Patrick Mouratoglou provided his thoughts on the current state of tennis which many believe are a crossroads.
Tennis as a sport has some interesting years coming up and though the future looks fine, some things could be changed to make it even more appealing. There is a valid argument about the sport losing young supporters due to other sports because it tends to be quite rigid in its nature. Flexibility is not something you think of when you talk about tennis but rules are.
It's not really a good recipe if you want to attract a new and more importantly a young fanbase that will allow the sport to thrive for many years. Mouratoglou agrees that it's a problem that needs to be addressed on time.
We need to renew our fan base. We need to bring the young fans on board – and we don’t.
Some of that will happen organically as people fall in love with the sport thanks to the likes of Carlos Alcaraz, Holger Rune, France Tiafoe, and other young players that are a great watch. Tiafoe in particular offered some interesting comments recently. Mouratoglou analysed them as they won the support of some colleagues already.
When Frances said that he wished that tennis would be more like basketball, a lot of people went against him, and when I retweeted, a lot of people went against me, too. Tennis is a very traditional sport with a lot of history and with fans that are very conservative and traditional and they want tennis to stay the way it is.
One thing particularly sticks out to Mouratoglou and that's the young generation who doesn't follow the sport at all. There just doesn't seem to be any interest and perhaps it's time to stray away from the typical tennis model.
The young generation is not following the tour, is not watching matches, is not watching full matches. And this includes the professional players who never watch full matches either. So that’s why I thought it was very interesting to propose a different tennis, besides the normal tennis, the classical tennis, this other tennis is called UTS, and the goal is to explore what would be the ideal product to seduce the younger fans and make them really love tennis.
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