmad Nassar On Ultimatums, Exhibitions And Anti-Doping

By Adam Addicott
15 Min Read
Image via https://www.ptpaplayers.com

Two years have passed since Ahmad Nassar was appointed Executive Director of the Professional Tennis Players Association (PTPA).

American-based Nassar is highly experienced when it comes to player unions. In the past, he has served as president of the National Football League (NFL) Players Incorporated and helped grow the NFL Players Association’s marketing and licensing business. He was also the founding CEO of OneTeam Partners which represents the commercial interests of women’s and men’s athletes across multiple sports.

However, the PTPA has been a brand new challenge. Co-founded by Novak Djokovic and Vasek Pospisil in 2019, the organization campaigns for players to have a greater say in the decision-making process of the sport. They have faced accusations of trying to divide the sport and have a fairly complex relationship with the sport’s seven governing bodies. So much so that earlier this month they threatened to launch legal action if progress isn’t made to address concerns they raised by the conclusion of next year’s Australian Open.

There are plenty of issues in tennis such as the current Tour calendar, prize money and ensuring the anti-doping protocols are fair to everybody. But how influential are the PTPA on these subjects and when will they make significant progress on such matters?

Shortly after returning to America from London, Nassar spoke at length with Ubitennis about a variety of issues as he outlined why his organization was only getting started.

Ubitennis: You joined the PTPA in August 2022. How would you describe your work so far?

NASSAR: We have focused on building a foundation. That’s something that other groups of athletes and other professional players associations have had decades to do, and we haven’t had that in tennis. When I say the foundation, it means articulating what we stand for and what we’re trying to do.

When I took over, there were all these rumors. The players want to start a competitive Tour like golf. They’re breaking away from the ATP….etc.

We spent a lot of time articulating through our player principles, forming our executive committee, building out our initial benefits and services for the players, really building, providing value to the players and educating everybody, including the players and their coaches and their agents on what a player’s association is.

And then being formally admitted to the World Players Association was a huge milestone. They only admit one player’s association for every group of athletes.

I use the word foundation because people don’t see those things. Sometimes I think players see that. But the public and the media will say Grand Slams still aren’t paying the players what they should. The ATP and WTA are still using player councils and claiming that the players are represented.

Now that we’ve built that foundation it won’t be a sudden thing, it’ll be gradual, but you’ll start to see more of that structure that’s above ground.

Some of the things we’re doing now with our legal review, our structural review, our negotiations with the Grand Slams and other entities, I think that’s that people will see that more and say, oh, PTPA is finally doing something, but it’s all a process and it’s all exactly what we laid out when I joined.

UBITENNIS: How long does it take to become a fully established association?

NASSAR: It’s not immediate. The NFLPA is 60, 70  years old. The NFL and the MLBPA are of a similar age.

I’m quite certain it’ll take less than that but it’s always a process.

Those players associations that I cited have been around for decades, they would tell you and their members their work is not done.

So you’re never really done.

It’s a reflection of the athletes we represent. Novak Djokovic is not done winning Grand Slams. He wants to win another one. And that’s the inspiration for us.

UBITENNIS: When will there be material progress on big issues?

NASSAR: That is something that I would say is a year or two off because it’s just very clear that the way tennis works, or doesn’t work right now, is not sustainable.

We’ve already seen the slams look at changing things.

We know that ATP and the WTA are looking at changing things by merging their commercial operations.

I think tennis will look different two or three years from now. We have to be laser-focused on making sure that no matter what, it ends up looking like it does serve the interests of the players.

And I would argue the fans and commercial partners and broadcast partners alike.

The schedule has to make more sense. Right now that schedule makes no sense. And it is a grind for the players. It’s a grind for fans trying to follow where their favorite player is playing each week. And so fixing that calendar, fixing issues like late night matches and different balls on different playing surfaces are on the same playing surfaces.

Fixing issues, around compensation? Yes. But also around the governance of the sport.

We have a sport where the shot clock adjustment was foisted on the players on the ATP Tour in the middle of the season with little to no input or notice. And it generated a lot of pushback from the players.

These people are working on a tennis court here, and fans are paying money to watch them play world-class tennis.

And the last thing anybody wants to do is sit there and have a point taken away or warnings given because of the clock. 

It’s just yet another indication that the players are not properly represented at a fundamental level.

UBITENNIS: Do you think the ATP/WTA players’ council can properly represent their peers if they are part of the governing bodies?

NASSAR: I think player councils are a good thing. We abbreviate it to player councils, the real name in the bylaws of those organizations is player advisory councils. They are illusions of having control. You don’t have control when you’re an advisor.

I’ve told (Victoria) Azarenka and players who’ve served (on the Players’ councils) for a long time, that I respect the hell out of what they do is incredible.

So many of them take it so seriously and they don’t get paid a nickel for doing it.

And it takes time out of their day and their practice schedule, but it is just fundamentally unfair.

These players bear zero fault. They have my enduring admiration.

Half of my executive committee for the PTPA has served on the WTA and the ATP player councils for many, many years. So these guys know exactly the limitations of being an advisory body. You don’t have any say. And it’s frustrating.

I think they are good things, but they are not good when they are presented as adequate and as the sole representation of the players.

Also, what about the Grand Slams? The player councils don’t represent the players in front of the Grand Slams, and everybody acknowledges that the Grand Slams are two-thirds, three-quarters of the revenue and the prize money.

Even if we’re assuming that what we’re told is true about the player advisory councils, which again, I don’t think is correct. It’s still missing two-thirds, three-quarters of the sport. That’s not a good structure, is it?

UBITENNIS: Earlier this month you published a press release about your proactive strategy and issued an ultimatum to the governing bodies to get back to you by the end of the  Australian Open. Otherwise, you will pursue legal action. Why are you giving this ultimatum now?

NASSAR: At this year’s Australian Open, the slams met with us, met with players and kind of articulated the high-level vision for what they call the premium Tour.

But really, it’s just a fundamental reshaping of the top level of professional tennis on the men’s side and the women’s side.

The Australian Open 2025 will be a full year since that time.

We need action. I think the Slams were serious about bringing real change and the Tours were serious about blocking that real change because of a lot of reasons.

They want to protect their tournaments. They want to protect their jobs. They want to protect. Everything. I’m not blaming anybody here.

But that’s the one thing we cannot have is inaction. And so what we really need is a forcing function to say, guys, we have to figure this out.

And a little bit of throwing down a gauntlet and saying, look effectively we can do this the easy way or we can do this the hard way. Right. The easy way is that we negotiate in good faith, which we’ve done now for over two years.

What we need is real change on a real timeline. Last year, the WTA took outside money from private equity, and they said, we’ll have equal prize money. By when? 2033.

How many of these players will be playing in ten years? My point is we can’t have this talk that is always in the future, always promising and nothing materializing.

This isn’t about filing lawsuits and winning claims.

NASSAR: The way I say we built the foundation over the last couple of years, part of that was financial. 

It does cost money to have world-class lawyers helping world-class athletes. But part of this is the mission, right?

I think that we have the ability, the resources and the network. Not just financial, but expertise, people who are also mission-driven, people who’ve had success in other sports, who can bring that same success to us in tennis.

And that’s what we’re going to build around. At the end of the day, it’s for the players.

UBITENNIS: One of the big debates is the Tour calendar with players saying it is too long. At the same time, some of these players are being criticized for complaining when playing in exhibition events. What is your view on this topic?

NASSAR: That’s the ultimate misdirection in my view, because the reason players play exhibitions has nothing to do with the calendar. It has everything to do with the fact that they aren’t compensated properly.

And because they aren’t compensated properly, how come nobody’s asking the right question?  Which is how do these exhibitions exist? They’re not charities.  How do they exist and pay the players this much money?

The reality is the players have that much value. That’s why. They sell tickets and people show up, and people care about seeing the players who play in the exhibition, which reinforces a fact we’ve (the PTPA) been saying for years now, which is that the players are vastly under-compensated in the current Tour slam structure.

So what people do is they use the misdirection to say, oh, see,  they complain about the calendar, but they’re playing exhibitions well, they’re playing exhibitions to solve a different problem, and they’re not happy about playing exhibitions.

Anybody who’s played real tennis knows you don’t go at full speed in an exhibition.

You can still put on a tremendous show for the people who pay tickets,  pay for tickets for an exhibition and entertain the crowd.

But let’s not be fooled at all into thinking that it’s like playing the US Open. It’s not.

UBITENNIS: Yes but when you look at Saudi Arabia, they paid $6 million to the King Six Slam winner. Do you not think some exhibitions are paying too much money that can be invested better elsewhere in the sport?

NASSAR: That’s a question for the people who put on those events. I think they could advocate, they listened, and they spent a lot of money on soccer. They spent a lot of money on golf.

They see the power of sports globally. And a $6 million exhibition is a drop in the bucket compared to what they paid for golf and what they paid for soccer.

I don’t think that’s the right place to start by saying, well, why is all that money going there?

UBITENNIS: Finally, the topic of anti-doping in tennis. Can the International Tennis Integrity Agency (ITIA) be reformed or does there need to be a brand-new anti-doping organization?

NASSAR: I think it can be. It is a fairly new creation because the ITF had to be reformed.

There was a massive scandal, five, or ten years ago that led to the creation of the ITIA.

They didn’t go far enough. They just moved half the people who were doing anti-doping and integrity issues at the ITF over to the ITIA, and they slapped some new letters on it.

They put the funding from the slams and the Tours and the ITF into it. They hired a layer of management of people from other sports. Karen Moorhouse is a professional who I’m sure is good at what she does. Theproblem is they did not go far enough.

I’m not interested in yet another set of letters investigating potential doping or integrity issues.

I’m interested in a truly independent organization, that has proper funding, that allows players to have due process, all the things that should have already existed and that isn’t interested in footfaulting players but is interested in policing the sport in a way that makes it fair for everybody.

Nobody has more of an interest in a fair sport than the players who play, right?

Because any clean player wants to play and know and have confidence that the person on the other side of the net is also clean.

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