The organizers for the Australian Open announced recently that there will be a substantial increase in the prize money of the tournament which will be held next month.
Players who will compete in the Australian Open held at Melbourne will be taking home a combined prize sum of 71 million Australian dollars with the champions of singles having a guaranteed prize of 4.12 million dollars.
The biggest increase in the prize sum comes in the early rounds as per the previous tradition of the Australian Open. Those that will lose the first qualifying round and are outside the rank of top 100 will get a sum of 20000 dollars which is a 30 percent increase since last year’s Australian Open.
The main draw’s first-round losers will be taking home a prize of 90000 dollars while the second round will receive a guaranteed sum of 128000 dollars.
This news of increase prize sum came after a group of players including Novak Djokovic, the president of the ATP layer Council pushed a statement that the slams should give a larger percentage of their revenues to competing players.
Craig Tiley, the director of the Australian Open said, “We have long been committed to improving the pay and conditions for a deeper pool of international tennis players. In fact, since AO 2007, prize money has more than tripled from 20m dollars to the 71m dollars for 2020 we are announcing today.”
“This year, as we do every year, we worked with the tours to establish the weighting for prize money increases round by round, and we pushed to reward players competing early in the tournament in both singles and doubles. We strongly believe in growing prize money at all levels of the game and we will continue to work with the playing group to create viable career paths in the sport and enable more players to make more money.”
The Australian Open 2020 will start on the 20th of January.
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