Aryna Sabalenka and Jessica Pegula praised the U.S. Open's record $108 million prize purse and the creation of a new Grand Slam player advisory council Friday, telling reporters the developments marked progress after a year of players pushing tournaments for a larger share of revenue. [1] "We're super happy... that we're finally getting to the point where we wanted to be at the very beginning," Sabalenka said. [1] Newly appointed USTA chief executive Craig Tiley told reporters Saturday the increase was designed to give players their "fair share," adding "I have always believed the players should be paid well." [2]

The purse is genuinely larger than last year's: $108 million total, a 20 percent increase over the 2025 record of $90 million, with singles champions each set to receive $5.5 million, a 10 percent bump and the largest single payout in Grand Slam history, and first-round losers earning $140,000, a 27 percent increase the USTA calls a Grand Slam record in its own right. [2][3] None of those figures, though, answer the question players spent the summer publicly raising: what share of the tournament's total revenue actually goes to the people playing in it.

That question has a specific, disclosed answer, and Reuters' own reporting supplies it without connecting it back to the purse announcement. Sabalenka and men's world No. 1 Jannik Sinner led a protest at the French Open and Wimbledon this year, limiting pre-tournament media availability to 15 minutes — a length chosen, Reuters reported, to symbolize "the roughly 15 percent of tournament revenue that the tournaments allocated to player prize money." [1] Tiley's Saturday comments addressed the dollar figure and the "fair share" framing directly, but neither he nor the tournament has disclosed a change to that underlying percentage alongside this year's purse increase. A larger purse funded by a larger overall revenue base, at an unchanged share, produces exactly the headline the U.S. Open got Friday — a record dollar figure — without requiring the tournament to concede anything about how the pie itself gets split.

The revenue base is not standing still. Sports Business Journal reported this week that U.S. Open grounds-pass face value rose from $60 to $65 this year, an 8.3 percent increase more than double the national inflation rate, while resale prices for those same passes have tracked above $300 on the secondary market — more than four times face value — a gap the outlet attributed partly to the USTA's decision to let Ticketmaster's resale exchange operate without the price caps other Grand Slams impose. [4] The tournament's $23 Honey Deuce cocktail, which sold more than 700,000 units last year generating roughly $17 million, held its price this year, but even that "flat" number reflects a longer climb of roughly 3.4 percent annually since 2007, faster than average inflation over the same span. [4] None of that additional revenue is reflected in a public accounting of whether the 15 percent prize-money allocation moved.

Sabalenka and Pegula's own comments leave room for exactly this reading. Pegula, who has taken a leadership role in player-tour negotiations, called the new advisory council meaningful progress but was careful to caveat that "there is still of course more work to do," adding that the council's actual authority — its membership, structure and enforcement power — "would be closely watched." [1] That hedge is the tell missing from most coverage of Friday's announcement: the players celebrating the purse increase are simultaneously withholding judgment on whether the structural mechanism behind it, the revenue-share percentage the summer's protests were actually about, has moved at all.

-- AMARA OKONKWO, Lagos