It is not entirely certain which message was the serve and which was the return. The statement that the Upper Bavaria district recently published sounds partly defensive. If she wasn’t the return, then she was pretty timid as a serve. Possibly because it was already the second serve and the first one went miserably into the net. The tournament should be “completely barrier-free and visitors with handicaps receive free entry,” is what it says about the ATP tennis tournament in Ismaning, which, by decision of the district council, will also receive a subsidy of 15,000 euros this year. Serve back, return back: It was no problem for the left-wing district councilor Klaus Weber to score the point with a cross-played forehand shot.
The district, which is primarily responsible for social affairs, repeatedly saves on assistance for people with disabilities. “But there is money for a millionaire spectacle,” said Weber, who had already denounced such a subsidy for “tennis millionaires” in 2021. At that time it was just under 43,000 euros, almost as much as the prize money paid out at the tournament that year. By the way, the winner in 2021 was Oscar Otte, who had already reached the round of 16 of the US Open a few weeks earlier. The tennis professional association ATP now lists prize money for him totaling just under $2.5 million or around 2.3 million euros. Even if Otte certainly can’t count all of this as a net profit, at least he can be considered a kind of “tennis millionaire”.
In view of Weber’s points victory in 2021, Upper Bavaria’s district council then capped its sports grants at 15,000 euros and adopted new funding guidelines, according to which the sum could not be spent on prize and entry money. And exactly these 15,000 euros for the Ismaningen professional tournament are being awarded for the third time this year because a large majority of the district councilors voted in favor of it again. Ultimately, the purpose corresponds to the company’s own funding guidelines. Only Left District Councilor Weber joined the opposite motion from the FDP on behalf of his committee community of a few small parties. Next, according to the district, we will probably talk about the funding guidelines again.