Record crowds, premium seats and an unchecked resale market have are transforming the self-styled people’s slam – and leaving ordinary fans fighting to get through the gates
It takes a truly exceptional affordability crisis to put Bill Ackman and Zohran Mamdani on the same side of the barricade. Yet this month the billionaire hedge fund manager and New York’s democratic socialist mayor found common cause over an unlikely grievance: the cost of getting into the US Open.
Ackman took objection to the cost of a grounds pass listed for $363. Mamdani responded to the broader uproar by securing 1,000 tickets for New York residents at $100 apiece, prompting more than 336,000 people to apply for them. Somewhere between the two sits the uneasy economics of the modern US Open, where a $65 ticket with no guaranteed seat on any court can fetch more than five times that amount on the tournament’s resale marketplace.
For generations the US Open has traded on its reputation as the people’s slam. Take the 7 train to Queens, buy a grounds pass and spend the day milling about within a few feet of the world’s best tennis players. But as the final major of the season begins in earnest on Sunday, that democratic ideal has been confronted with a basic problem: more and more of the people are being priced out.
“The US Open is owned by the USTA which is a non-profit,” Ackman wrote on social media. “The idea that a day one ground pass is $363 is absurd. The USTA’s mission is to promote the sport of tennis. How is a $363 ground pass consistent with this mission?”
It was a striking complaint from someone who rarely has reason to balk at the price of admission – in more ways than one – and more striking still when Mamdani weighed in days later. The two men have spent much of the past year fighting from opposite sides of New York’s affordability debate, with Ackman sparing no expense to prevent Mamdani’s election last November. Apparently all it took to set aside months of political bloodsport for a temporary detente was the obscene cost of getting into the tennis. Heartbreaking, indeed.
The simplest explanation for the US Open sticker shock is also the most obvious: demand has exploded. But so, too, has what the USTA is selling.
Over the past decade the Open has transformed itself into something closer to a three-week New York cultural festival, a late-summer collision of sport, fashion, celebrity and conspicuous consumption. The $23 Honey Deuce is no longer merely a cocktail but a souvenir, status marker and social media prop. Celebrities fill the suites, influencers populate sponsor boxes and Arthur Ashe Stadium can feel less like the main showcourt than an aperitif to Fashion Week. The Open surpassed one million visitors for the first time in 2024 and shows little sign of slipping back below that mark. Everybody wants in because everybody else wants in.
And there is little indication the Open intends to resist that momentum. Craig Tiley arrived this summer as the USTA’s new chief executive after more than two decades running Tennis Australia and the Australian Open, where he presided over that tournament’s similar evolution into a sprawling three-week sports and entertainment festival. He is already talking expansively about what the US Open could become.
Asked Saturday how the tournament may continue to grow, Tiley offered a striking shorthand for his vision. “This will become the tennis Disneyland,” he said, a phrase unlikely to reassure the sport’s traditionalists. Growth, he explained, would come not necessarily from making the event longer but from creating more experiences for players, children and adults within it.
Tiley described the “insatiable appetite” to come to Flushing Meadows as a “nice problem”, though he acknowledged there were limits to how far attendance itself should grow. “We’re not going to be one of those events that just want to pack the precinct for the sake of packing it,” he said.
Unfortunately, for many longtime attendees, the same demand powering the Open’s expansion is also reshaping the economics of getting inside.
As countless World Cup tourists came to discover the expensive way, New York law allows tickets to be resold for whatever someone is willing to pay, and Ticketmaster, the Open’s official ticketing partner, operates both sides of the transaction: selling the original ticket and hosting the marketplace where it can be resold.
The USTA benefits from both. It acknowledges receiving a portion of Ticketmaster’s fees when a verified resale ticket changes hands, meaning the same ticket can generate revenue for the organization more than once. The USTA says its share comes from fees rather than the resale price itself, but declined to answer questions from the Guardian about what percentage it receives or how much the arrangement generates annually.
The USTA argues that shutting down Ticketmaster resale would simply push buyers toward less secure third-party platforms. Tiley nevertheless acknowledges that prices on the secondary market can become prohibitive. “One of our biggest challenges is the secondary market,” he said. A grounds pass officially priced at $65 was listed for $321 on Saturday.
