MADRID – The debate surrounding doubles is growing in intensity. While Salvadoran Marcelo Arévalo criticized those who disparage the format, the head of the Madrid Masters 1000 sees things differently: doubles tournaments must be reformed because they cost an unjustifiable amount of money.
“Doubles don’t sell enough to justify the cost they represent for a tournament,” Gerard Tsobanian, president and CEO of the Spanish tournament, told CLAY, in an interview also published in RG Media.
“Unfortunately, in tennis tournaments, doubles don’t sell enough to justify the cost they represent for a tournament. I would like every singles player to also play doubles. Or that every doubles player be required to have a certain singles ranking,“ added the Frenchman of Armenian origin.
Tsobanian understands that the doubles tournament cannot settle for specialists in the modality alone, that the way to attract spectators and justify the cost of the event is to attract ”top-level players“ to doubles. ”An endless debate,” he adds with some frustration.
The total prize money for the last edition of the Madrid tournament was €8,055,385. The winner of the singles tournament, Norway’s Casper Ruud, took home €985,030. The doubles champions, Argentina’s Horacio Zeballos and Spain’s Marcel Granollers, shared €400,560. Tsobanian understands that doubles does not justify its cost compared to what singles generate. And he leaves open the question of how many tickets are bought to see a doubles player.
Doubles, an essential and historic form of tennis, certainly does not feature the best-known players today. Although in the 1980s a great player like John McEnroe formed one of the best pairs in the world alongside Peter Fleming, it could well be said that this was an exception: from then on, the best players did not follow the example of the greats of the 1950s and 1960s, who for the most part played doubles with the same consistency and enthusiasm as singles.
For the “Big Three” (Novak Djokovic, Rafael Nadal, and Roger Federer), doubles was a rarity, although both the Swiss and the Spaniard won gold medals in the event at the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the 2016 Rio Olympics, respectively. Today, figures such as Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz also do not give much importance to doubles.
The tradition of doubles in women’s tennis was stronger until relatively recently, with stars such as Martina Navratilova, Steffi Graf, Martina Hingis and the Williams sisters, but in recent years the best players have also moved away from the doubles event.
An expert observer of the tour, Tsobanian believes that the debate over how to structure the men’s calendar is also “endless,” but he is against turning the circuit into something only for elite players. In this sense, he stands on the opposite side of the fence to his mentor, Romanian Ion Tiriac, who has been proposing for years that tennis be structured like Formula 1: only the best competing to win each week.
“I don’t see it. Cancel the 250s and only have 500s and Masters 1000s to create a top league like they want to do right now? The question is whether the players want it, and I don’t think they do, because they want to have the chance to play in smaller tournaments. Djokovic, for example, played and won the ATP 250 in Geneva before Roland Garros.”
“I think you have to have a clear vision. If the top players play, and how many of them, and from when can we call them elite? The top 50 in the rankings? The top 40, 30, 20? Can they only play 500, Masters 1000 and Grand Slams, or can they play smaller tournaments?”
“It’s true that there are a lot of 250s, but that’s also the strength of tennis. It’s a worldwide, global sport, there’s a tournament every week somewhere in the world, we take the sport to all parts of the world, combining men and women in the same event, something that not many sports do. Tennis is a complete product. It’s unique, it’s privileged, and we have to preserve that.”
Tsobanian also spoke to CLAY about Latin America’s desire to host a major tournament, a Masters 1000. American Butch Buchholz, creator of the Key Biscayne tournament, wanted to do it in the late 1990s, when the format was still called Super 9. Tiriac also thought about it.
“South America has a long tradition of important tennis, with great players. There were discussions about bringing a Masters 1000 to Buenos Aires, and I myself was involved in discussions with Tiriac and the people interested. They told us about what a great place Buenos Aires was to host a Masters 1000.”
When was that? “Less than ten years ago, before Tiriac sold the tournament [from Madrid to IMG].”
The idea, Tsobanian believes, makes sense. But there is an obstacle.
“The problem is economic. While in the Middle East it is more of an audience problem, in Latin America it would be more of an economic problem than an audience problem.”
