Saturday 11 July 2015 7:59 am

Wimbledon 2015: Prize money for Grand Slams keeps increasing

As Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic prepared for their showdown in the Wimbledon men's singles final, their eyes were probably on the title, and not the prize money.

Still, the prize money is quite nice, now standing at £1.88m for the winner; the runner-up doesn't do badly, either, taking home £940,000 thanks to the biggest prize money pool in tennis history.

The same paycheques were on offer to Serena Williams and Garbine Muguruza competing in the women's final yesterday.

Serena Williams has now earned just shy of $70m (£44m) over her career so, at the margin, it won’t mean as much to her as Spain’s Muguruza, who has only won $2.05m over her career.

But, either way, these sums are vastly different to when the Open era started in 1968.

The below chart shows how much the prize money for ladies' singles has increased over time to their current record levels.

And here, in a pretty similarly shaped curve – given in 2007 prize money was equalised for men and women – is how men's singles prize money has grown:

Of course, in real terms this will be slightly different. But still, £750 in 1968 is equivalent to £12,176.97 – that’s 0.65 per cent of what Serena took home this year.

And this is consistent across all the slams, with total prize money increasing in line with prize money for individual players.

The US Open even wants to increase total prize money to $50m by 2018, putting pressure on other tournaments to follow suit.