It’s impossible to forget Gerard Piqué warning of the collapse of tennis before he himself, with the invaluable collaboration of the International Tennis Federation (ITF), destroyed the Davis Cup. Impossible to forget him, yes, because the former Spanish footballer has now been reincarnated as a French tennis coach, Patrick Mouratoglou, the new prophet of extinction.
Mouratoglou says that in 20, 30 or 40 years’ time “there will be no more tennis”. That will happen when he no longer has to work and is happily retired, but the way to prevent it would be to capitalise on and boost one of his businesses today. A cynic might say that this is to help secure that happy retirement for Serena Williams’s former partner. The Ultimate Tennis Showdown (UTS) as a shield against the meteorite hurtling unstoppably towards those dinosaurs with rackets.
What does Mouratoglou, owner of UTS, argue?
“Tennis is a relic of the past. It was created before 1900, and the format has remained virtually unchanged since, if at all.”
“Consumption patterns have completely shifted. Social media, streaming platforms, video games, people under 30 don’t consume content the way they used to. When I ask them, 100 per cent tell me they don’t watch matches anymore. Too long. They watch highlights. The product isn’t suitable. It’s suited to us, to me. Not to those under 30.”
Mouratoglou is right when he argues that the new generations approach sport differently from previous ones. But isn’t that what happens generation after generation?
It is true that digitalisation and AI have accelerated everything to unprecedented levels, but it is precisely this acceleration that prevents us from drawing such drastic conclusions. The world is moving at an unprecedented pace, and these very generations are sending mixed signals: many cannot live without TikTok, yet many of them, too, increasingly favour the human and ‘analogue’, tired of anonymity and digital uniformity.
To say that tennis is “a relic of the past” and that its format has remained “virtually unchanged” since the 19th century is, for Mouratoglou to understand without difficulty, a “boutade”.
If tennis hasn’t changed, neither has football. Or the other way round: tennis has changed just as much as football has. There’s no meteorite in sight. Just as is the case with Andrea Gaudenzi, the head of the ATP, Mouratoglou would do well to venture out of Europe more often – a continent and a society that are not necessarily the measure of all things. Nor does it make sense to gauge the future of tennis based on the age-old prophecy, yet to be fulfilled, that in the United States the sport will soon cease to matter to anyone.
Tennis is hugely popular in Latin America. It is experiencing a boom in Brazil thanks to the impetus provided by Joao Fonseca and a golden age in Argentina, a country with ten players in the top 100 of the ATP rankings.
If the future of tennis is such a concern, how does one explain that a continent with the highest proportion of young people in the world, Africa, has just one tournament in the entire annual calendar? It is the ATP 250 in Marrakech. South of the Sahara, there is nothing.
Why ignore the phenomenon of Australia, a country that loves tennis like few others in the world? What happened to tennis’s determined push into China? And what plans are there for India? Will Central America and the Caribbean continue to be ignored, another part of the world with a large young population where a challenger tournament like the one in Cap Cana aspires to join the main ATP circuit?
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Why keep the epicentre of professional tennis so far removed from many regions of the world that, as Mouratoglou rightly argues, bring fresh blood and enthusiasm to a sport that is now one of the most universal in existence?
Why not take the promotion of tennis seriously so that watching matches – the full match and its highlights – is simple and affordable? The French coach is right on that point.
Although the annual calendar, particularly the men’s one, suggests otherwise, tennis is much more than just Europe and the United States. The day that is understood, the ‘meteorites’ that Piqué saw will cease to torment Mouratoglou as well, a man as capable of analytical insight as he is skilled at delivering dramatic soundbites.
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