THE ENTITY which runs The Championships at Wimbledon is called the All-England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club but these days that name is almost misleading enough to warrant an appeal to the trades descriptions act.

The most quintessentially English of tournaments has embraced the age of global marketing with a vengeance, contributing to the £26.3 million surplus (the word "profit" is far too coarse for SW19) that it handed over to the Lawn Tennis Association (LTA) last year, more than half of the governing body's annual income.

No fewer than 34 Wimbledon shops can be found in a variety of cities throughout China, approximately 350,000 Wimbledon branded sports shoes were shifted in Japan last year at a number of regular trade fairs and only this month a partnership was reached with India's TVS Motors to produce a range of scooters in the trademark green and purple.

It all means that whether a British player wins or not, whether or not rain disrupts play, it should always be game, set and match to the oldest tennis tournament in the world.

In the kindest possible sense, running Wimbledon in today's global marketplace is a bit of a racket.

This surplus figure was as low as £400,000 back in 1980 and should probably even be higher if it took into account the reinvested building costs for the revamped Court No 2, or the retractable roof and expanded seating capacity at centre court which will both be fully operational by next summer.

But then, maximising commercial income is a little problematic when even onsite advertising itself is regarded as the height of vulgarity.

Instead, the Championships operate a variation of the class system, where some 25 companies in eight different markets are licensed to become merchandising partners and only the most reputable, high-end brands are permitted to pay a fee to become "official suppliers".

This ever-expanding list covers everything from the 1902 arrangement with Slazenger to provide the tennis balls, to IBM who officially provides the information technology to deliver Hawkeye.

Recent arrivals to this supporting cast are Evian (the official bottled water) to dilute your Robinson's (official still soft drink since 1934), and HSBC, who in these credit crunch-dominated times, have come on board as official banking partner.

Treading this fine line between commercialism and crassness since 2005 has been Ian Ritchie, the chief executive of the AELTC, something which he certainly didn't have to worry about when launching Channel 5 as a brazen new boy on the TV marketplace back in 1996.

A line in the sand has been drawn about any deviation from all-white clothing, overt on-site advertising, and playing on grass, but other than that all bets are off, especially expanding traffic on a Wimbledon website which already touches 10 million users in the course of Wimbledon fortnight.

"You sometimes have the impression this is a stuffy old place, with loads of blokes in blazers, and what do they actually do?," Ritchie told the Sunday Herald. "Yet I think we are reasonably astute commercially around the world to make £30m a year.

"To make that out of two weeks a year is not bad going and you can only do that due to a reasonable amount of activity around the world.

"There is the core on-site event which you wouldn't touch and I don't think we should touch but then you've got all these opportunities in the rest of the world and by different means. There is an appetite for this around the world which I think we should be pretty aggressive about."

The main issue boils down to not jeopardising the tournament's current market-leading position for a quick buck. For instance, don't expect to see any adverts for fried chicken lining the walls of the centre court any time soon.

"There are a lot of pressures on quoted businesses which short term, year on year, have to show absolute profit growth, and can have very little view on the long term," Ritchie said. "But we are in a privileged position where we are able to look to the protection of the brand, which for the medium term of the business is the right thing to do.

"You could go out quite easily here and pay short-term money, plaster the place with advertising, call it the whatever centre court' in a sponsorship deal, but I think you would say hang on' you are destroying the very brand value which has crept up over the years.

"There are things I think you would tinker with at your peril, you might not feel the affects in five years, but you would definitely feel it in 15 or 20. Our view of life is about optimising income, not necessarily maximising income."

Ritchie's get-out clause is the fact he defines the word "tradition" in the most flexible of terms. Is it "tradition", he asks rhetorically, to "allow for somebody to lose the match because of a bad line call, when you have got the technology that you can stop that?" Or is it tradition "that we endlessly show reruns of Borg-McEnroe tie breaks or that people who achieve a lifetime ambition to come to the centre court get their day washed out?"

One tradition which will remain intact next year will be the covers coming on at centre court during rain breaks, as it will take 10 minutes for the roof to fully close, but Ritchie will not entertain any discussion about the introduction of night matches.

Whether they appreciate it or not, all this global revenue-generating activity filters back to help the supporters. Organisers are less beholden to ticket sales, and less affected on those occasions when the weather deteriorates.

Prices for a day pass can be kept down to manageable levels (£20), hospitality seats at centre and No 1 courts can be kept to 8%, and regardless of Marat Safin's comments during the week, prices for strawberries and cream can be kept below inflation.

For the record, a punnet of strawberries and cream has only gone up from £1.70 in 1993 to £2.25 in 2008.

"It is lovely when the sun shines, but in terms of the economics of the business there is not a huge amount of flexing there because centre and No 1 are always sold out anyway," said Ritchie after a week in which attendances have been up every day on last year.

"When it is raining we don't have a bad financial time, and when the sun is shining, we don't have huge financial benefit."

The organisers are not the only ones finding there is money to be made out of Wimbledon. While entrepreneurial home owners along the main route from Southfields tube station have hired their garden or drive out to burger or juice bars, certain nameless tennis players are implicated in altogether more criminal money-making schemes.

Matches at the Championships are among those being probed for suspicious betting patterns, and Ritchie is among those charged with establishing a "central integrity unit" for global tennis, commencing his action on the topic by limiting access to players' locker rooms prior to matches.

"With the betting thing, you've got to recognise it is a threat," Ritchie said. "The changes to locker room access are only a small part of it, there are 15 recommendations on the report which we are all going to implement in due course."

Having recently agreed new long-term deals with all their main broadcasters - the BBC are signed up till 2014, and further contracts are in place with US duo NBC and ESPN, and NHK in Japan - looming on the horizon is the end of the existing mutual co-operation agreement between the AELTC and the LTA, which comes up for negotiation in 2013, a full century after it first came into being.

Whether or not another British winner emerges in the next 100 years, Wimbledon itself will continue to do the business.