Wimbledon: Format, History and All-Time Champions

No tournament wears its age quite like Wimbledon. It is the oldest championship in tennis, first contested in 1877, and the only one of the four majors still played on grass. The All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club runs it from a leafy corner of southwest London, and the surface, the near-total insistence on white clothing and the queue outside the gates all reinforce a reputation for stubborn tradition. Look closer, though, and the record shows a competition that has revised its scoring, seeding, schedule and even the length of its final sets far more often than its image suggests. The lawns stay the same; the rulebook does not.

This guide explains how the modern Championships are structured, follows the changes that produced that structure, and ranks the singles champions by titles won.

The first Championships

The inaugural event took place in July 1877 at the club’s original ground on Worple Road. There was a single competition, the Gentlemen’s Singles, and Spencer Gore, a 27-year-old who had come to the game from rackets, won it from a field of 22 entrants. The laws were far from settled. The rectangular court had only recently replaced the hourglass shapes used in some early versions of lawn tennis, and the net was steadily lowered over the next few seasons toward the height familiar today.

Women joined in 1884, when the Ladies’ Singles debuted and Maud Watson beat her sister Lilian in the final. Gentlemen’s Doubles became a Championship event the same year. Ladies’ Doubles and Mixed Doubles were both granted full status in 1913. From early on the tournament ran on the challenge-round system, under which the defending champion skipped the opening rounds and simply waited to play the winner of an “all comers” draw. That arrangement survived until the club reorganised in the 1920s.

1877Year of the first Championships

Church Road, and the long amateur era

In 1922 the club relocated to its present site on Church Road, built around a new Centre Court, and abolished the challenge round so that titleholders had to work through the draw like everyone else. The decades between the wars produced the game’s first genuinely international stars, from France’s celebrated quartet of male players to the American Helen Wills Moody, who gathered eight singles titles between 1927 and 1938.

For almost its entire first century, Wimbledon crowned amateurs only. There was no prize money, and the best players of the 1950s and 1960s who turned professional found themselves shut out of the majors. That looked increasingly absurd as paid tours drew away the leading talent, and in 1968 Wimbledon joined the small group of events that opened their draws to professionals.

The Open Era and the pay question

The 1968 Championships, the first of the Open Era, went to Rod Laver in the men’s singles and Billie Jean King in the women’s. Opening the field deepened the competition and enlarged the event’s commercial reach almost immediately. King spent years pressing for fairer pay, but change at Wimbledon came slowly: the tournament awarded equal prize money to its singles champions only in 2007, the last of the four majors to close that gap.

How the modern draw works

Each singles event is a 128-player single-elimination draw, so a champion has to win seven matches to lift the trophy. Players enter by one of three routes: direct acceptance on world ranking, an organisers’ wildcard, or the qualifying tournament, which is staged away from the main grounds at Roehampton in the days before the Championships begin. Thirty-two players are seeded in each singles draw, spaced so the top names cannot meet before the closing rounds.

Men contest best-of-five-set matches; women play best of three. The main doubles draws hold 64 pairs, and the fortnight also features mixed doubles alongside wheelchair, junior and invitation competitions. Seeding used to be a Wimbledon peculiarity. For the men’s singles the club applied its own grass-court formula from 2002, adjusting the world rankings to reward recent results on grass. That method was dropped in 2021, and men’s seedings now follow the standard rankings, as the women’s list always had.

Scoring: the part that keeps changing

If any element of Wimbledon has been rewritten within living memory, it is the scoring. The tie-break arrived only in 1971, first triggered at eight games all before settling at the now-standard six-all. For decades, though, it deliberately did not apply to the deciding set. A final set still had to be won by two clear games, and every so often that rule produced a marathon.

The most extreme instance came in 2010, when John Isner beat Nicolas Mahut 70-68 in the fifth set of a first-round tie that stretched to 11 hours and 5 minutes across three days, still the longest match in the sport’s history. Momentum for change grew, and in 2019 Wimbledon introduced a deciding-set tie-break, but only once the final set reached 12 games all. That halfway measure did not last. In March 2022 the four majors agreed a common standard, and Wimbledon now settles a level deciding set with a 10-point tie-break at 6-6, in the fifth set for men and the third for women.

Grass, roofs and the calendar

The court itself is managed with the same care as any part of the operation. Since 2001 the lawns have been sown entirely with perennial ryegrass, chosen for its durability under heavy foot traffic, and are cut to eight millimetres during the fortnight. Grass yields a lower, faster bounce than clay or hard courts, which historically rewarded big servers and net-rushers, though slower modern grass and heavier balls have long since drawn baseliners into the picture.

Weather once governed everything at Wimbledon, and the club has spent heavily to blunt its effect. A retractable roof went up over Centre Court in 2009 and over No. 1 Court in 2019, allowing play to run through rain and into the evening under lights. The schedule shifted too. For most of its history the tournament kept the middle Sunday as a rest day, which forced all the fourth-round singles into a frantic “Manic Monday.” From 2022 that Sunday became a normal day of play, turning the event into an unbroken 14-day tournament and reducing the backlog that bad weather used to create.

The most successful singles champions

Among the men, Roger Federer holds the Open Era record with eight titles won between 2003 and 2017, one clear of the seven shared by Pete Sampras and Novak Djokovic. Further back, William Renshaw took seven titles in the 1880s under the old challenge-round rules. Bjorn Borg’s five straight crowns from 1976 to 1980 remain one of the most admired streaks the game has produced.

On the women’s side, Martina Navratilova stands apart with nine singles titles, six of them in succession from 1982 to 1987. Helen Wills Moody’s eight rank next, with Steffi Graf on seven. Serena Williams won six times between 2002 and 2016, a total that keeps her among the leading champions of the Open Era. Counting every discipline, Navratilova collected 20 Wimbledon titles across singles, doubles and mixed doubles, a career haul no one has matched.

20Navratilova's total Wimbledon titles (all events)

The winners receive trophies as recognisable as the event itself: the gentlemen’s silver-gilt cup, first presented in 1887, and the ladies’ Venus Rosewater Dish, a decorated silver salver introduced in 1886.

A reference verdict

Wimbledon’s aura of permanence can hide how readily it has adjusted around the edges while guarding what matters most. The grass, the whites and the 128-player knockout endure, yet the bespoke seeding formula came and went, the deciding-set tie-break was adopted and then standardised, the roofs arrived and the middle-Sunday rest day disappeared. Conservative in appearance and quietly practical in operation, that mixture is exactly why the oldest championship in tennis still reads as the sport’s benchmark rather than a relic.