Wimbledon chairman Philip Brook has defended a further increase in tournament prize money that will now see the singles winners win £1.88million this year.
The 2015 edition of the tournament is less than two months away and Brook has confirmed that the prize money has once again increased as the tournament organisers look to reward the world’s best players.
Prize money for Wimbledon has now gone up for the last four years and during that time the money has jumped from £14.6m in 2011 to £26.75m in 2015.
The news will come as a boost to those competing for the title, with Novak Djokovic the current favourite to win at SW19, while the likes of Andy Murray, Roger Federer and Grigor Dimitrov are also well fancied, with Rafael Nadal is still struggling to find his best form ahead of the grass court season.
Speaking about the increase in prize money, Brook insists the players deserve the increase.
He said: “Without the world’s best tennis players, we wouldn’t have the world’s best tennis tournament. And we recognise the players are an essential ingredient of our championships.
“The level of prize money is affordable to this championship, so we feel it’s important that we should reflect that in what we pay the players.
“I think you’ve seen now that some other tournaments are reacting to what we did two years ago, so there are some big increases in other grand slams and other masters events in response to what we did two years ago.”
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