Wimbledon Park: a Growth Machine Case Study

Wimbledon is the only one of the four major Grand Slam tennis tournaments that does not host its qualifying matches on site. It wants to change that. The tournament’s organizers, the All England Lawn Tennis Club (AELTC), are planning to develop parts of Wimbledon Park and build a new 8000-seat stadium, 38 open tennis courts, and a bunch of other maintenance buildings and depots. While the courts will be located on the old Wimbledon Golf Course which is not currently publicly accessible, numerous paths, buildings, and paved standing areas would also be added to the parts of Wimbledon Park that are open to the public.

Not everyone is happy with this plan. The site is a Grade 2* Historic Park and when AELTC acquired the land from Merton Council in 1993, it was under the condition that the park remain undeveloped open land. The group Save Wimbledon Park has mobilized against the development plan for years now, but their court challenges have as of yet not been successful.

City leaders are not sympathetic to the protests against the development. London deputy mayor Jules Pipe said the plan “would facilitate very significant benefits” that would “clearly outweight the harms.” London Mayor Sadiq Khan, who has recused himself from the process, expanded on the purported benefits. He said, “This scheme will bring a significant range of economic, social, cultural and environmental benefits to the local area, the wider capital and the UK economy, creating new jobs and green spaces,” and “will cement Wimbledon’s reputation as the greatest tennis competition in the world and London as the sporting capital of the world.”

These arguments are characteristic of what urban studies scholars call ‘the growth machine.‘ University of California at Santa Barbara professor Harvey Molotch first coined the term in 1976, when he argued that “the desire for growth provides the key operative motivation toward consensus for members of politically mobilized local elites, however split they might be on other issues.” These elites are the rentier class—developers, realtors, and financial institutions—as opposed to normal residents, who might have other priorities like quality of life or maintaining access to public space.

Though proponents of growth above all sometimes override community objections through legal and judicial means, or by making deals behind closed doors and/or with limited public comment periods, their primary tactic is to “foster a sense of solidarity based on territory,” says sports sociologist Kimberly S. Schimmel. They say that the benefits from growth and development will extend to everyone in the city, not just the rentier class.

We can see a bunch of these arguments in Khan’s statement. First, the development “creat[es] new jobs,” a standard line for growth machine acolytes, and an obvious part of any construction project. But he also says that it will create new “green spaces,” a puzzling claim. The development does actually open up some new green spaces to greater access, since the golf course is currently closed to the public. However, there is no way that building a stadium, 38 tennis courts, and a maze of walking paths and concrete pads over an existent green space could not decrease the total area of green space in Wimbledon Park. This decrease of total green space, along with impacts to sightlines and wildlife, are some of the key concerns of the Save Wimbledon Park group.

Khan goes on, saing that the “economic, social, cultural, and environmental benefits” of the Wimbledon Park development aren’t just for the AELTC, but for “the local area, the wider capital, and the UK economy,” and will help make London “the sporting capital of the world.” Khan talks about these benefits as applying to geographic areas, regardless of the class or financial involvement with the project of the individuals living there. Similar rhetoric often appears around stadium developments in north America, even leading to hefty city-paid subsidies for their construction.

The underlying assumption here is very similar to trickle-down economics. When wealthy people are given benefits—tax breaks, subsidies, or freedom from regulation—their business ventures will stimulate the economy in such a way that the working class will benefit as well; the wealth drips down throughout the population and eventually reaches the bottom. At least, that’s how the theory goes. As we can see by the 39% increase in wealth inequality between the top and bottom 10% of American households since Reagan championed the ideology in the 1980s, the practical evidence is not exactly in its favor.

Growth, as a whole, is a fundamental principle of capitalism. And capitalism is the system that we’re living in, so there’s no real way around it. But if we’re already being pushed into identifying with our geographic area, being a resident of whatever neighborhood or city we live in, we might as well use our voices to advocate for the causes that we find more important than growth. Capital interests already defend growth; it doesn’t need our help. I love sports, but I don’t want my city government paying for the priviledge of letting professional leagues make money off its citizens.

Headlines

Private equity is moving into youth sports.

• This New York Times feature examines the opportunity presented by the massive youth sports market primarily through interviews with enthusiastic parents and kids, paired with some statistics and vague ‘critics say…’ counterarguments. The parents justify the high cost by pointing to potential future returns of college scholarships and professionalism, or by saying they’d do anything to make their kids happy. Only one directly quoted source has negative thoughts on high-intensity youth sports, a hockey player who chose to play at a lower level so that he could have more time with his friends and wouldn’t be separated from his family.

• The first aspect of this culture that I find worrying is the so-called ‘professionalization of youth sports.’ The article notes that about 20% of parents in youth sports think their kid could play Division 1 athletics, and 10% think their kid could be an Olympian. It goes without saying that this is incredibly overconfident. And by continuously encouraging higher-intensity training and play and investing significant financial resources into it, parents risk putting unrealizable pressure on their children. The American Association of Pediatrics writes, “The professionalization of youth sports is widely considered responsible for the high volumes of training and the pressure to specialize in a single sport that may lead to overuse injury, overtraining, and burnout in youth athletes.” While many kids obviously love their sport, the high-investment, high-risk, and high-reward financial incentives of turning your kid into a professional athlete can definitely push parents and kids into unhealthy or dangerous situations.

• My second point of concern is the exploitation of parents. Wherever private equity goes, high returns for their investors must follow. And most importantly, these returns must show continuous and theoretically infinite growth. This eventually leads to enshittification, especially if the market is consolidated enough for competition to be low. When there aren’t any more kids to enroll in youth sports, private equity owned firms will need to start squeezing more money out of their existent customer base, either by enticing them into more expensive programs (with the dangling carrot of professionalism, no doubt), or simply by raising prices. Maybe it’s because I’m a dirty communist or whatever, but I think that youth sports is a community good, and the people in charge of it shouldn’t be doing it just to extract as much profit as possible.

Trump-rubbing-his-nose-into-sports roundup:

• At the beginning of June, Trump issued a travel ban on 12 countries, with an additional 7 facing some restrictions. This sucks in general, but also in ways specific to sport. While there’s an explicit exception for athletes traveling to the 2026 FIFA World Cup and the 2028 Olympics and other “major” sporting events, there is no clear way to determine what sporting events count as major. It’s also unclear if family members and fans from restricted countries will be able to attend evvents, major or not, or if professional athletes who play in the USA but originate from restricted countries will be affected.

• In mid-July, Trump did a whole lot of posting about how the Washington Commanders and Cleveland Guardians should change their names back to their previous iterations, which used indigenous names/slurs and iconography. He said that many Native Amerians want this, though he didn’t see fit to show any evidence of this. He also said that he might put “restrictions” on the Commanders and not let them build a stadium in Washington DC if they refused to change the name. They currently play in Maryland, anyway, so in my opinion it’s not a very strong threat.

• On July 25, Trump signed an executive order calling for the Department of Education to disburse funds to public universities to enforce new scholarship regulations and Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) deals. It nominally seeks to stop “pay-for-play” deals in which the NIL framework is simply used as a way to compensate athletes for their time and expertise, and support additional scholarships for non-revenue generating sports, like most womens and Olympic sports. But it seems incredibly unclear if any of this will actually happen, especially given that Trump is in the process of dismantling the Department of Education entirely. Boise State University professor Sam Erlich summed up the general reception of the order: “Is this just a threat or something that is actually going to lead to something? Will the executive branch actually insert themselves into these situations to enforce this? And what will be the unintended consequences if it does get followed up on?”

On your way out:

• Sustainable fashion journalist Katie Robinson made a great video about the three-way alliance between big fashion, big oil, and Formula 1. It’s a great watch!

• I’ve been listening to the new Tyler, The Creator album on repeat. Full of bangers and gets stuck in my head all the time.

• I finally got around to making another Instagram reel for my oft neglected fiber arts account (@stellaslittleprojects). It’s about a dress I made this spring and I think it turned out super cute.