Will 2024 be the last year of tennis as we have long known it? To ward off the threat of a Saudi Arabian takeover, plans are on the table for a “Premier Tour”, a combination of the four Grand Slam tournaments and a dozen other marquee tournaments. Will they all hold in the same direction?
Australian Open, Roland Garros, Wimbledon and US Open. Everyone knows the four cornerstones of the tennis calendar.
This is the only support. Besides the Slams it is a great chaos. WTA 250, ATP 500, Masters 1,000, ITF tournaments… Tennis fans haven’t been able to see the forest through the trees for a long time now.
How could it be different? No fewer than 7 organizers contribute: the ATP for men, the WTA for women, the four organizers of the Grand Slams and the International Tennis Federation (ITF).
The result: a packed schedule, with players having to compete on five different continents from January to November.
In 2024, 71 ATP and 58 WTA tournaments will once again be concentrated in 11 months. And that doesn’t even include the Olympic Games.
The overcrowded calendar has long been a thorn in the side of many players, but previous attempts at reform have always failed, because all the organizers have different interests.
This became painfully clear during the corona period. When the French Tennis Organization reinserted Roland Garros into the calendar without consultation, the other organizers found themselves faced with a fait accompli.
Saudi hijackers on the coast
Rancor between players and a divided landscape. It’s a breeding ground for Saudi hijackers on the coast.
Saudi Arabia is keen to get its foot in the door in tennis. In 2019, the kingdom launched a demonstration tournament with the Diriyah Cup, but an ATP or WTA tournament has yet to take place.
This year Jeddah won the Next Gen ATP Finals for five years, the championship reserved for the best players under 21, but for the Saudi sheiks this is nothing more than a sweetener.
And they have already shown that the Saudis will not patiently wait their turn in 2022 by upending the world of golf. With plenty of money, the Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF) has attracted many top players to the alternative LIV Golf Tour.
Could tennis become the next victim of Saudi debauchery?
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Not if Andrea Gaudenzi manages to do it.
To avoid a LIV scenario, the president of the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) wants to appease Saudi Arabia with a top-level tournament. More specifically, a Masters 1,000 event, the prestigious tournaments that rank just below the Slams.
According to the British newspaper The Times, a plan is now on the table to land on Saudi soil starting from January 2025, a week before the Australian Open.
It would completely shake up the preparation for the first Grand Slam tournament of the year.
Instead of the traditional preparatory tournaments in Adelaide, Brisbane and Hobart, the best players would compete 12,000 kilometers away on the Arabian Peninsula.
Premier Tour as an answer
The fact that the Australian tennis season is being treated as collateral damage in the Saudi tennis deal has not pleased Craig Tiley, the head of Tennis Australia.
At Wimbledon, the organizer of the Australian Open decided to enlist the support of other Grand Slam tournaments for an alternative plan to sideline the Saudi threat.
The program: the Tennis Premier Tour. Taking the Formula 1 calendar as a source of inspiration, Tiley wants to combine the four Grand Slam tournaments and a dozen other major tournaments into a single competition for around the world’s top 100.
The details have yet to be defined, but according to The Athletic these include the prestigious tournaments in Indian Wells, Miami, Madrid, Rome, Cincinnati…
The proposal has several advantages: top players have to play fewer tournaments and the tennis season becomes easier for fans to follow.
And what about tournaments that end up forgotten? These would be used by players outside the top 100 to collect points and secure a place on the Premier Tour.
You have 14 major events, making it easy for fans to follow tennis.
Taylor Fritz, number 10 in the world
The Professional Tennis Players Association (PTPA), the tennis union founded by Novak Djokovic in 2020, is open to the proposal.
Taylor Fritz, world number 10, is also a big supporter. “It’s a great idea,” the American said at the start of the season.
“There are 14 major events, which makes it easy for fans to follow tennis. And beyond that, there is no longer a crazy schedule for us.”
Yet promoter Craig Tiley stresses there is still “a lot of work” to do. It is therefore necessary to get many people on the same page.
“There is a great opportunity for tennis to offer a leading product in a more coordinated way,” he concludes hopefully.
It already seems clear that tennis will look different in 2025. The only question remains: which path will be taken?
2024-01-06 08:16:51
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