Broadcast money stopped growing at the US Open. The turnstile took over.

For most of the modern era, the money in a major sporting event came from the people who were not there. Television paid, and the crowd was the set dressing. At the US Open, that has quietly stopped being true.

The USTA's own published finances show broadcast revenue essentially flat — $149.1m in 2021, $145m in 2024. Over the same three years ticket revenue rose 37%, from $151.7m to $208.5m. Sponsorship was up 26%. Hospitality and service revenue more than doubled, from $41m to $83.3m. Every engine that is still growing is inside the gates.

The building is being rearranged to match

Arthur Ashe Stadium is midway through an $800m renovation that leaves overall capacity roughly where it was and changes who sits where. About 3,500 mid-priced loge seats are being removed; courtside capacity rises by around 2,000. The old loge averaged $291 a session. The non-club courtside seats replacing much of it average more than $560, and hospitality seats run above $2,300.

That is the strategy expressed in concrete: fewer moderate seats, more expensive ones, in a venue that is not getting bigger. It is not unique to tennis — the same substitution of clubs and hospitality for ordinary seating has run through stadium design for a decade — but rarely is it so cleanly documented in one build.

The resale loop, and the questions the USTA won't answer

New York law lets tickets resell for whatever a buyer will pay. Ticketmaster is the Open's official ticketing partner and runs both ends of that trade: the original sale and the marketplace where the ticket is resold. The USTA acknowledges taking a share of Ticketmaster's fees when a verified resale goes through, meaning one seat can earn the organisation money more than once. It says the share comes from fees rather than the resale price, but declined to tell the Guardian what percentage it takes or what the arrangement is worth annually.

It also declined to say how much face-value inventory actually goes on sale before tickets start appearing on the secondary market — the single number that would settle whether $65 grounds passes are a real offer or a shop window. One was listed at $321 on the secondary market on the Saturday before the tournament. When New York's mayor released 1,000 city-resident tickets at $100 each, more than 336,000 people applied.

Why the ownership structure makes this a live question

The USTA is a non-profit, staging its showcase event on public parkland in Flushing Meadows. Its net assets have nearly doubled in a decade, from $371m to $734m, with more than $580m in cash and investments. And it is now almost entirely a one-event organisation: the Open produces close to nine of every ten dollars of USTA operating revenue, up from roughly 80% ten years ago. It reinvests heavily in grassroots tennis and player development, and it points to Fan Week — free entry across eight of the event's 22 days — as evidence that access still matters.

The counter-argument the organisation makes is worth taking seriously: if revenue were the only objective it could price the grounds pass at $300 itself and keep the money now going to resellers. "We knew that we would be leaving dollars on the table," its chief commercial officer, Kirsten Corio, told the Athletic. "The market has spoken."

The man now setting the direction

Craig Tiley arrived this summer as USTA chief executive after more than two decades running Tennis Australia, where he turned the Australian Open into a three-week sport-and-entertainment festival. Asked how the US Open grows from here, he offered a phrase that will not comfort traditionalists: "This will become the tennis Disneyland." Growth, he said, would come from more experiences inside the event rather than more days of it — and he was explicit that packing the site is not the goal. "We're not going to be one of those events that just want to pack the precinct for the sake of packing it."

He also named the constraint himself: "One of our biggest challenges is the secondary market." The USTA says ticketing policy will be reassessed after this year's tournament. For anyone running an event that has outgrown its venue, that review is the thing to watch — because the Open has now demonstrated, in audited figures, that the on-site customer has replaced the broadcaster as the growth story, and nobody has yet shown how you do that without pricing out the people who made the event worth attending.