Having arrested the long-term decline in the number of people playing tennis, Scott Lloyd has set himself a new challenge — defeating the British weather.
Lloyd, pictured above, who has been chief executive of the Lawn Tennis Association since 2018, is seeking fresh funding from the government and the private sector to build dozens of covered sports “hubs” across the country.
The hope is that grassroots enthusiasts then play tennis — and its upstart rival padel — all year round, and not just during the summer months around the Wimbledon championships, which start on Monday.
The All England Club, which runs the Grand Slam, is the LTA’s biggest source of funds. It distributes 90 per cent of its profits to the body, which last year reached almost £50mn.
The LTA believes its planned hubs would cost £1.8mn-2mn per site, potentially less than half the amount needed for an indoor tennis centre of a similar size. The aim is to give more people more chances to play by fitting canopies over courts, after a previous investment in courts in parks led to a surge in participation.
“We have 1,600 indoor tennis courts in this country, roughly, whereas France has 9,000. The Czech Republic has 10 times more indoor tennis courts per capita than we do. So we are a long way behind our European counterparts,” said Lloyd, who was previously deputy chair of the David Lloyd health club chain set up by his father.
The initial plans would cost about £80mn, with the LTA seeking some state funding to “underwrite the project” and help attract outside investment. The new centres would also be multi-use, potentially housing small basketball or netball courts, for example, and designed to withstand the British climate.
Tennis, like many other sports, is facing the challenge of an increasingly crowded market for attention, especially among young people. A recent report by Ofcom, the media regulator, showed waning interest in watching live tennis among those aged 18-34 since 2019.
Membership of traditional tennis clubs has also been in decline, although that trend has been reversed in some places by the addition of padel courts. The young racket sport, which mixes elements of tennis and squash, has been growing rapidly in the UK. It now has more than 400,000 regular players, and will soon reach 1,000 courts nationwide, up from 600 at the start of this year.
The LTA, which governs both tennis and padel in the UK, has in the past come under fire for wasting money, changing strategy too often and failing to develop promising young players. Previous attempts to broaden the appeal of tennis have been largely unsuccessful.
A year after taking over, Lloyd launched a five-year plan — dubbed “Tennis Opened Up” — to overhaul the organisation, revitalise British tennis and make it more inclusive.
“The practical reality was that tennis was perceived as a traditional, middle-class sport, difficult to access, difficult to play, expensive. And some of those things were true, but not all”, said Lloyd. “We want as many different people as we can to be interested in tennis.”
To improve access, the LTA spent about £45mn resurfacing more than 3,000 courts across the country, many of them owned by cash-strapped local authorities. Half of that money came from the Department of Culture, Media and Sport.
It also introduced an app to make it easier to book a court, and rolled out a standardised training programme for school-age children — a “national curriculum for tennis”.
The result, according to the LTA’s own figures, has been to reverse the sport’s slide. Last year, 2.6mn adults played monthly, up from 1.4mn in 2019, while more than 2mn people are now registered members of the LTA, up from 500k in 2019.
A separate report last year from the International Tennis Federation, which compared data from the LTA and other national governing bodies, showed that the UK was at the forefront of a global post-pandemic boom in the number of people playing the sport. Worldwide, 106mn people played tennis at least once last year, up from 84.4mn in 2019.
As well as trying to boost the grassroots game, the LTA is responsible for the performance of elite British tennis players. It runs training programmes for top players at the UK’s National Tennis Centre in Roehampton, where the likes of Jack Draper, Katie Boulter and Cam Norrie practice. The centre has one of only three practice courts in the world that is fully equipped with the Hawk-Eye ball tracking system, giving players access to reams of data they can use to improve their game.
Investment has also gone into tournaments hosted in the UK, most of which are lossmaking, so that young players get more opportunities to compete against their international peers.
The LTA has a target of having at least five players in the top 100 ranking for both men and women by 2028. While the UK currently falls short, there was a point last year when 11 British players made it into the rankings, the highest number since 1978.
Draper is now fourth in the world, the top ranked British player since Sir Andy Murray in 2017, and is the fourth seed at Wimbledon. In total, 13 British players will appear in round one, including Boulter, Norrie, former US Open winner Emma Raducanu and teenager Mimi Xu.
Even as the LTA tries to reduce its dependence on Wimbledon, Lloyd hopes Britain’s young stars can provide “inspirational moments” so that more people pick up a racket. “For anyone interested in tennis, you need those moments at the top of the game”, he said.
