The wonders of Wimbledon, a global sports event in a democratic league of its own

The oldest Grand Slam event in tennis, Wimbledon, first played in 1877, is still in great shape 148 years later, and up there with the best and most successful events in sport.

🎾 Wimbledon 2025 got underway yesterday and long-time readers and followers will know I’ve long believed it is the best organised and most democratic major event in all of global sport.

A year ago, when this Substack was still just a few months old and had a few thousand followers and many fewer paying subscribers, I wrote a four-part series around a tournament that has made a huge impression on me, as a sports fan and as a journalist, for decades.

There are now many more of you who receive this newsletter, almost 12,000 in fact, and hundreds more paying subscribers than a year ago - for which I remain hugely grateful. Without your support, this work wouldn’t exist.

I hope it’s generally informative, maybe even entertaining, and perhaps, sometimes, even important. Sport, for many of us, is the most important thing of all the unimportant things in life.

Wimbledon sunset: Close of play in SW19, with No1 Court left and central London on the horizon. Photo: Nick Harris

Long story short: most of you won’t have been followers or subscribers a year ago when I first published my Wimbledon series. But Wimbledon is here again, and it’s as relevant as ever.

So maybe you might be interested in reading:

• Day one of last summer’s series, a 4,500-word opus about why Wimbledon is the best organised and most democratic event in sport, detailing the 10 secrets of its success. Taster: “It’s not merely a cherished sporting fortnight, popular worldwide, but a rip-roaring financial success, profitable enough every year to give tens of millions to tennis development and other good causes. It’s also innovative, and run by people with tremendous foresight, more of which later.”

• Day two of the series and the frankly gob-smacking story of the player who fixed a match in plain sight on Wimbledon’s No.14 Court, and then doubled down on his cheating by getting multiple drugs bans - but not before he had turned into an unreliable snitch for the authorities. Taster: “It’s a peculiar feeling to go to watch a top-class sporting event knowing for certain that the match you’re about to watch is going to be fixed in front of your eyes, with someone involved corruptly making financial gain.

  This has only happened to me once, but it happened at Wimbledon during the Championships in a men’s singles match. It turned into a really strange day, interviewing the player at the heart of the fix immediately afterwards and then speaking to his bewildered opponent.”

• Day three of the series and an objective performance-based assessment of the 20 greatest players to have graced Wimbledon in the Open era since 1968. My favourite tennis player to watch, ever, was Roger Federer, and the only spoiler I’ll give you about this piece is he wasn’t No1. Or No2. Or No3. Or No4. Or No5. That is ridiculous, but when you’re using an objective system, you have to go with what the numbers say. And there was an absolutely remarkable top 10. Taster: “There are numerous ways you can rank the greatest players in Wimbledon history. In the Open Era since 1968 - when Grand Slam tennis has been a global game played by professionals in 128-competitor draws - there have arguably been 20 contenders. Those players, 12 men and eight women, have each won at least two Wimbledon singles titles in that period, with 19 of them having win percentages of more than 80% in their matches on the lawns of the All England Club (AELTC), and most of them going deep into a majority of their SW19 tournaments.”

• Day four of the series, which was a list of the greatest ever matches at Wimbledon, among hundreds of nominations by readers, nominated either in the comments section of a previous article or via X (the artist formerly known as Twitter), or via our Facebook page, or via DMs and email. Taster: “Greatest is clearly subjective. One of the final top five matches (revealed in the piece) actually left me pretty bored at the time, to be honest, although it impressed lots of people and I can understand why without agreeing. Two of the final top three are my own two favourite Wimbledon matches ever, and I was lucky enough to watch both of them live. Being there probably influenced me, but they were both absolute crackers. There is only one women’s match in the top five and it doesn’t even feature Martina Navratilova, who won her maiden Slam singles title in a Wimbledon classic against Chris Evert in 1978.”