The Battle Over Wimbledon’s Ambitious Expansion Plan

Wimbledon follows the same schedule each year: The singles quarterfinals land on the Tuesday and Wednesday of the second week, as the mood switches from festival to hard-nosed competition. But in 2025, the action on Centre Court will clash with a meeting eight miles away at the High Court in central London. It will be crucial in determining Wimbledon’s long-term future. 

For decades, the All England Lawn Tennis Club, which hosts the tournament, has sought to expand its 157-year-old site. After buying neighboring land and paying off the tenants, it was eventually granted planning permission for a huge redevelopment in 2024. The proposed project is big: By adding another 39 courts, the total number will rise to 71—more than double the number in New York and Melbourne, and quadruple the total in Paris. The AELTC says the plan is so sweeping in part because grass courts deteriorate more quickly with use than the hard and clay courts used elsewhere. 

But more than anything, they believe this approach would enable it to host its qualifying tournament in-house. Currently, Wimbledon is the only Grand Slam that lacks the space on its existing site to host its qualifiers. Instead, it rents courts at a club in Roehampton three miles away. Players have told Wimbledon organizers that qualifying is a less satisfactory experience than at the other Grand Slams, a criticism that the club takes extremely seriously. 

The expansion also includes the creation of two new parks, a 23-acre area at the south end of the site and a 4-acre one at the north, along with a plan to clean up an existing lake and lay a boardwalk around it. Dominic Foster of the AELTC tells Front Office Sports that these commitments demonstrate that the expansion is intended to not only maintain the tournament’s position “at the pinnacle of sport but also provide substantial year-round public benefits.” (Wimbledon declined FOS’s request for comment on the project’s cost.)

But the plan’s implementation is proving a struggle: A group of local residents has raised a six-figure sum to challenge AELTC in court. The showdown is scheduled—remarkably—at the same time as Wimbledon itself. In some ways, it’s a classic NIMBY (not in my backyard) standoff—but one playing out on one of the most hallowed grounds in sports.

In 1993, the AELTC bought the land occupied by a neighboring golf course from a local council. In 2018, AELTC bought the golf club itself, terminating its lease, which was due to run until 2041. Three years later, it published a proposal to build a third show court—a potentially significant additional revenue driver—and the 38 extra courts on the golf course land. Foster claims the club has consulted with 10,000 people about the expansion.

Opposition has been loud. One group formed in 2021, Save Wimbledon Park, counts writers, record-label owners, and architects as core members. “The huge irony is that we are all tennis fans,” Simon Wright of SWP tells FOS. “We all go to the Championships. We all like living in an area where tennis takes place. We just like Wimbledon the way it is, rather than what the club is trying to do to it.”

Although Wimbledon is in a strong financial position—ticket sales and broadcasting revenue are both increasing—the AELTC believes the physical constraints on the site are preventing it from keeping pace with the other Grand Slams, particularly in attendance figures. 

In 2024, the tournament sold just more than 526,000 tickets, compared with 675,000 people at the French Open, 1 million at the US Open, and 1.1 million at the Australian Open. Crucially, the latter two tournaments bring in around 20% of those fans for their qualifying tournaments. To maintain its competitiveness, the AELTC wants to triple the size of the site by the early 2030s. Currently, Wimbledon sells 8,000 tickets for the qualifying event, but it is projecting it will be able to sell five times as many if it brings the tournament onto its own site.

SWP is not generally opposed to Wimbledon expanding. Wright explains that the group dislikes the size of the redevelopment (which it describes as an “industrial scale tennis complex”), believes there has been a lack of good faith engagement between AELTC with the local community, and disagrees with the club’s interpretation of agreements made when it bought the golf course land. 

After a tug-of-war between the two London councils that have jurisdiction over the land, the Greater London Authority was called in to review the planning application. The plan was rubber-stamped by the deputy mayor of London in September 2024.

Since then, SWP claims to have raised £200,000 to cover its costs from 1,000 different donors and has the support of Wimbledon’s member of parliament, Paul Kohler. Another high-profile opponent is Richard Rees, an architect who designed elements of the current Wimbledon site. He argues that “size is not everything” and believes the expansion represents “a maximum scenario for development in a perfect tennis environment without any significant constraints being accepted.”

The hearing at the High Court is not a discussion of whether the expansion should be permitted, but a judicial review at SWP’s request, looking into whether the GLA’s decision to grant planning permission was lawful. 

There is a lot at stake for both sides: If the judicial review finds in favor of any of SWP’s legal disputes, then London can withdraw the planning permission; if the SWP’s case is dismissed, the group would have the option of appealing to the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, the country’s preeminent legal authority. Like a close match on Centre Court, this battle could still go to a deciding set.