The Wimbledon Effect? Pah! New balls please

As strawberries and cream provide their annual boost to the British economy, it’s worth asking what became of the “Wimbledon Effect”. This was a term coined to describe Britain’s economic policy in the 1980s and 1990s, when the home nation was lucky if any of its so-called tennis stars made it into the tournament’s second round.

“Who needs British champions?”, said Wimbledon Effect enthusiasts, when the country still hosted one of the world’s top tennis tournaments. In the same way, no matter that, post-Big Bang, British banks were driven out of the City by foreign competitors, London was still one of the world’s great financial centres. The argument later expanded into a benign view of foreign buyers of British champions in industries of all kinds, from telecoms to chocolate.

Today, the Wimbledon Effect may be fading. Foreign talent is no longer so welcome. The corporate boxes on Centre Court are still full of rich foreigners, but they are more likely to fly home to Milan than contribute daily to the British economy, following  scrapping of non-dom tax breaks. Post-Brexit, there is also a sense that foreign owners have been more willing to move jobs out of the City than would have happened under British ownership.

Since the woeful 1990s, Britain has actually produced a few players capable of winning a Wimbledon title. Does that have lessons for our economic model? Unkind folk might see the country’s current top male player as a continuation of the “nepo baby” strategy that Britain has long excelled at, given he is the son of a former head of the Lawn Tennis Association. But, like Andy Murray before him, Jack Draper is more accurately an example of a homegrown talent who had to leave to pursue his dreams somewhere abroad that invests properly in developing tomorrow’s tennis stars

Ironically, as a model of how to create a booming British industry by brilliantly nurturing homegrown and foreign talent side-by-side, it’s hard to beat Premier League football and its lucrative academy system. This global brand has boosted Britain’s economy by attracting vast amounts of foreign capital and talent (thanks to a supportive government visa program), while making club and national teams alike much more successful. Staying metaphorically in south-west London – move over Wimbledon, let’s model the economy on the Chelsea Effect.