What old tennis players teach us (2017)

The process where resources accrue to those with more resources is called the Matthew Effect. It explains, amongst other things, why the degree distribution of social networks follows a power law.

There's a nice experimental test of this where showing the number of previous downloads a song has makes it more likely to be downloaded (but not to the extent that it entirely overrides the quality of the song. <https://www.princeton.edu/~mjs3/salganik_dodds_watts06_full....>

An interesting article to revisit 8+ years later.

Now, in 2026, men's tennis is dominated by Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz, both under 25 years of age

Also, I don't think women's tennis has shown the same cartel effect in the top 5 or top 10 as men's tennis has recently. It seems like there's much more churn there, and many more young players, though I haven't measured this and maybe it's just a feeling.

A lot of Gregory Bateson’s work warned that if the balancing loops in a system are too weak, the system stops being an ecosystem and starts being an arms race. The interesting bit here isn’t that elite tennis players (or guilds, or platforms) dominate but that dominance reprices the entry conditions and eventually kills the replenishment layer that made the whole thing dynamic. These axioms read like something straight out of a Batesonian case study in runaway.

Fascinating article. I wonder how the next decade will compare to when the Big 4 played. Tennis is now doing a three year trial of guaranteed baseline earnings but only for the top 250 (https://www.atptour.com/en/news/baseline-december-2024).

Tennis players portion of total revenue is the lowest among major sports- 17.5% (https://tennishead.net/tennis-players-receive-smallest-reven...)

I wish there was more funding and support for players below the top 250 and not just in countries with strong central tennis academies.

Is the same mechanism at play with football ? Say Real Madrid gets so much money from champions league that they can buy all the best players and then keep winning ? And then only a small clique of elite clubs end up winning all the time?

( disclaimer : I know nothing about football !)

"There are thresholds in systemic complexity that serve the system but do not serve the components of the system well."

Isn't that like Rule #1 from Systemantics, that systems grow to serve their perpetuation, not the features they were originally designed to supply?

Also, pournelle's iron law of bureaucracy