Professional tennis is (still) broken. Here’s how to fix it (again)

Each year, the vise squeezing tennis toward some level of fundamental change grows a little tighter. Since 2023, the sport has been doing what it does every decade or so: having a fundamental reckoning with its format, calendar and tournament structure, which fatigues some players and fans alike.

No other major sport has been as successful in delivering equality between men and women, though work remains to be done. Few major sports benefit so greatly from global spread and near-24/7/365 matches. But, just as has been the case for years, nearly everybody involved agrees that the structural mess of governance and play cannot continue.

Where they disagree is on how to change it, and into what. The pinnacles of the sport should be the four Grand Slams; the sport needs to develop as many players, in as many places, with as much opportunity to earn a real living, as possible. These are two poles about which everyone agrees. What lies between is up for constant debate.

In the past year, two possible hinge moments have occurred. In typical tennis fashion, they could not be more different.

Last March, a player body filed an antitrust lawsuit against the men’s and women’s tours, the world tennis federation and its anti-doping authority. A few months later, the Professional Tennis Players’ Association, which 24-time Grand Slam champion Novak Djokovic co-founded, removed the world federation and anti-doping authority as defendants and added the four Grand Slams, sharpening the focus of a suit previously bloated by odd conspiracy theories, and quotes from top players who said they did not support it.

The ultimate goal is getting those players a better proportion of prize money as tournament revenue and making the calendar less intense.

A few months later, Djokovic left the PTPA. A couple of months after that, the Australian Open became the first major to reach a settlement with the PTPA, giving it information in exchange for release from potentially financially ruinous damages. The French Open, Wimbledon, the U.S. Open, the ATP Tour and the WTA Tour still have motions to dismiss or defang the lawsuit in place. They have also held meetings about how to reach détente.

As the legal process plays out over the next year, the pressure on the sport’s leaders to create a schedule that is more remunerative and less taxing for the players may ratchet up. Separately, a group of top men’s and women’s players has banded together to pressure the Grand Slams to pay them more than the roughly 18 percent of revenues they currently receive.

The other hinge moment came this February, when the WTA Tour pledged “meaningful improvements” to its calendar by 2027, by way of a new council. Its top stars have said its rules on which tournaments are mandatory and the penalties for missing them are too stringent, while the tour says player welfare is a priority and that those rules have brought increased prize money.

How much it can do without the cooperation of the ATP Tour and Grand Slams, whose interests in the biggest events and when and where they are held would influence any change, is up for debate. But it is a statement of intent.

Everyone has a view. The former world No 1 Daniil Medvedev suggested this week that only the Grand Slams and 1000s should carry ranking points, reducing the need for players to chase points at smaller events, a plan even he acknowledges will not be realized.

But what can happen now? Plenty — if tournaments and players can think a little creatively to ease the wear and tear on the players, improve the product and make it more appealing to fans.

The Athletic spent the past months asking people in tennis for their ideas about fixing it, and the places in which change could happen.

How long should a tennis match be?

This is not the age-old debate about whether men should play best-of-five in the Grand Slams while women play best-of-three. One of the last things that Craig Tiley, the former Australian Open tournament director and Tennis Australia chief who just joined the U.S. Tennis Association, said before he left his role? His former tournament wants women to play best-of-five from the quarterfinals onward.

Overall, the sport has grown increasingly physical. While rallies are not really getting longer, as many players believe, matches have been, especially on the men’s side at the Grand Slams. Arguments in favor of trimming formats say that they introduce more tension into contests sooner, and reduce workload on players. Arguments against say that they introduce too much variance into a sport that is supposed to reward overall skill, as well as physical conditioning.

The match tiebreak in general has some backing. Mary Carillo, the broadcaster, former French Open mixed doubles champion and soon-to-be Hall of Famer is clear about this. “At the majors, if the men play to two sets all, play a damn 10-point tiebreaker,” she said in a voice message. Counterfactually, that would mean the epic 2025 French Open final between Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner would not exist. But in reality, any format change would see players adjust to the new tempo of matches.

Jamie Delgado, a longtime coach who has worked with Andy Murray, Grigor Dimitrov and now Jack Draper, sees replacing the third set of matches with a 10-point tiebreak as a change that could help produce variety, instead of the same collection of players winning all the time.

“If you’re the best player and the conditions are always the same you kind of back yourself to always win,” Delgado said during a recent interview. “If you change the surface a little bit or the conditions a bit and brought it to the two sets, they might not.”

How would this go over with fans? Mischa Zverev, the former pro who now manages and in-part coaches his brother, world No. 3 Alexander, wants tennis to ask them.

“They’re the ones who pay money that want to come and see us,” he said during an interview. “If they want to see us play up to four, we will play up to four. If they want to see us playing a champions tiebreak as a third set, and they’re like, ‘whatever,’ we’ll play.”

Andrea Gaudenzi, the leader of the ATP Tour, has been dead-set against making matches shorter. He longs for the days when the finals of the ATP Masters 1000 tournaments, a rung below the Grand Slams, were best-of five sets.

“Why should we make our product smaller and less relevant?” he said last fall.

What can the rankings do to help players, rather than exhaust them?

As it stands now, the tennis rankings are a carrot and a stick all at once.

On both the men’s and women’s tours, a player’s ranking comes from their best performances across the year, in 18 tournaments. Until this year, the ATP Tour figure was 19. It’s still 19 if a player qualifies for the Tour Finals for the best eight players of the season, and the same is true on the WTA Tour.

Both tours also have a set number of mandatory tournaments, for which a player will receive zero points if they don’t participate. On the WTA Tour, not all of them can be counted toward a player’s ranking, because there are 21. On the ATP Tour, there are 18.

The more tournaments a player enters, the better chance they have of good performances and higher rankings. The less they play, the less margin for error. That all makes sense. But penalizing players for missing events can have the effect of incentivizing over-playing.

Then there are the new tournaments. A non-mandatory ATP Masters 1000 will arrive in Saudi Arabia as early as 2028. It is expected to be played in February. And complicating matters is the fact that the mandatory events, or events that are non-mandatory but important, come in bunches.

For the women, the Qatar Open in Doha and the Dubai Tennis Championships in the United Arab Emirates are consecutive. This year, the schedule was even more intense, because there was only one week between the Australian Open finishing and the Qatar Open starting, when there are normally two. At the Dubai event, there were 10 withdrawals just before it and four mid-match retirements from a field of 56 players.

On both tours, there’s the Sunshine Double, comprising the BNP Paribas Open at Indian Wells, Calif., and the Miami Open, which occupies March. After a week’s break — or not, for players lower down the rankings, who need to win points at smaller tournaments too — there’s the Madrid Open, Italian Open and the French Open essentially all in succession.

“It just feels a bit rushed,” Delgado said.

When it comes to making changes, fewer mandatory events and fewer ones that account for your rankings would be a good place to start,” said Romain Rosenberg, the PTPA’s deputy executive director. “Nineteen or 18 events is a lot,” he said in a phone interview.

“It’s not the fact that we don’t need a ranking point system, it’s the fact that the ranking point system today is designed to incentivize players to play pretty much all the time.”

The WTA’s new council, which 2024 U.S. Open finalist Jessica Pegula will lead from a player perspective, is designed to start softening some of that. WTA chair Valerie Camillo said that “there has been a clear sentiment across the Tour that the current calendar does not feel sustainable for players.” The way it dovetails with the rankings system aggravates that feeling, but without cross-tour reform, the impact of any changes will be limited.

What about the two-week, 1000-level events?

They are going to be around at least until 2030, when the contracts call for a review.

So far, even players who were enthusiastic about the increased prize money and bonuses that have come from extending five of the biggest tournaments outside the Grand Slams from seven days to 12 have found those tournaments to be a grind.

For fans too, these events can feel interminably long. The way matches are arranged means some are better than others, but in some cases, quarterfinals are played across two days and finals land at strange times. Carillo joked that “it feels like the Masters 1000s refers to how many days it takes to finish them.”

And so at the end of the first full season with all five in their new two-week form, a litany of complaints has unspooled. The longer events are supposed to offer players more rest. Instead, they are more exhausting. They are supposed to offer owners more revenue, but their schedules put finals on strange days. They are supposed to offer more entertainment for fans, but their length means narratives stutter, rather than catching fire. During an interview last fall, Gaudenzi, the plan’s architect, asked players to give the format time.

Is there a stopgap solution? Come the second week of all these events, there are players in need of tennis and courts in need of filling. They have offered more opportunity to lower-ranked players, by expanding draws from 56 to 96, but players who lose early often have nothing to do for more than a week. They still have to cover the expenses for their teams.

One solution could be staging some of the alternative events that have started to gain prominence, from 10-point tiebreak tournaments to the “One Point Slam” that was such a success at the Australian Open. Sponsors would profit, tickets would be sold, and players could compete for more money — and plan ahead more easily.

“A month could be minus $20,000 or $30,000, or it could be plus whatever you’re winning. You have no idea and you can’t plan,” Zverev said.

Billie Jean King, a pioneer on and off the court, is certainly in favor of meeting fans where they are on special events.

“I would have made it the biggest event in tennis and the most money if you’d let me do it 50 years ago without any question,” she said during an interview of the U.S. Open moving its mixed doubles event to a $1 million showcase for stardom.

“It should be the biggest, most money event. It’s human beings, it is about the world, it is about who is our audience.”

That primacy is not on the horizon. But it’s clear that fans love seeing men and women competing against each other — without any need for modified courts.

How to protect players’ bodies from the schedule – and themselves

Incentivization is also a problem when it comes to players’ health. Skipping mandatory or important tournaments is one way to miss them; getting injured is another. Someone like Holger Rune, the former top-five men’s player who ruptured his Achilles tendon at the end of 2025, will be out for roughly a year.

He’s not earning much money when he’s not playing, since he doesn’t have a contract like a player in team sports. Some sponsorship or endorsement contracts stop paying players if they are injured for an extended period. Overall, the tours are committed to prioritizing player safety, but their structures can lead players to play sooner than they ought to or more than they should.

There are systems designed to guard against this. Men’s players can use their average ranking, calculated during the first three months of a layoff of at least six months, for nine months or to enter nine tournaments, whichever comes first.

If the layoff goes beyond 12 months, they get to use the protected ranking for 12 tournaments or months. Women’s tennis uses a player’s ranking when they get injured for eight tournaments, or 12 if they are out longer than a year.

The tours are also moving to standardize tennis balls across each “swing” or part of the tennis calendar. Currently, tournaments played on the same surface and in the same part of the year might use very different balls because of sponsorship contracts. A perceived decline in quality of the balls since the Covid-19 pandemic has led players to increasingly blame them for injuries, or to say that they make rallies and matches feel longer and harder, even though rally length is not increasing.

“We know that variability and balls and variability in equipment and surface definitely have an impact,” said Dr. Robby Sikka, the PTPA’s medical director, of the relationship between conditions and injuries.

He would like to see players consulted more around injury risk and preventions.

“My first thing would be, can we do a player survey across the board to find out the issues that are going on across all of tennis?” Sikka said in a phone interview. “What are the best events? What are the events where they feel like the services are best?

“We do this in other sports where we do a survey and we collect that information and we find out which teams are taking care of families better, which teams have the best locker rooms, which teams have the best training rooms. Let’s find out what the best practices are. And reproduce them and reproduce access to the best services.”

How to distribute tournaments across the world

Every February, tennis fans flick on their televisions and see rabid crowds in Argentina, Brazil and Chile, and mostly the opposite of that in Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. But the ATP and WTA have both prioritized growing into Saudi Arabia, with the men’s Masters 1000 tournament to come there and the WTA Tour Finals held in Riyadh the past two years and for at least this one too. WTA chief executive Portia Archer said last year that an extension is possible.

“There are trade-offs,” she said during an interview last fall. “I think, as you noted, that we’re building fandom, and so that’s not the same as reaching our hardcore fan that already exists.”

Tennis needs to grow to all parts of the world, and money is important too when it chooses to do so. But plenty of tennis players say the tours are missing a huge opportunity in not going to South America more often, even if doing so might require more changes to how things currently work.

In an interview last year, three-time French Open champion and former world No. 1 Gustavo Kuerten said he experienced this every time he arrived back in Brazil from a triumphant trip, with fans greeting him at the airport. In an interview of his own, Argentina’s former world No. 8 Diego Schwartzman made an impassioned case for how much tennis would benefit if it gave more support to South America.

In February 2024, three-time Grand Slam champion and former world No. 1 Murray posted on X: “South America should have its own dedicated swing on the tennis tour with its own masters series. The way the fans support the tournaments there is incredible. Amazing atmospheres and is clearly part of their sporting culture. Vamos @atptour!”

This issue is only getting more pressing because of the timing of the new ATP Masters 1000 event in Saudi Arabia. February is the natural place for it to sit, and Gaudenzi has said that he wants a swing of tournaments in Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia to run concurrently with tournaments in South America.

But the new Saudi Arabian event has the most rankings points and prize money to award, and the existing Qatar Open and Dubai Tennis Championships are 500-level, one rung below. The Rio de Janeiro Open is also a 500, but the Argentina Open is a 250, and they are played on clay while the other events are on hard courts, making players change surface from hard to clay after the Australian Open, and then back again for the Sunshine Double of the BNP Paribas Open at Indian Wells and the Miami Open.

The South American tournaments are a harder sell, and they have less money with which to convince players. But the fans are some of the best in the sport. And any shorter schedule runs into a fundamental obstacle.

“The big difference between tennis and nearly every other sport is that tennis events are tied to participation,” said the owner of a mid-sized tournament in 2024. “Formula 1 is a spectacle. You can’t grow a global participation sport with 14 tournaments around the world.”

Or how to change the calendar entirely?

Paul Annacone, who is part of Taylor Fritz’s coaching team and has worked with the likes of Pete Sampras and Roger Federer, has been in pro tennis long enough to know that change doesn’t come easily.

He would love to see the tour simplified, but above all, he would love to see a joint year-end event to see out the season in style.

“Instead of the ATP finals, let’s have say, the world championship finals,” Annacone said in a phone interview.

“And you combine it in terms of governance and oversight with the women’s event. So you have say eight men and eight women at one mega-event at the end of the year. How romantically enticing does that sound? It doesn’t take a genius to figure that out. But it does take a genius to figure out how to navigate all the pathways to actually make it happen.”

Others have specific ideas about tweaks that could be made to the calendar throughout the year. “Move around that overstuffed burping calendar of ours so that there’s a decent break after Wimbledon,” Carillo said. “Let the top players take a few weeks off in the summertime and for the rest there’d be 500s and 250s. You could make Canada a 500 event and you’d still get a good field.

“And then a one-week Masters before the (U.S.) Open. Fall is fine for the team events and the smaller year-enders and then you get a long break before the circus tents go up again in January.”

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

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