LONDON — The Lawn Tennis Association gave Tatjana Maria an honorary lifetime membership of Queen’s Club when she won last summer. What it did not give her this summer was a spot in the draw.
Maria, the 38-year-old German who became the oldest WTA 500 champion in history at Queen’s twelve months ago, was denied a wildcard for the 2026 HSBC Championships and forced to come through qualifying — a process that, because of rain delays, required her to win two matches on the same day. She was, at the time, the top seed in the qualifying draw. She was also, at that point, the reigning champion of the event.
She won both matches. But the episode has opened a pointed debate about how the LTA allocates wildcards and whether its stated policy — reserving all four entries for British players — holds up against its own history.
“I think with all the respect of what I did last year, I was pretty sure to get a wildcard or I was hoping to get a wildcard,” Maria told reporters after qualifying. “It was not, like, five years ago. It was last year and especially this tournament and to come back like a champion — I hoped and I thought I would get a wildcard.”
The LTA’s wildcard decisions landed one week before the tournament began, confirming that Katie Boulter, Francesca Jones, Harriet Dart and 17-year-old Mika Stojsavljevic would fill all four slots. Maria, ranked 54th in the world, sat just outside the cut for direct entry into the 28-player main draw; the difference was a handful of ranking points. Tournament director Laura Robson communicated the decision to Maria’s camp directly. “All the wildcards would go to the British players,” Maria said she was told. “Which I understand of course, but as a champion, it’s tough for me.”
The LTA offered a defence that laid out the policy plainly. “The LTA owns and invests in staging these events for the benefit of the British game as a whole — so fans can see world-class international players from around the world and support our British players,” an LTA spokesperson said. “We have seen British success at these events and breakthrough wins, so there is clear value in giving British players these development opportunities.” The statement did not address the specific case of a defending non-British champion, nor the question of precedent.
That precedent is precisely what Maria’s husband and coach, Charles-Édouard Maria, chose to invoke. Speaking to The Daily Telegraph, he pointed to Feliciano Lopez, the Spanish player who won the men’s Queen’s title in 2017 and received a wildcard for the following year’s event. “It’s sad,” Charles-Édouard said. “After all the advertising they did for the tennis women, all the headlines last year about ‘The Queen of Queen’s’, the reality is that they are not helping us.” The LTA extended that courtesy across national lines when Lopez benefited from it. In the intervening years, the British-players-only policy had apparently hardened.
Maria’s run last year at Queen’s was not merely a sporting upset. Women’s tennis had returned to the club for the first time since 1973 — a landmark in the sport’s effort to reclaim prestige venues — and Maria, seeded nowhere, came through qualifying, beat former Wimbledon champion Elena Rybakina and reigning Australian Open winner Madison Keys in back-to-back matches, and defeated Amanda Anisimova in the final 6-3, 6-4. The LTA leaned on the story heavily in the months that followed. Maria said the volume of support from Queen’s Club members after the wildcard decision became public surprised even her. “They came to me and said, ‘really we don’t understand why you didn’t get the wildcard’,” she recalled. “So it was super nice.”
She also made clear she had not seen the decision coming. In an interview for the Tennis Weekly podcast, she said she had been planning on the assumption that a wildcard was effectively guaranteed. “With all due respect to what I did last year, I was pretty convinced I would get a wildcard, or at least I expected one, because of what I did last year,” she said. Instead, she found herself entered into the second-tier Lexus Birmingham Open the week prior, leaving her in the logistically difficult position of needing to reach the Birmingham quarterfinals before she could travel to London for qualifying — a schedule she ultimately navigated to make the main draw.
The controversy touches something unresolved in the governance of smaller WTA events, where tournament directors retain broad discretion over wildcard allocation and no formal obligation to consider a defending champion’s status. At the Grand Slams and higher-tier events, ranking-based entry covers most of the draw; it is at the WTA 500 level, where a handful of ranking points can separate direct entry from qualifying, that the choice becomes most consequential. Maria’s situation contrasts sharply with that of Serena Williams, who received a wildcard for the same tournament on the strength of her return narrative. Maria herself called for a structural response rather than an apology. “It is something that should be normal,” she said. “If you are champion of an event and you don’t get in the year after, I think automatically this should be considered. It’s something out of respect.”
The 2026 HSBC Championships draw features Elena Rybakina and Amanda Anisimova — both of whom Maria beat en route to last year’s title — as well as Williams, making her first competitive appearance since the 2022 US Open. According to Sky Sports, Maria’s ranking at No. 54, built on points accumulated since a second return from maternity leave, will decline automatically if she cannot match last year’s result. That calculation — the one the LTA did not make when allocating wildcards — is now hers to manage from inside the main draw.
Maria said the response from her daughters Charlotte and Cecilia, who watched her grind through those two qualifying matches Monday, made it matter anyway. “Yesterday I wanted to win also for my girls to stay as long as possible because they really love to be here and they love the tournament,” she said. What the LTA thinks of the episode, beyond its spokesperson’s statement, it has not publicly elaborated. Whether a wildcard policy review follows — for this tournament or others run by British governing bodies — is not yet clear.
The women’s event runs through June 14. Wimbledon begins June 29.
