Hello and welcome to the tennis podcast live from Wimbledon presented by Barclays, the official banking partner of Wimbledon.

Today has been Media Day here at SW19. Our bandwidth has been,

well speaking for myself, completely maxed out. It has been grossly oversimulating in kind of

the most fun possible way, hopping from room to room, trying to make the most of the precious

few minutes that the players, the top players, have offered up for pre-tournament media,

because that has kind of been the lead story of the day here today.

As we heard a couple of days ago, the protest action that started in Paris at the French Open a few weeks ago,

has continued here at Wimbledon and is set to continue throughout the first week of the tournament.

This is the top players or most of the top players, more on that to come, led by high-profile sports administrator Larry Scott.

They're all limiting their time spent with the media in order to impact the grand slams

and their high-paying rights holders, in particular.

And here, that would be the BBC and ESPN, most prominently,

to impact them in hopes of negotiating a higher share of revenues in player prize money,

as well as improved player welfare.

A reminder that Wimbledon announced a 20% increase in prize money for this year, their

highest ever year on year increase. But as a percentage of overall revenues, it falls short of

the 16% that the players were targeting. It's 14.4%, I believe, at the moment.

So they were targeting 16% for this year with a long-term goal of achieving 22% of tournament revenues going into player prize monies,

and that would be in line with what the tours are able to offer.

Matt, you probably attended the most top player press conferences today in the beautiful

air-conditioned media theatre here. How big a feature was this protest in how the day unfolded?

On the one hand, I would say, quite a big feature.

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