r/tennis•
YaoPau

Idea for a new tennis format: would you be for or against it?

I was looking through tennisabstract pages yesterday and found something interesting that isn't talked about much: how many matches top players play compared to the middle-ranked players. For example: David Ferrer (rated #4) played 95 matches last year over 27 tournaments, while Xavier Malisse (rated #63) played 51 matches over 29 tournaments.

Issues with the current set-up

It seems kind of backwards to have 32 professionals + 20 qualifiers fly out for an event, and to have half of them play 1 match and then leave. Those players lose money from travel/hotel expenses, the fans lose by seeing fewer and fewer matches as the tournament goes on even though there are 52 professionals who reserved that week to play tennis in their town.

We get less-accurate rankings because some players like Malisse only play 50 matches a year when they're capable of playing 80+, and the quality of tennis suffers I'm guessing when you have someone like Ryan Harrison playing a total of 5 matches in the last 2.5 months because he keeps losing first round. Really hard for a 20 year old to improve that way. You also have strange consequences from the tournament format. For example, Murray and Del Potro have only faced each other 7 times in their career despite that being a great match that I think most fans would love to see.

New format: each week is just a bunch of matches, like how any other sport operates

Here was my hypothetical thought instead: instead of a tournament, there are a series of divisions depending on location, and players can apply/enter whichever division they want (assuming they have a high enough seed). So if Wayne Odesnik is getting killed by travel expenses, he can choose to play in the North American division to reduce costs. If Sam Querrey wants a challenge, he'll sign up for the European division so he can play Federer/Nadal/Murray/Djokovic. From there, each ATP250/500 "tournament" is just a week of randomly paired matches, with each player guaranteed 4 matches over the course of a week regardless of whether he wins or loses, and maybe the final day the top 2 players (by record that week) face off in the final match of the tournament (#3 vs #4 can play just before that, and so on) so there is added excitement. All players receive a minimum salary that covers basic expenses, and each win earns you more money (although it'd be less staggered than the current format where the winner can take 20% of the prize money).

The benefit for the fans is that whichever day you can come there will be several great matches, with all the courts full. The benefits for players include more matches for the bad players, and the top players will get more rest between matches. I'm not sure if tournaments could charge more money based on putting on more matches over the course of the week, but that's a possibility too.

Then we can still have the regular tournament format for the ATP1000s and Grand Slams.

Posted Apr 14, 2013, 1:05 AM UTC

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