At the 1948 World Championships at Wembley, Richard Bergmann beat the Czechoslovak Bohumil Váňa in the fifth game of the men's singles final to win the world title for the third time. The Vienna-born player, who had settled in England before the war, then announced that he was finished with amateur competition. "My decision is based on the fact that it is possible to reach the top in world table tennis and still be a poor man," he said, in words preserved by the American historian Tim Boggan. "I have played here tonight before more than 8,000 spectators, and for my performance I shall receive no reward." Nearly 80 years later, his complaint still frames every argument about table tennis prize money: who earns it, how it is shared out, and whether the best can live on it.
Some of the answers are easier to find than they were. At WTT Champions Yokohama in August 2025, Chen Xingtong won the women's singles and took home US$40,000. China's 12 players at the event earned US$150,000 between them, according to a count by Sanwei Sport, and Chen's cheque alone was more than a quarter of it. Wang Chuqin, beaten in the men's final by Tomokazu Harimoto, received US$20,000, exactly what Sun Yingsha was paid as the losing women's finalist.
That symmetry is the first thing to understand about where the money goes, and it is a relatively recent arrival. The second is less visible. Eleven added up the advertised prize funds of all 25 events in the 2025 WTT Series and found that just over US$14m was on offer. Almost half of it, 47%, was concentrated in the four Grand Smashes, and 82% went to the three tiers whose singles draws are built almost entirely from the top of the world rankings: the Grand Smashes, the six Champions events and the season-ending Finals. Inside each event the money is shared out more evenly than in most professional sports. Between events, the slope is steep.
- Grand Smash (4 events)6.6US$m
- Champions (6)3.6US$m
- Star Contender (6)1.75US$m
- WTT Finals (1)1.3US$m
- Contender (8)0.79US$m
Eleven added up the advertised total prize fund of each of the 25 events in the 2025 WTT Series, including the 5% each event sets aside for the athletes' future fund. The total was US$14.0m; the Grand Smashes, Champions events and Finals together had US$11.5m, or 82%. Feeder events are not included.
For readers newer to the circuit, a word on how it is arranged. World Table Tennis, the commercial company the International Table Tennis Federation set up in 2019 and which began staging events in 2021, runs a ladder of tournaments. At the bottom are the Contenders, worth US$100,000 each, open to a wide field and often where young players and those from smaller nations collect their ranking points. Above them come the Star Contenders, at US$300,000. Then the Champions events, with 32-player singles draws and no qualifying, and the Grand Smashes, the sport's equivalent of tennis's grand slams, with 64-player main draws and prize funds of US$1.5m to US$2m. The WTT Finals in December takes only the leading 16 men and women of the season. Eleven's earlier series on WTT's money looked at where that money comes from; this piece follows it out of the door.
When there was no money
For most of the sport's first half-century, the honest answer to where the prize money went was nowhere, because there was none, and taking money elsewhere could end a career. The ITTF was founded in 1926, under the presidency of the English aristocrat and film-maker Ivor Montagu, and it guarded amateur status with a zeal that its members enforced. At the 1938 congress the English association suspended the American Ruth Aarons, the women's world champion of 1936, for playing unauthorised exhibition matches for money in England, and the ITTF enforced the ban. Aarons, the Table Tennis England archive records, had been unaware of the ruling and was under contract to play. Bergmann himself was kept out of the 1947 World Championships in Paris by Montagu, according to the ITTF's own history, for accepting money for exhibitions during the war without official permission. In 1951 he played exhibitions in South Africa against the English association's wishes and was again denied a place at the World Championships.
The Americans fared no better. In 1949 the US association suspended Dick Miles and Marty Reisman, its two best players, after a European tour on which the Swedish and English associations complained they had not honoured all their exhibition commitments. Reisman, the hustler whose life loosely inspired the 2025 film Marty Supreme, made much of his living from exhibitions and money matches, outside the official game. The rule that a table tennis player could be the best in the world and earn nothing from it was, for a generation, the price of belonging to the world's governing body.
- Guo Yuehua, 1980 (US$12,000 at the time)45700US$
- Winner, 202455000US$
Eleven adjusted the 1980 prize by the US consumer price index (annual averages of 82.4 in 1980 and 313.7 in 2024). The 2024 figure is the winner's prize the ITTF announced for that year's World Cup.
Source: ITTF: the history of the World Cup; US Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI
What changed it was the Olympics. The International Olympic Committee would recognise only sports whose rules spoke clearly about amateur and professional status, and the ITTF's constitution did not. The required wording was agreed in 1979, table tennis was voted on to the Olympic programme in 1981 and it made its debut in Seoul in 1988. By then money had started to appear in the sport's own events. The first men's World Cup, in Hong Kong in 1980, carried a prize fund of US$36,500, from which Guo Yuehua received US$12,000 for beating his teammate Li Zhenshi in the final. In 1992 the ITTF's history records Jan-Ove Waldner, that year's Olympic champion in Barcelona, as "reputedly, the first table tennis millionaire".
Measured against prices, the gains at the top since then are smaller than they look. Eleven adjusted Guo's US$12,000 by the US consumer price index and found that it was worth about US$45,700 in 2024 money. When the ITTF announced the prize money for the 2024 World Cup in Macao, the winner's share was US$55,000. Forty-four years of growth, in other words, had raised the champion's real reward by about a fifth, while the fund as a whole, now US$1m and shared between men's and women's events, had grown many times over.
The modern professional circuit began in 1996, when the ITTF launched its Pro Tour. The first event was the English Open in Kettering that April, whose prize money, the English association's magazine Table Tennis News reported, was a record US$30,000. The first Pro Tour Finals, in Tianjin that December, offered US$200,000. Men and women were not paid alike. When the 2002 Qatar Open doubled the usual Pro Tour purse to US$205,000, the ITTF's preview explained that the men's and women's events would share it 60-40: US$34,000 for the men's singles winner, US$22,000 for the women's. The ITTF says it has paid men and women equally since 2008, and WTT kept the rule. Its event prospectuses now print a single singles prize table that applies to both, which is why Sun Yingsha and Wang Chuqin collected identical cheques in Yokohama, and why China's women, who won more matches there, took home US$106,500 to the men's US$43,500.
- Wimbledon 202545.5times
- WTT Champions Yokohama 20258.9times
- WTT Contender 20267.7times
- WTT Champions Macao 20257.5times
Eleven divided each singles winner's prize by the prize for losing in the first round of the main draw: £3m by £66,000 at Wimbledon, US$40,000 by US$4,500 at Yokohama, US$5,000 by US$650 at a 2026 Contender and US$60,000 by US$8,000 at Macao. The champion's share of each singles pool was close to 15% at Wimbledon and at Macao.
Source: WTT Champions Macao 2025 prospectus; Sanwei Sport; Wikipedia: WTT Contender Lagos 2026; Sports Illustrated
A flat structure
Within each WTT event, the distribution is unusually flat. The official prospectus for WTT Champions Macao in September 2025 set out a fund of US$800,000, of which US$760,000 was paid on site, the remaining 5% going under WTT's rules to an athletes' future fund and medical programme. In each singles draw the winner received US$60,000, the runner-up US$30,000, the semi-finalists US$16,000, the quarter-finalists US$12,500, the last 16 US$10,000 and the 16 first-round losers US$8,000 each. Those first-round losers, half the field, shared about a third of the money. At the Contenders the proportions are almost the same, with US$5,000 for the champion and US$650 for anyone beaten in the last 32.
Set beside tennis, the contrast is sharp. Wimbledon paid each 2025 singles champion £3m and each first-round loser £66,000, a ratio of 45 to one. At Macao the champion earned seven and a half times as much as a first-round loser; at Yokohama, where the scale was smaller, about nine times. Curiously, the share taken by the champion is almost identical. Wimbledon's £3m was 15.5% of each singles pool. WTT, Xinhua reported in February 2025, had just raised the singles champion's share at its series events to 15% of the total prize fund, and Macao's US$60,000 was exactly 15% of the US$400,000 allotted to each gender. The difference is the size of the draw. Wimbledon spreads each singles pool across 128 players and seven rounds, Macao across 32 players and five, so a first-round loser in table tennis takes a far bigger slice: 2% of the pool at Macao, against 0.3% at Wimbledon.
That flatness is not something the leading players have campaigned to protect. Before the Singapore Smash in February 2025, China's players and coaches put a series of suggestions to WTT. Wang Chuqin proposed that prize money should rise and that qualified players could receive ranking-based rewards or appearance fees, according to the NetEase sports account Qiujie 007 (translated from Chinese). Wang Manyu agreed and suggested that the champion's share of the total should also increase. Eight days later WTT announced its changes: an extra US$1m in prize money, most of it for doubles and the Finals, whose fund rose to US$1.3m, and the champion's 15%.
Further down the rankings
For the players further down, the arithmetic looks different. "Let's say you earn $8,000 for losing in the first round," Quadri Aruna, Nigeria's long-time leading player and an Olympic quarter-finalist in Rio in 2016, said in remarks reported by SportsDay in July 2025. After 20% tax and the costs of the trip, he went on, "Eventually, you're left with about €3,000 or even less." He contrasted the modern calendar with the old Pro Tour, when "the prize money wasn't much, but we didn't play as many tournaments, so expenses were manageable". The present system was harder: "Now, it's extremely costly. You could fight your way from the group stage to the semi-finals and still walk away with nothing." His conclusion was blunt. "You win money, pay tax, reinvest it into your next event and in the end, your balance is zero."
The figure Aruna chose was precisely the first-round prize at Macao, one of the richest events on the calendar outside the Grand Smashes. At a Contender, where many players outside the elite tiers earn their ranking points, a first-round defeat in the main draw is worth US$650. The number of events has risen at the same time: Eleven's count in its study of player workload found 25 senior WTT tournaments in 2026, against ten on the first Pro Tour of 1996. More events mean more chances to earn and more flights to pay for.
Kanak Jha, a three-time Olympian for the United States, described the same squeeze to Team USA before Paris 2024. "It's financially tough," he said. "Traveling, going to tournaments, having a private coach." And: "But unless you're in the top 1 percent of your sport, it's very hard to earn a living being a professional athlete." He had launched a crowdfunding page that spring to help cover his costs.
The season-long figures show how quickly the curve drops. WTT's earnings list for 2024, published by Butterfly that December, put Wang Chuqin top of the men's table with more than US$261,000 and Wang Manyu top of the women's with US$244,325. In all, 11 women passed US$100,000. But the 34th and 35th women on the list, Lily Zhang and Sreeja Akula, earned US$50,995 and US$50,590, and the 35th man, Oh Jun-sung, a little under US$50,000. Each of them, over a full year of travel, won less than a single first-round defeat at Wimbledon was worth in 2025. For most professionals, club salaries in Germany, France, Japan or China, national federation support and sponsorship are what make a career pay.
WTT's founders were open about the problem they had inherited. Steve Dainton, then the ITTF's chief executive, wrote in an open letter in May 2020 that, for all the sport's popularity as a pastime, "prize money at ITTF events was not high enough". In the same letter he described the Grand Smashes as the events "offering the highest prize money in the sport", and that is how the calendar was built. Thomas Weikert, the ITTF president at the time, told Reuters that year: "We want that players are more satisfied by prize money and events themselves." The totals have risen since. Dainton told the ITTF's 2024 annual general meeting that prize money had grown from US$5.3m in 2019 to more than US$10m, and the 2025 calendar's headline funds came to about US$14m, as Eleven's earlier analysis of the accounts discussed.
The structure that results has a clear logic. Within a tournament, table tennis is generous to those who lose early. Across the calendar, it is generous to those already near the top, because most of the money sits at events that only they can enter. A player ranked 80th can win a Contender and earn US$5,000, barely more than a first-round loser at Yokohama and less than one at Macao. The sport's real dividing line is the entry list for the Champions tier.
Bergmann, as it turned out, came back, and won the world title for a fourth time in Budapest in 1950. Timo Boll, who retired in 2025 after almost three decades at the top of the German game, gave a different verdict on his own career to hessenschau that year: "I was able to live very well from my job, but I also still have this normal life" (translated from German). The world's best can now earn a good living from table tennis. Bergmann's sentence still applies, with a small amendment: it is possible to reach the top 50 in world table tennis and still be a poor man.
