After a three-hour life-and-death struggle with Alejandro Turriziani Alvarez, a Spanish qualifier ranked No829 in the world, Liam Broady collapses into a cheap plastic chair beside the umpire at Vale do Lobo Tennis Academy and stares vacantly at a crowd of no more than a dozen people gathered in vigil at court side. The lowlights of a 2-6, 7-6, 7-6 loss replay in his mind like a pulsating headache for minutes until eventually he hauls up his haggard frame and trudges back to the clubhouse, retreating to the nearest toilet to escape the mutters of sympathy.
Two and a half years ago, the 32-year-old from Stockport was the last British man in the singles draw at Wimbledon after stunning Casper Ruud, the world No4 at the time, in a five-set epic on Centre Court — a victory for which he earned £131,000. After a first-round defeat on the Futures circuit worth £240, his thoughts turn to self-flagellation and retirement. “When’s your flight?” Broady asks after he re-emerges, still distraught with his tennis bag on his shoulder before offering an apologetic handshake. “I know what I said, but if I talk to you now I’ll completely lose my head.”
‘Everyone’s fighting for their daily bread’
“It will be good for you to see the rawness of what it’s like after I’ve lost,” Broady says when we meet a few days earlier. I jokingly warn that his opinion could change, but he is a likeable, open book, keen to give an unvarnished insight into the mad and monotonous world on the lowest rung of men’s professional tennis.
The M25 Vale do Lobo is, in truth, one of the more glamorous events on the Futures circuit. The tennis club ordinarily caters for holidaymakers in one of the Algarve’s many golf resorts, with four pristine outdoor hard courts and a handful more in shabbier condition for practice. There is a gym for the players to warm up in and a café offering poké bowls and quinoa salads — even if players must still pay for their food themselves.
Over the course of his 12-year career, Broady, the world No283, has been stranded in remote corners of China, played matches under the smoke of burning tyres in India, and shared a room with his dad in a brothel in New York — inadvertently, he hastens to add — to sustain his dream. A warm winter in Portugal may not conjure as much sympathy, but the reality is less sunny than imagined. The previous year in Faro, water was leaking through the roof on to the indoor courts.
The prize money for the winner of Futures events is just under £3,500. After factoring in flights, accommodation, a rental car, food, and the wage he pays his brother, Calum, 28, to be his travelling companion and manager, Broady estimates he is already £1,000 in the red before his first practice session. Some players will bring their coaches to tournaments, but Broady cannot afford to, so Calum, a former semi-professional footballer, feeds him balls. The night before I leave for Portugal, a package of natural gut racket strings arrives in the post. Made from a cow’s intestine, they have a softer feel than polyester and so should lessen the strain on Broady’s recent pectoral injury.
“The stringers are a bit chaotic because most of them are club coaches at this level. Last week in Faro, the guy didn’t know how to string gut properly. He started snapping strings and then he went absolutely ballistic at me. They’re about £35 a set,” Broady says.
The pro in Vale do Lobo is competent, but the stringing itself costs £14 a racket. Roger Federer used to get eight done for every match. Broady sticks to two a day. Only used balls are provided for practice at Futures events, which wear out quickly and do not replicate the feel in a match, so Broady has to purchase his own, along with hiring a court for practice at scruffier venues.
As the fourth seed, he is guaranteed first-round prize money from which his entry fee is deducted, but those who go through qualifying must cough up £30 and receive nothing if they fall short. They also have to call their own lines with umpires only present for the main draw. “When I was having to build my ranking back up last year, I hadn’t played in qualies [at Futures] for like ten years. I did my warm-up, was in the zone, and a woman ran on to the court saying I hadn’t paid,” Broady laughs.
The camaraderie among the players goes beyond just needing to save money — Broady shares an £85-a-night Airbnb with Calum, one of the rare occasions they’ve had separate rooms, but others will cram four into a flat and then draw each other in the tournament. They compete tooth-and-nail but then share dinners and practise together the following morning. “You need people to bounce off or it becomes a very lonely existence,” Broady says.
It is the proving ground for young hopefuls, the lifeblood of journeymen in overdraft, and a landing spot for the likes of Broady, who have tasted the air of the summit only to be plummeted back down the mountain. A few weeks after he finally cracked the top 100 in 2023, a fractured ankle ruled him out for the best part of six months. By the end of the following year he had tumbled to No546 and is still the chasing ghost. The one thing that unites them all is the desire to escape their purgatory.
“It’s this small community that lives a completely bizarre life. None of us have worked a normal job. Hardly anyone’s got any education. I always think it’s like the wizards and mudbloods [a derogatory term in the Harry Potter books to describe pupils born to non-magical parents]. Nobody can really relate to you apart from other players. A normal person gets sacked once but we lose every week. There are 64 players here including qualifying, and there’s only one guy that won’t feel shit at the end of it. Spread that across ten Futures this week and that’s 630 losers. Everyone is fighting for their daily bread. It’s like the underbelly of the sport.”
‘I spent ten years trying to achieve it and then it was gone’
There are no easy routes in tennis, even if British players have better opportunities than most. Broady grew up in a working-class family in Stockport.
His father, Simon, renovated houses for a living, often plastering and painting walls for 16 hours a day. He traded hours in a home-built recording studio to a local coach who was in a band, for tennis lessons for Liam and his older sister Naomi, 36, who peaked at No76 in the world rankings.
By the time he was a teenager, Liam was one of the best juniors in Europe, and Simon sold the family home to fund their travel up and down the country in an old Nissan Almera. “Once we drove from Manchester all the way to Sardinia for an under-18s event and then back for two days straight and carried on to Edinburgh to play a pro event when I was 16 years old. It’s funny when you look back on all the stuff you did just to make it work,” Liam says.
After Broady finished as the runner-up in the boys’ singles at Wimbledon in 2011 and the US Open in 2012, agents circled and sponsors dangled five-figure deals. He seemed on course for stardom, but his momentum stalled when he transitioned to the Futures circuit, embarking on losing streaks of seven, and later even 12, matches. Broady survived on LTA funding and Wimbledon wild card prize money but he was still treading water and, in 2017, he hit rock bottom, eating poorly and drinking in pubs as his results waned while living in a £12-a-night hostel in Bath, “sleeping with my tennis bag like a teddy bear so no one robs it in the night”.
In 2019, he was in £4,000 of credit card debt. Still hard-up during Covid, Broady began coaching at tennis clubs in Manchester. “It was f***ing shit,” he says, bluntly. But being confronted with that afterlife made him appreciate how much he loved the hamster wheel. In 2021, he won his first Challenger title and qualified to represent Team GB at the Olympics. Then he reached the third round at Wimbledon in consecutive years. “I bottled the junior Wimbledon final, so to beat Ruud in five sets on Centre [Court], it felt like I’d shed all the years of crap I told myself that I was born to be a loser,” he says.
It also finally propelled Broady into the top 100 — a golden safety net guaranteeing entry into all four grand slams and more than £250,000 in prize money. “That’s when you start to think, two or three years of this and I’m set for life,” he says. Broady desperately tried to persevere through the pain in his ankle on a diet of pills, and even flew all the way to Australia, only to abort his first practice session and admit surrender. “I’d spent ten years trying to achieve it and then it was gone and I had to go back to square one,” he says.
The cruel reality is Broady may never scale those heights again, but a strong run of results could grant him direct entry into bigger events on the second-rung Challenger Tour, which is still nirvana next to the Futures. The total purse at the Oeiras Open 3, a Challenger 125 event near Lisbon next month, is £175,000 compared with the £22,000 that was on offer in Vale do Lobo — and players get their hotel rooms covered for a minimum of five nights. “If this year doesn’t go well, I’ll probably have to stop,” Broady says. “That’s just the nature of this sport. It’s brutal.”
‘It’s like Groundhog Day. Every f***ing day’
Amid the battle for survival, the daily routine for tennis players on the Futures circuit can be decidedly mundane. Broady starts the morning with tinned sardines, olive oil, almonds, and cereal. Qualifying for the main draw is under way so it will be hours until a court is free for practice, and the £40 fee to hire one in neighbouring Quinta do Lago would be too extravagant. Given the sterility of their Airbnb, Liam and Callum drift from one café to another, having a single espresso at each — their tally often reaches five a day — before wandering down to the tennis club.
An unusual number of British faces makes passing the time more tolerable — the LTA now stages about ten Futures events each year to kickstart players on home soil. Henry Searle, 19, who became the first Briton to be crowned Wimbledon boys’ champion in 61 years in 2023, is one such player going through the same adaptation as Broady 15 years earlier. Dan Evans, the former British No1, is on site too, mentoring Searle while he recovers from a wrist injury. The quartet play games of tennis football on a padel court, their shouts drowning out the cries of anguish from qualifying next door.
When there is less company, Broady has been prone to developing obsessions. A history and culture buff with a particular fascination for the Romans, he is reading The Lives of the Caesars by Suetonius. “I’m like a bloody raccoon on methamphetamines, wanting to go everywhere and see everything,” Broady says, laughing. The National Archaeological Museum of Cagliari was perhaps his favourite. Other highlights include visiting the pyramids in Egypt, walking around Jerusalem, and eating wagyu beef in Japan. Food poisoning in Mexico that confined Broady to a toilet for the duration of a long-haul flight and being stiffed by taxi drivers in Tunisia sit nearer the bottom of the list.
Less intellectual “fixations” have included video games, Pokémon cards, go-karting, and golf, which Broady had to give up after he spent three hours at the range and hit so many balls his hands were covered in blisters — he already has to tape certain fingers before every match to stop them from cutting and cracking.
The players all have their own stories to tell. Sean Hodkin, the world No1,588, joins the group with red cheeks and a fist bump after a gruelling win in the first round of qualifying. The 27-year-old from Scunthorpe used to fund his travel by giving private lessons to businessmen in London while sleeping on an air mattress in a friend’s office. He also worked as a hitting partner at Wimbledon, where his jobs included warming up Sir Andy Murray for his final Wimbledon.
Since then, he has started a YouTube channel charting his life on tour, which has quickly grown to 15,000 subscribers, and is helping to cover his losses each week. Broady’s worst night amid the sounds of coitus in his suspect hotel in New York ahead of the US Open juniors pales in comparison to Hodkin’s nightmare.
“I just ran into the wrong person at the wrong time in the Czech Republic,” Hodkin says. “I was staying in a room in a hotel on top of the tennis centre which had a shared bathroom. I walked up the stairs to use it and there was this massive guy with his wife and his kid, his door was open, and I could see a gun on the chair. Next thing he’s banging on my door, shouting in Czech. I thought I better open it because if I don’t he might kill me or something, and he grabs me by the collar and pushes me up against the wall.
“He was a gangster on the run and thought I was there to kill him. I showed him my tennis bag and he got on the phone to this guy running the tournament who said I was a tennis player and to leave me alone. And then afterwards he sat me down on the bed with his arm around me and was telling me his life story. I was like, ‘Can I go to bed now? I need to get ready for my match tomorrow. I’m trying to qualify here?’ ”
Broady and Searle practise together in the late afternoon once qualifying has finished before killing time in the evening by watching football. The next two days follow a similar pattern, with Calum feeding balls to Liam for a practice session around lunchtime on one of the courts not fit for matches before later playing a set with Searle.
Having got to Vale do Lobo on Saturday evening, Broady is glad his first-round match is finally around the corner on Wednesday. He arrives at the tennis club around three hours early, spends about an hour warming up with Searle, sharing the court with two other players, before stopping for lunch — a grilled chicken breast with beetroot salad. He knows little about his opponent due to a lack of footage online.
“This is the part I won’t miss. It’s like Groundhog Day. Every f***ing day,” Broady says of the wait. “To be honest, at the start of last year [after coming back from injury], I really struggled with it, but I’ve played a lot of matches and got back to being comfortable. Also, I feel pretty good about my game. I try not to be overly serious. I don’t want to wallow in the nerves because it makes them worse.”
Tennis can be fickle. A few games into the match, Broady turns to Calum, who is watching nervously through the cage behind the court. “It feels like I haven’t played for a week,” he says. Despite breaking twice and cruising through the first set, Broady is distracted. The players are only given four new balls after the first nine and then every 11 games, as opposed to six after the first seven and then every nine games on the ATP Tour, and he is miffed about one going missing.
Then a questionable call irks him. “I saw it touching the line,” the umpire says, prompting Broady to chunter. “No, you didn’t.” Calum shakes his head. “This guy never does anything easily,” he says. Alvarez, 23, remains stubborn, surviving a series of break points before seizing on Broady’s errant serve. “I don’t know how he’s making these f***ing shots. He’s swinging like mad,” Broady says after losing the tiebreak.
A small crowd of fellow players gather at court side as the prospect of an upset grows. Alvarez’s framed volleys catch the line and net cords fall on Broady’s side of the court. The odd double fault adds to his frustration. They trade breaks and stumble to the finish line. It is an hour-long tussle that encapsulates all the blood, sweat, and tears of professional tennis. After Alvarez edges the tiebreak 8-6, Broady goes pale, like a visitor to his own wake. On Instagram, the abusive messages and comments start flooding in from gambling addicts telling him he should kill himself.
When we meet for lunch at the tennis club the following day, perspective has begun to stem the bleeding. “It’s so difficult to process straight afterwards and not get emotional and insecure. You almost need to let yourself feel shit for an hour or two so you can snap yourself out of it,” Broady says. “The whole of yesterday evening, I was just thinking like, ‘I’m spending a lot of money to do this. How am I going to get back up there?’ Every loss adds to that dynamic of: is it right to keep going? Like, f***, I’ve just been chopped by a guy who is No900 in the world. But that’s the highs and lows of tennis at the end of the day. I’ve not had a low like that in a while, but you’ve just got to keep knocking on the door.
“In tennis there are a lot of people who are from privileged backgrounds. They don’t get to see what life can be like. Where I’m from, life can be shit. It can be difficult. You can slog and graft for 50 years and not see much for it. If it wasn’t for tennis, I’d have never got to see the things I’ve seen and meet the people I’ve met, so whatever happens, I’m eternally grateful for it.”
As Broady heads off to practise, a scream from the furthest court abruptly stops everyone in their tracks. “What are you doing? The whole match. Nooo!” the player in question shouts after a poor line call on match point before ranting all the way back to the clubhouse and throwing a racket at his bag. Broady stifles a laugh. “There you go. The Futures tour. What a way to finish.”
