The All England Lawn Tennis Club (who oversees the yearly Wimbledon Championships) have an incredible depth of archive footage in its vaults. AELTC have more or less every final from the Open era, male and female, plus important matches that are not available on YouTube due to current copyright laws.

Intelligently, The United States Tennis Federation and Australian Open Federation have got round this issue by taking control of the situation and releasing all of the archives themselves. This gives the Federations complete control and allows millions of tennis fans around the world to enjoy archive matches in master tape high definition picture quality.

Wimbledon have not published any archive matches since 2020 and the height of Covid 19 when everyone was forced to stay at home. I have no idea why Wimbledon refuses to release anything. Wimbledon is in a unique position. It is a private club, but at the same time a public organisation. A public organisation usually has different aims and responsibilities. In this scenario the instincts of the private club take over, as they feel no need to engage. On the other hand, the US Open and Australian Open are run in conjunction with their Federations. The remit is wholly different; this is reflected in their outlook on releasing archive matches to the public. After all, tennis players play for the public.

Here is the US Open YouTube Channel and Australian Open YouTube Channel, they release archive footage on a daily basis.

https://www.youtube.com/@usopen/videos

https://www.youtube.com/@usta/videos

https://www.youtube.com/@australianopen/videos

The Wimbledon Digital Team ignored my correspondence over the last eighteen months. I’ve enquired to them directly whether they have the matches and if they intend to publish them in a controlled manner. I received correspondence from the Communications Team but the Digital Team have consistently ignored my email correspondence, I know for a fact that Wimbledon does have the archive matches in their vaults. In July I made a Freedom of Information request to the BBC on whether they had these matches and would consider releasing highlights on the BBC Sports YouTube Channel. In particular I enquired about the 1998 Wimbledon semifinal, 1999 Wimbledon semifinal, 1999 Wimbledon final and 1999 Queens final. I received this response from the BBC:

The FOI Act does not apply to information held by the BBC for any of those purposes. This is explained in an information sheet enclosed with this letter.

To be clear, in this case we have not searched for any information since any that we found would be non-disclosable, and the searches would not serve any useful purpose. However, on this occasion, we are happy to voluntarily provide the following information in response to your request.

We do hold these matches, however they do not belong to the BBC. They belong to

Wimbledon (Lawn Tennis Association) and we simply have a contract to broadcast the material for them under licence.

We have no known intention to rebroadcast the older matches, as we are dealing with the current tournament.

Many of the matches mentioned are available on YouTube. Wimbledon itself has an official YouTube channel, available to everyone: http://www.youtube.com/wimbledon

Information Commissioner's Office

Besides the matches I enquired about, there are so many other historically important matches hidden from public view. Such as the 2000 men’s final, 2001 men’s semifinal, 2003 men’s final, 2005 ladies final, 2006 ladies final among countless other early round matches from the 1980s onwards.

If you wish to see Wimbledon release these historically important matches, please join me and sign this petition.