Tennis is failing to address gambling-fueled abuse seriously

Adam Minter 

Wimbledon’s stars will have to endure hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of threatening social media posts and direct messages when the tennis championship unfolds over the next two weeks. Racism, misogyny and straight up mean-spiritedness will comprise much of the abuse. If past tournaments are any guide, gamblers will volley many of them. According to a new report from the Women’s Tennis Association and the International Tennis Federation, 40% of the angry messages players received during the 2024 season came from disgruntled bettors.

The missives are vile. For example, Katie Boulter, the second ranked British player, recently told the BBC that she’s received messages instructing her to purchase “candles and a coffin” for her family, and hoping that she gets cancer. On a human level, such harassment is horrifying. On a sporting level, it threatens the integrity of competition.

To address the problem, the WTA and ITF are calling for more action against individual gamblers by gaming operators. It’s a good idea, but it’s not enough. If the tennis associations are serious about protecting players, they need to do a better job of policing and reforming the betting companies with whom they have established profitable partnerships.

Tennis has always been popular with bettors due to its year-round schedule, frequent events and long matches. Online betting has made it more so. Instead of simply wagering on outcomes, online options provide gamblers with the ability to make real-time, in-play bets on propositions as varied as who will win a set, which player will break serve next and how many aces a player will make.

Unfortunately, these individual-focused “prop bets” increase the risk of targeted athlete harassment - and not just in tennis. In the US, for example, the National Collegiate Athletic Association has found the link between prop bets and athlete harassment to be so pervasive that it’s called upon states to ban these sort of wagers on college sports entirely.

Until recently, professional tennis has had little incentive to look at the link and determine how to address it. After all, prop bets are extremely profitable for the gambling sector and their partners in the tennis industry. Nobody pretends otherwise. When the ITF announced that sports marketing firm Infront Sports & Media AG will serve as its betting and data stream rights holder starting in 2025, the federation touted that the deal would provide it with “significant financial uplift.”

But in recent years, more and more players are complaining about online harassment from gamblers. As these complaints accumulate, they’ve put tennis and the gambling industry on the defensive.

To get a handle on the scale of the problem, the ITF and WTA worked with data sciences firm Signify. As detailed in their report, Signify analyzed 1.6 million posts and comments sent to players who competed in the associations’ events during the 2024 season. Roughly 8,000 were abusive and threatening. Fifteen were considered so serious that they were passed along to law enforcement, including four posts related to competition at Grand Slams and one regarding the Paris Olympics.

That detected abuse is likely just the dirty tip of a much bigger iceberg that’s hidden away in direct messages or in posts that don’t directly tag players. Either way, the damage is widespread, causing anxiety and depression in athletes and those close to them since family members are often targeted, too. Ultimately, those mental health effects can make their way onto the court.

What makes the situation worse is that most tennis players have little choice but to subject themselves to it. For example, the WTA has long encouraged athletes to post and self-promote - and then reserves for itself the right to use that content for the organization’s own marketing purposes. If players don’t post, they can still find success on the court. But their personal brands, and the associated paid promotional opportunities, won’t be nearly as lucrative.

The good news is that the tennis organizations are quantifying the problem and seeking to insulate players from it. Those who participate in WTA Tour and ITF World Tennis Tour events are now covered by Threat Matrix, a service that filters abuse from social media feeds and direct messages. That’s a good start. But even if such a system could be 100% effective - and it can’t be - it doesn’t actually get at the root causes of the problem.

Addressing those factors isn’t simple. Legal gambling isn’t going away, nor should it. Fans like it, and if they don’t have legal options, some will simply seek out easily accessible alternatives.

But that doesn’t mean that tennis is helpless. Gambling companies need access to the sport’s feeds and data to offer products to bettors. If the tennis industry doesn’t like how those products are impacting its players, it has considerable leverage to demand changes. Among the most significant steps the sport could take is to demand a limit - or even ban - on many of the in-play prop bets that other sports have identified as a source of harassment. Likewise, associations could simply delay the near real-time streams of tennis matches they provide to betting companies so that in-play bets are more difficult.

Either step would hurt online gambling and tennis revenue posing short- to medium-term financial challenges. But refusing to even consider them would mean the sport’s governing bodies aren’t meaningfully considering the well-being of their players - a stance that could damage their long-term interests even more. |  Bloomberg

• Adam Minter is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering the business of sports. He is the author, most recently, of “Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale."