Wimbledon Championships

• 1. Introduction

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  In the summer of 1877, twenty-two men paid a guinea each to play tennis on a patch of meadowland in south London. The rain came, as it always does, and what was supposed to finish in five days stretched to nine. When it was finally over, a rackets player named Spencer Gore had beaten William Marshall 6-1, 6-2, 6-4 in forty-eight minutes, collected a silver cup worth twenty-five guineas, and walked away from a tournament that almost nobody outside the grounds had noticed.

  Nearly a hundred and fifty years later, that same tournament draws crowds from across the planet, fills broadcast schedules on six continents, and carries a prize fund in the tens of millions of pounds. It is the only tennis major still played on grass. It is the only one with a curfew. It still serves strawberries and cream. And it still calls the men's event the Gentlemen's Singles.

  How does a private club's sporting experiment become the most storied event in a global sport? What traditions survived, which ones cracked under pressure, and which ones were preserved precisely because they were impractical? The story of Wimbledon is also a story about Britain itself, about who gets in, who gets to watch, and what a country chooses to perform for the world.

• 2. The Club and Its Origins

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  The All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club was founded on the 23rd of July 1868, originally as a croquet club. Its first home was a patch of ground off Worple Road in Wimbledon. Lawn tennis arrived in 1876, added almost as an afterthought after Major Walter Clopton Wingfield had devised the game as an outdoor version of real tennis, originally naming it Sphairistike.

  Within a year, the word "Croquet" had been shuffled in the club's name to make room for lawn tennis, and the first championship was announced. The rules were freshly written, replacing a code previously administered by the Marylebone Cricket Club. The key elements of today's game were already present; the main differences involved details like net height and the distance of the service line.

  For the first forty-five years, the reigning champion only needed to show up for the final, waiting in comfort while challengers battled through the draw. This gave holders an extraordinary structural advantage and produced a procession of back-to-back titles. The practice ended in 1922, the same year the club moved to its current home off Church Road. That relocation cost approximately £140,000 at the time and was considered a financial gamble by those who knew the club's accounts. The old Worple Road ground eventually became a school playing field.

  By 1882, croquet had effectively disappeared from club life, and the word was stripped from the name. It was quietly restored in 1899 for sentimental reasons. Ladies' Singles was added in 1884. Ladies' doubles and mixed doubles followed in 1913. The first black competitor, Bertrand Milbourne Clark from Jamaica, played in 1924.

• 3. Grass, Balls, and Tradition

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  Since 1902, every ball struck at Wimbledon has been manufactured by Slazenger. That relationship is the longest-running sponsorship in the history of sport. Before 2001, the courts were sown with a blend of 70% ryegrass and 30% Creeping Red Fescue; the club switched to 100% perennial ryegrass to better withstand the wear of the modern game.

  The colour of the ball itself changed as recently as 1986, when the traditional white was replaced by yellow to improve visibility on colour television. The decision was practical and belated: the UK had been broadcasting in colour since 1967, the year Wimbledon itself featured in the country's first official colour television transmission, a four-hour live broadcast on BBC Two.

  The dress code that now defines the tournament's look was not formalised until 1963. Before that, white clothing was a convention rather than a rule. The first formal code required essentially all-white attire, a standard that has been enforced with increasing precision. In 1982, Martina Navratilova's wearing of branding for "Kim" cigarettes caused controversy. In 2023, the rules were updated to allow female players to wear non-white undershorts, provided they were no longer than the skirt or shorts worn over them.

  The sponsorship arrangement with Robinsons fruit squash ran from 1935 until 2021, one of the longest commercial relationships in sport. Emirates took over as a sponsor in 2024, joining the other three Grand Slam events. Unlike many of its rivals, Wimbledon keeps advertising minimal and low-key, a deliberate choice that preserves the visual character of the grounds.

• 4. The Grounds Transformed

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  Centre Court's name dates to the original Worple Road layout, where the principal court sat in the middle with others arranged around it. When the club moved in 1922, the name travelled with it even though the court was no longer central. It took until 1980, when four new courts were commissioned on the north side, for the description to become accurate again.

  For decades, rain was Wimbledon's most reliable adversary. The retractable roof installed before the 2009 championships changed that. Designed to open or close in twenty minutes, it was tested at an event called A Centre Court Celebration on the 17th of May 2009, featuring exhibition matches involving Andre Agassi, Steffi Graf, Kim Clijsters, and Tim Henman. The first championship match completed under the closed roof was between Dinara Safina and Amelie Mauresmo. The first match played entirely under the roof featured Andy Murray and Stanislas Wawrinka, on the 29th of June 2009.

  Centre Court holds 14,979 spectators. The Royal Box sits at its south end. The old No. 2 Court, demolished and replaced, had earned the nickname the Graveyard of Champions after eliminating a procession of highly seeded players in early rounds: Ilie Nastase, John McEnroe, Boris Becker, Andre Agassi, Pete Sampras, Martina Hingis, Venus Williams, Serena Williams, and Maria Sharapova all fell there.

  A long-term development plan unveiled in 1993 reshaped the grounds in successive stages running through 2011. A master plan announced in April 2013 outlined further improvements over the following decade, including acquiring the adjacent Wimbledon Park Golf Club for £65 million to bring qualifying matches on site. A retractable roof on No. 1 Court, which holds 12,345 people, was completed in time for the 2019 championships.

• 5. Rules, Seedings, and Upsets

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  René Lacoste and Helen Wills were the first players to be seeded number one at Wimbledon, under a system introduced during the 1924 championships. That first system was rudimentary, allowing countries to nominate four players placed in different quarters of the draw. It was replaced by merit-based seeding in 1927.

  Only two unseeded men have ever won the Gentlemen's Singles. Boris Becker was ranked 20th and there were only 16 seeds when he won in 1985. Goran Ivanisevic was ranked 125th when he won in 2001 as a wildcard entrant, though he had previously reached the final three times and had once been ranked as high as number 2 in the world; a persistent shoulder injury over three years had reduced his ranking before it cleared. In 2023, Marketa Vondrousova became the first unseeded player to win the Ladies' Singles, entering ranked 42nd in the world.

  The furthest any qualifier has progressed into the main draw is the semi-final. John McEnroe achieved that in 1977, Vladimir Voltchkov in 2000, and Alexandra Stevenson in 1999. The 2005 Gentlemen's Doubles was won by a pair who were not only unseeded but qualifiers, the first time that had ever happened.

  The final-set tiebreak rule was announced on the 19th of October 2018: if the score reached 12-12 in the final set of any match, a tiebreak would be played. Prior to that change, players could theoretically win a final set by virtually any margin, however many games it took. In 2019, quad wheelchair competition became a permanent event. Beginning in 2023, the Gentlemen's Doubles format shifted from best-of-five sets to best-of-three, following complaints from participants.

• 6. People Inside the Ropes

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  Ball boys and girls, known as BBGs, operate under an instruction that a good BBG should not be seen. They are meant to blend into the background. From the 1920s onward they were sourced from the Shaftesbury Children's Home; from 1947 they came from Goldings, the only Barnardos school to supply them. Since 1969 they have been drawn from local schools, and since 2008 from schools across the London boroughs of Merton, Sutton, Kingston, and Wandsworth, as well as from Surrey.

  BBGs average fifteen years old and serve for one year, with the possibility of re-selection for up to five tournaments. Each one earns between £160 and £250 across the thirteen-day event. They work in teams of six, two at the net and four at the corners, rotating one hour on court and one off. A training intake of around 300 candidates is reduced to the roughly 250 required for the tournament, with final selection through continuous assessment beginning in February.

  Girls first appeared as BBGs in 1977 and on Centre Court since 1985. The split between boys and girls is now fifty-fifty. Before the tournament ends, each BBG receives a certificate, a can of used balls, a group photograph, and a programme.

  Service stewards have a different origin. Before the Second World War, members of the Brigade of Guards and retired Royal Artillery personnel performed the role. After the war, the club offered employment to demobilised servicemen: the Royal Navy came first in 1946, the British Army in 1947, and the Royal Air Force in 1949. The London Fire Brigade joined in 1965. In 2015, a combined force of 595 Service and Fire Brigade stewards attended the tournament.

• 7. Money, Cancellations, and Controversies

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  Prize money was first awarded in 1968, when the tournament opened to professional players. The men's winner received £2,000 and the women's champion £750 from a total fund of £26,150. Not until 2007 did Wimbledon and the French Open become the last Grand Slam events to equalise prize money between women and men. By 2024, the total prize fund reached £50 million. In 2025 the single-tournament total rose to £53.55 million, with each singles champion collecting £3 million.

  The tournament was not held during the First World War between 1915 and 1918, nor between 1940 and 1945 during the Second. On the 11th of October 1940, a bomb struck a corner of the Centre Court competitors' stand, eliminating 1,200 seats. Repairs were not completed until 1947; full restoration and renovation was finished for the 1949 edition.

  The COVID-19 cancellation in 2020 came at an estimated cost to the club of around £250 million. Prior to the 2003 tournament, the club had begun paying an annual insurance premium of £1.61 million specifically to cover pandemic cancellation risk, a precaution taken following the SARS outbreak. That foresight resulted in an insurance payment of £114 million when the 2020 tournament was called off.

  In April 2022, following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the club banned Russian and Belarusian players, a decision the ATP, ITF, and WTA responded to by stripping the tournament of ranking points for that year. They judged the prohibition discriminatory based on nationality. The ban was lifted on the 31st of March 2023. Line judges worked Wimbledon for 147 years before being replaced by electronic calling systems at the 2025 championships, following the broader adoption of Hawk-Eye Live technology across professional tennis.

• 8. Strawberries, Queues, and the Long Queue

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  The tradition of strawberries and cream at Wimbledon is traced, at least in legend, to a visit King Henry VIII paid to Cardinal Thomas Wolsey at Hampton Court, roughly six miles from the grounds, where the chancellor's cook reportedly served wild strawberries and cream. Whether or not the story is true, the quantities consumed confirm that the tradition is real. In 2017, fans ate 34,000 kg of British strawberries and drank 10,000 litres of cream. In 2019, the grounds served 191,930 portions.

  For anyone hoping to watch from the show courts without a pre-purchased ticket, queuing overnight is the accepted method. The club permits it and provides toilet and water facilities for those camping. Sequentially numbered queue cards have been issued since 2003. In 2010, the one-millionth numbered queue card was handed to Rose Stanley from South Africa, at 2:40 pm on the 28th of June.

  For the majority of Centre Court and show-court seats, the route is a public ballot held at the start of each year. The ballot has always been substantially oversubscribed; figures from 2011 suggested four applicants for every available ballot ticket. Applications must be posted to arrive by the last day of December in the prior year.

  The Champions' Dinner, formerly the Champions' Ball, follows each edition of the tournament. At its most formal the event included a dance between the men's and women's singles winners. That tradition became irregular over time, though it resurfaced at notable moments: in 2015, Novak Djokovic and Serena Williams danced to the Bee Gees' "Night Fever" at the dinner; in 2024, Carlos Alcaraz and Barbora Krejcikova danced together. The 2021 dinner was cancelled entirely due to COVID-19 restrictions.