The Djokovic approach to economics is fraught with unforced errors

There is already a commercial popularity contest in which the best players win big: sponsorship

Djokovic got his balls caught in the net when he suggested female tennis players should get less prize money than the men (EMPICS)

Novak Djokovic has been talking to Billie Jean King this week. But the Serbian tennis superstar’s real intellectual influence seems to be John Bates Clark.

Clark was not a tennis coach or a former pro, but a 19th century economist who hypothesised that each worker should be paid their “marginal product”, or the additional economic value they (individually) created for their employer.

Djokovic got his balls caught in the net when he suggested female tennis players should get less prize money than the men because women are less of a draw on TV and generate fewer match ticket sales and thus contribute less to the profits of the tournament. But the world number one has since clarified his marks, after talking to Ms King, who almost single-handedly forced competitions to offer equal prize money to men and women players in 1973. Apparently Djokovic wasn’t casting aspersions on female tennis players.

What Djokovic actually wants is a “fairer and better distribution across the board”. So, reading between the tramlines, that presumably means he believes all tennis professionals – both male and female ‑ should get a share of a tournament’s prize money based on their individual popularity.

It’s the kind of argument one would expect to hear from a libertarian think tank, whose experts often take to the airwaves to argue that all of us should get paid by raw financial results and that any quibble with this principle is some species of communism. Those think tanks are usually wrong.

And so too is Djokovic. Not completely wrong mind. He’s correct that a large share of the profits of a tennis tournament should flow to the players. After all, it is the players who the crowds come to see. I used to live in Wimbledon and I never saw many people hanging around the All-England Club outside the tournament fortnight. But as for his proposed distribution of those rewards within the population of players, Djokovic has crashed out in the first round.

There are several problems with the idea. First there is the issue of information. The technology does not exist that enables tournament organisers to determine the precise popularity of each tennis player in real time. This is one of the reasons why John Bates Clark’s hypothesis on the division of economic rewards in the free market is not taken literally by sensible economists; it’s simply impossible to determine the size of an individual worker’s “marginal product” in the way that Clark suggested.

But isn’t tennis different? A tennis tournament isn’t a company. It’s not even a team sport. We know full well who the superstars are don’t we? Only up to a point. Even in tennis there is uncertainty about performance on the day – otherwise there wouldn’t be a meaningful competition. What if a superstar underperforms? Imagine a top seed against a journeyman (Rafael Nadal versus Dustin Brown, ranked 102nd in the world, for instance in Wimbledon last year). The top seed was beaten. The crowd had come to see Nadal. Viewers had switched on to catch him. So should he get more money than Brown, who actually beat him?

Second, there is already a commercial popularity contest in which the most famous players win big: sponsorship. These rewards from sports brands, watch manufacturers, airlines and all the rest dwarf what players can earn on the playing circuit. Maria Sharapova’s estimated fortune from tournament victories is $6.7m. But various sponsorships (before her recent drugs scandal) have brought her around $23m. Djokokovic seems to want to supercharge that existing engine of gross commercial inequality.

Finally, the idea that every player could, or should, get paid a sum that reflects their individual popularity reflects a misunderstanding of what a tennis tournament is – not only in an ethical sense but an economic sense too. Spectators in the stadiums, and even TV spectators, want a festival of tennis. Of course they want to see the big stars, but it’s not only about the stars. A crude attempt at payment by popularity would conflict with this sense of the tournament as a collective experience and endeavour in which everyone – including the female players and the low-ranked – plays their part and makes a contribution.

That’s why the views of Djokovic on female players drew such a strong response. All those arguments about the number of sets they play, or the average quality of the female competition, or the reality behind the relative TV popularity numbers are really diversions. The suggestion of unequal pay for winners conflicted with what many people’s conception of what the tournament was about. And also disrespected the history of the struggles of the likes of Billie Jean King.

The general public view of tennis tournaments is not that they are merely money making ventures. If that was what got them excited they would go and cheer outside the offices of Goldman Sachs. But in an era of massive money from pay-per-view sports channels there is a dangerous tendency to reason along Djokovic lines. In the Spanish top football division the division of TV money is based on popularity of the clubs – and the result is monstrous inequality with hundreds of millions of euros flowing to Real Madrid and Barcelona each season while the smaller clubs are perpetually on the cusp of bankruptcy. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer – and the result is a grotesque competitive imbalance.

One area where the terribly flawed Premier League deserves credit is in resisting this kind of division of the TV spoils. All Premier League clubs get an equal share of the fast growing pot of TV money.

Money is, inevitably, a part of hyper-popular sports such as tennis and football. But if money is allowed to eclipse the sport and corrupt the sense of fair competition and collective endeavour then the light will, ultimately, go out on the source of the money too.