The best tennis player you’ve never heard of is from somewhere in central or eastern Europe.
She might be called Anastasia Myskina, or Svetlana Kuznetsova. It could be Jeļena Ostapenko, Markéta Vondroušová or Elena Rybakina.
She will be a grand slam champion – likely multiple times over. She will be an unstoppable force faced with the immovable object of her home country.
“For these girls’ agents, their market was too small or too underdeveloped in athlete sponsorship to market them efficiently in terms of revenue for the athletes,” says Géraldine Filiol, co-founder of women’s sports agency WomanUp, former executive at Top Five Management Athlete and a long-time former Eurosport executive. “None of them were truly global in their appeal.”
Unless, of course, they are beautiful. Call it the ‘Anna Kournikova blueprint’ or the ‘Maria Sharapova framework’; the tried-and-tested pathway to becoming a mainstream tennis star from eastern Europe is to win and look good doing it, with an emphasis on the latter.
Kournikova became one of the most famous players of all time despite a career-high world ranking of eighth, while Sharapova combined dominance and beauty throughout her career at the top of women’s tennis.
Central and eastern Europe has continued to be an engine room for women’s tennis talent. Since 2004, 12 players from Central/Eastern Europe have won 27 singles grand slam titles — nearly one-third of all the grand slams held in the last two decades. Eight of those players have won more than one.
And yet aside from Sharapova, none of these women have been able to convert their talent into lasting fame and fortune.
“It’s true that after the retirement of Sharapova, some stars from Eastern Europe started to emerge about seven, eight, nine years ago. And they were good players, but they didn’t have the charisma, they didn’t have that special thing,” says Filiol.
She added: “People expect more from women in general (than from the men) as athletes in terms of their expression of their personality.”
The lasting effects of the Cold War have presented an additional layer of challenges for women from central and Eastern Europe, on top of the struggles that already come with being a woman playing sport.
Former WTA president Micky Lawler says this regional hangover once extended to male players, too. Player endorsement deals would often be far more lucrative for western Europeans than for players from Slovakia or the Czech Republic.
“Those national economies were smaller, and that was reflected in those endorsement opportunities,” Lawler explains. But according to Clifford Bloxham, a four-decade veteran of athlete representation at Octagon, there comes a time when a player’s story and personality must begin to transcend their country of origin. An eastern European athlete and their team must manufacture a myth.
“Everyone’s interesting, everyone’s got a story, I think it’s just about identifying what that story is and what might capture the imagination of the consumer and the brands around the world — or certainly outside of their country, where possible,” Bloxham says.
New frontiers
In a decade dominated by social media platforms, athletes can now tell their stories more authentically than ever before. As such, the mythology being built around the current women’s world No. 1, Poland’s Iga Świątek, is breaking the mould.
Unlike Kournikova 25 years ago, Świątek is not appearing in the swimsuit issue of Sports Illustrated. Instead, her Vogue profile featured photos of her on the court in her On-sponsored tennis kit and interacting with fans. The interview centred on her introverted nature, and her love for reading and Taylor Swift.
In times gone by, Iga would have been a tennis agent’s nightmare. But in an age when a far broader range of people are celebrated for who they are, Świątek and her agent, Max Eisenbud, are grasping their chance. Świątek is a quiet, modest champion from a smaller market, earning millions in endorsement money regardless.
Rather than reinventing herself as a sex symbol, Świątek has found
lucrative branding and sponsorship opportunities with brands that better suit her, such as Lego and Infosys.
Her partnership with Lego aligns with her interests off the court: Świątek has spoken in the past about how activities such as building Lego help her remain calm and rebuild her mental strength between matches.
Through her Infosys sponsorship, Świątek – who has previously said her favourite school subject was maths – is also creating programs to empower young women around the world build careers in STEM.
Even as part of her deal with beauty company Lancome — the first time an athlete has signed a global sponsorship agreement with the company — her stated aim is to celebrate her own femininity while supporting women in the job market of her native Poland as part of the deal.
Eyes on the prize
Lawler, who spent over 25 years at agency Octagon and almost a decade as president of the Women’s Tennis Association, believes Świątek’s unique rise is also down to the lasting effects of equal prize money in the sport.
No one in the top 10 all-time earners on WTA’s official list as of September 2024 retired earlier than 2020 (Maria Sharapova), with seven of the top 10 still active on tour.
As a result, Lawler says, female tennis players now have more autonomy over their sponsorship partnerships and marketing.
“The prize money ecosystem is such that the players have options, they can turn down opportunities. And it also depends on their management structure, and who’s leading, how they’re doing it,” she says. “The new way you market athletes, I think it’s very individual. I don’t think there’s a blueprint.”
And as for the constraints of old for eastern European players, Lawler believes the women’s world number two, Aryna Sabalenka, is also breaking free to carve her own path.
“If that were true, Sabalenka overcame it,” Lawler says of the issues faced by female athletes from small markets. “Why? Performance. Big personality. She has a big presence on court: she can relate to the fans, the fans can relate to her. She’s got a sense of humour, she knows how to play with the crowd.”
Sabalenka is a three-time singles grand slam champion. Despite from being from Belarus and not currently playing under a flag due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Sabalenka seems to have, by and large, overcome problems relating to her tiny home market. She is thought to make around $7m per year in endorsements.
Rivalries
Even for those at the top of the rankings, stardom isn’t created in a vacuum. Rivalries make individual stars greater than the sum of their parts. Serbia’s Novak Djokovic hails from a small eastern European market but was propelled to global fame as a result of his on-court battles with Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal.
In women’s tennis, a rivalry between two Belgians, Kim Clijsters and Justine Henin, similarly elevated the profiles of two players from a small market. The two played each other 25 times between 1998 and 2010, with eight of those matchups coming in grand slams.
“They lived in a very unique environment since Belgium is a small country. You had a number one from the Flemish side and a number one from the French side, so they had a unique rivalry that,
had this been in the American market, it would have had different proportions, yes. It still captured every opportunity in the Benelux market,” Lawler said.
“You need to convince marketers that the little girls around the world want to relate to different types of women, not just super models.”
Jonathan Dasniers de Veigy
She added: “Whether it’s eastern Europe or any other small market, it’s always easier with a big market. But you also have competition and, actually, in eastern Europe you have a lot of competition.”
Czech-American legend Martina Navratilova, too, was bolstered to fame by her rivalry with American Chris Evert.
Evert, Lawler said, had the image of being “the girl next door” with a cool and collected performance on the court. Navratilova was the “courageous superhero” from a small market of strong players. The rivalry, Lawler said, propelled them both forward.
On the men’s side, historic rivalries are fading with the recent retirements of Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Andy Murray. But new rivalries are set to take their place: matches between Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner have quickly become appointment viewing for fans across the world.
The same cannot yet be said for Świątek and Sabalenka, whose head-to-head rivalry could be described as lukewarm. So far, their shared narrative is yet to go global and, these days, women’s tennis players from eastern Europe are left to claw for global fame through dominance alone.
Sabalenka’s outgoing nature may make for natural marketing material, but there is a final, crucial element to her and Świątek’s ability to transcend their nationalities.
“No matter what, you can’t beat the results,” says Jonathan Dasnières de Veigy, director of client management for tennis at Octagon. “And you can’t beat the fact that, no matter what, if a player is achieving amazing things on court, the consequences will be much higher if they perform amazingly well.”
Though fleeting success can sometimes be enough for an American, British or Chinese player to sustain fame and fortune, women from Eastern and Central Europe need at least a period of dominance to achieve global stardom.
Along with social change and better prize money, Świątek’s record of four French Opens and a US Open was required for her to carve her own path. Lawler believes her consistency – three straight wins at Roland Garros from 2022 to 2024 – has made her an outlier.
“A player who is a consistent and a generational athlete, she is going to have opportunities,” Lawler says. “It’s just the natural kind of movement that people want to be associated with success, and there’s positive alignment there.”
But for a player like 2024 Wimbledon champion Barbora Krejčíková to break through in the same way, consistency will be the key to overcoming her Czech nationality. To be a globally-recognised player or match up with the endorsement money of players from bigger markets, a player like Krejčíková simply must do more than a player like Emma Raducanu – as unfair as it may seem.
For others, who perhaps are yet to win a grand slam or lock down a place in the WTA’s top 10, the task is even harder. Bloxham believes this is where building a narrative or myth around a player becomes almost non-negotiable.
“It’s much harder when you’re a great player, but you’ve never won a title that gives you a label. You have to work harder with the player to build a narrative. But the key is, obviously, it has to be real,” Bloxham says.
Dasnières de Veigy, however, believes it cannot just be down to the players to market themselves. Sports media, and the wider mainstream culture, must do its part.
“You need to convince marketers that the little girls around the world want to relate to different types of women, not just super models. And maybe for them to understand that they need to talk to everyone and not just run the same types of profiles on covers.”
“It takes a bit of time,” Filiol laments. “We probably need a few more decades, that’s what I tend to think.”
