New courts please! Where are all the promised indoor tennis facilities?

Germany, with a population of 83m, has 5,424 indoor courts (1 indoor tennis court for every 15,300 people). France, with a population of 65m, has 9,741 indoor courts (1 indoor tennis court for every 6,500 people). The UK, with a population of 67m, has just 2,000 indoor courts (1 indoor tennis court for every 33,500 people).

In a country with a cold, wet climate like the UK but with such a strong heritage in the sport, it would make sense to continually invest in indoor tennis facilities to help match the aspirations of the players.

5 years ago the Lawn Tennis Association committed to building hundreds of new indoor tennis courts. Scott Lloyd, LTA Chief Executive, said in June 2019 : “More indoor facilities across England, Scotland and Wales are absolutely crucial to our ambition to open up tennis to many more people. When I joined the LTA last year I was determined to make facility investment a priority and use my experience in this area to implement this more targeted approach.”

The LTA said in a statement at the time that “Going forward, the LTA will be working with local authorities and seeking operational partners to help deliver large scale, participation changing, sustainable, community-focused indoor tennis venues. In another marked change of approach, the LTA will now operate centralised planning to provide a national planning framework to bring consistency, coordination and efficiency to planning applications.”

In their published accounts at the beginning of 2023, the latest accounts available, the LTA had £82m of current assets, which in essence is cash at hand, and is to receive a record £45m from Wimbledon as part of their profit sharing arrangement in 2024. This is the biggest ever payment from Wimbledon to the LTA and highlights the ever growing financial strength of the two week grass court Slam.

So with this financial clout and promises of huge investment, how many new indoor tennis courts have been built in the UK since the announcement 5 years ago? How many of the 72 identified areas in the UK that met the ‘demand threshold for indoor tennis courts’ have received LTA funding to help construct new facilities?

Racket Business couldn’t find records of any new indoor tennis courts being constructed in England in the past 5 years apart from the new indoor tennis centre at Wimbledon itself, which was privately funded and is only for the use of the AELTC’s 400 members and guests. We have asked the LTA to comment but so far no reply has been received.

Which begs us to ask the question as to whether the LTA are hoarding their cash because they know that if their current deal with Wimbledon, which expires in around 15 years time, is not renewed then they will have to drastically restructure their organisation. They announced an operating loss of £9m in those same 2022/23 accounts.

If we do get a reply from the LTA (and we’ve asked) we suspect they’ll say that in their announcement of 2019 they committed to help fund new indoor courts and not to actually build them. Which leads Racket Business to assume that, as not a single indoor court has been funded since then, there must be something seriously wrong with the funding application process.

If any of our readers have more information about this situation then please let us know and we’ll update this article with any further news from the LTA when it comes.

UPDATE (23rd May)

The LTA have now published their report for their 2023 finances and included in that report (which can be read in full here) is a paragraph on the topic of investment in courts…

“Since 2019, £8.9m has been awarded across 87 projects to help build or improve indoor tennis courts, padel courts, floodlights and outdoor courts.”

Interesting to note they have aded the word ‘padel’ into this information as we suspect that the majority of investment in the past 2 years has been into padel courts, as these are being built very fast in the UK. The LTA still won’t confirm that they’ve invested any funds at all into building new indoor courts