Does tennis really need to be shorter?

In January of this year, at the Australian Open in Melbourne, Craig Tiley told The Athletic that the women’s competition should introduce best-of-five sets from the quarter-finals onwards. All the research, he said, showed that interest grows as the match goes on, and that tennis, as a sport, needed to evolve.

Eight months later, in September, in the same city, his successor as Tennis Australia CEO stood up at the SportNXT conference and proposed almost the opposite. Andrew Abdo, formerly chief executive of the National Rugby League and five weeks into the Tennis Australia job, said the men’s game may not need to play best-of-five all the way through, that the point-scoring system may need to change, and that if you want to maximise your commercial outcome, you are in the entertainment game.

Between them, these two men have run the tournament that in January produced the longest semi-final in its history, in which Carlos Alcaraz beat Alexander Zverev in five hours and twenty-seven minutes. Both men are talking about the same competition. They have arrived at directly opposite answers.

The week the evidence landed

The US Open finished on the eve of Abdo’s remarks in Melbourne, and the fortnight it had just delivered was an active rebuke to the shorten-the-sport case.

Novak Djokovic’s first-round loss lasted four hours and thirty-six minutes and averaged 958,000 ESPN viewers, peaking around 1.3 million. It helped deliver ESPN’s biggest US Open opening-day audience ever. The 2025 Wimbledon men’s final between Sinner and Alcaraz peaked at 8.8 million UK viewers, up from 7.5 million the year before, and that Wimbledon generated a record 69.3 million BBC digital viewing requests across the fortnight. The 2025 US Open men’s final between the same two players averaged three million US viewers, up 82 per cent year on year, and quarter-final viewing that fortnight was the highest in a decade.

Nor is any of this only about the finals. Emma Raducanu’s third-round Wimbledon match against Aryna Sabalenka in 2025 attracted a five-million UK peak, one of the most watched non-finals in several years, and nothing about the scoring was different. The protagonists were. And this month at the US Open, Serena and Venus Williams put twenty-three thousand people into Arthur Ashe Stadium for a first-round doubles match. Doubles, first round, not the main singles championship, traditional scoring.

None of that is proof that duration is a matter of complete indifference to anyone anywhere. It bluntly destroys the assertion that people will no longer watch long tennis. They will, when they are given a reason.

What tennis has already tried

The sport has been trying to compress itself for a long time.

Ultimate Tennis Showdown, launched by Patrick Mouratoglou in 2020, is the most radical version. Four timed eight-minute quarters, one serve, fifteen seconds between points, bonus cards, live coaching, microphones on the players and interviews during matches, spectators allowed to make noise. It has real audiences. The 2024 London Grand Final sold more than twenty thousand tickets over two sold-out days, the 2025 London event again reported approximately twenty thousand attendees, Sky Sports acquired UK and Ireland rights for the 2025 final, and it paid out $1.865 million in prize money. Ticket prices reach £600 for VIP courtside. UTS is a real sports product. Its sustainable profitability is publicly unproven, and the players it uses to make the product work, from de Minaur to Rublev to Ruud, are the same tour stars that conventional tennis uses.

INTENNSE, an American team-format league that plays seven ten-minute “BOLTs” inside a ninety-minute team contest, has grown sharply in its second season, from three teams to ten, from a few thousand spectators to nearly eight thousand across twenty-eight events in Atlanta, with ticket revenue up more than sevenfold. Its promoters have been unusually candid about the underlying economics. Sports Business Journal reports the league has raised more than ten million dollars, expects two to three million dollars in revenue in 2026, and is targeting profitability in 2028. That makes it a credible sports startup, not an established commercial hit, and its growth path involves adding recognised personalities and investors alongside the shorter format, from Sloane Stephens to Diego Schwartzman to the Bryan brothers to Terrell Owens to Martin Brodeur. Format, plus characters, plus teams, plus storytelling, plus investment. Not ninety minutes alone.

Tie Break Tens, which reduces a match to essentially a ten-point tiebreak, was formally adopted by the ITF in 2025 as its official short-format partner and is being taken into junior and participation programmes. That is a real and durable role for it, and it is a complementary form of tennis, not a challenger to the professional tour.

The ATP’s Next Gen Finals may be the most instructive of the lot. Recognisable tennis, but with first-to-four-game sets, best of five, no-ad scoring, shorter breaks and faster point clocks. It has explicitly served as an innovation laboratory. Electronic line calling and coaching experiments that appeared there first subsequently migrated to the main tour. Next Gen’s philosophy is to test which parts of the existing sport can be improved rather than invent a new one. Its current format preserves best of five acts, each act shorter.

And World TeamTennis, running some version of shortened team tennis since 1974, is the warning case. It has been putting teams, shortened scoring, men and women, stars, noise, entertainment and local franchises on the same court for half a century. That is fifty years of the ideas the current experiments treat as new. After Covid the league fell to five teams in 2021, cancelled its 2022 season saying the franchises had been financially damaged, promised a 2023 relaunch, and as of this year has not resumed. A clever format does not create fandom by itself.

The comparators everyone reaches for

Cricket is the sport everyone reaches for. T20 proves that a shortened version of a sport can become enormous. IPL 2025 reached 537 million television viewers and 652 million digital viewers, and its final reached 426 million people, with JioStar reporting extraordinary watch-time and participation across television, mobile and connected screens.

The T20 story, however, is not “cricket shortened, therefore audiences grew”. The IPL introduced or amplified city franchises, player auctions, global stars concentrated into teams, salary economics, night-time television, music, colours, identities, a compact season, regular rivalries, huge marketing, clear standings, playoffs and modern media-rights economics. It did not shave two days off a Test match. It created another sport within cricket.

The ECB’s Hundred is the cleaner example. It was explicitly built to attract people who did not traditionally watch cricket. After five seasons it had passed two and a half million cumulative attendance, and just over two hundred thousand of those attendees had bought a ticket to their first-ever cricket game. In 2025 it sold five hundred and eighty thousand tickets, forty-one per cent to families, and grew its Sky audience by thirty-eight per cent. Investors subsequently paid amounts that will generate more than half a billion pounds of proceeds for stakes in the eight franchises. The design brief the ECB itself identifies is short window, iconic venues, family audience, men and women on the same stage, world-class players and fan experience. Duration is one feature inside a whole new product architecture.

FIBA 3x3 basketball did not shorten NBA games. It created a distinct sport, on half a court, with three players a side, in urban settings, with different pace, different identity and different event culture. By 2025 the World Tour reached over two hundred territories, generated more than a billion digital exposures and grew its social following from 7.3 million to 10 million in a year, with around seventy per cent of its audience aged between thirteen and thirty-four. That is a younger audience built alongside NBA basketball, not by compressing it.

And Formula 1’s Sprint is the most relevant comparator for the Grand Slams. F1 did not shorten the Grand Prix. It introduced an additional shorter competitive event on selected weekends. In 2024, Sprint weekends averaged ten per cent more television viewing than non-Sprint weekends. In 2025, seventy-eight per cent of surveyed fans wanted Sprints to stay, and Sprint weekends generated more social conversation and reach than the ones without. Protect the crown-jewel format, add compressed jeopardy around it. There is a lesson there for the Slams that neither Abdo nor Tiley explicitly reached for.

The one commercially proven tennis innovation

Laver Cup barely changed the scoring at all. Its innovations were Europe versus World, teams, captains, three days, players sitting courtside together on team benches, rising stakes through the weekend, scarcity and stars. Roger Federer himself has described the appeal as watching the world’s leading individual rivals become teammates for a weekend. Tennis Australia owns twenty per cent of Trident 8, the company operating Laver Cup, and its 2025 accounts record A$1.978 million as Tennis Australia’s share of Trident 8’s profit and A$1.336 million of dividends received. It is one of the very few tennis-format innovations of the past decade for which sustained commercial success can be shown from the audited accounts of a shareholder rather than from the promoter.

Which brings us back to Melbourne

Every product that has visibly worked, from the IPL to the Hundred to FIBA 3x3 to F1 Sprint to Laver Cup to the revamped US Open mixed doubles, has done considerably more than shorten a sport. Each has added stars, or teams, or narrative, or access, or a whole new product context. In every case, the shorter format has been the vehicle for that expanded meaning.

The evidence was not on Abdo’s side. Tiley’s proposal in January was to lengthen the women’s final rounds because his research showed interest grows as the match goes on. The 2026 US Open, which Tiley now runs at Flushing Meadows in his new job as USTA CEO, has just spent a fortnight producing exactly that pattern at scale, with five-set epics on centre courts, records on opening day, doubles matches filling Arthur Ashe because Serena and Venus were playing, and a qualifier ranked one hundred and twenty-first in the world coming from nowhere to reach the quarter-finals as a story that ran across three broadcast weekends.

Abdo may be right that tennis needs to evolve. Tiley may have been right that women’s finals should extend to best-of-five from the quarter-finals. Their two answers point in opposite directions on the length question but that question may not be the most important one. What matters more is what each minute of a tennis match delivers to the person watching it.

A five-set Djokovic loss on day one of the US Open pulled a million viewers on ESPN. A doubles first-round match involving Serena and Venus put twenty-three thousand people into Arthur Ashe. A Wimbledon third-round match involving Emma Raducanu drew five million UK viewers. Tennis has an audience for its long format when the sport supplies a reason to watch.

Tennis may not need fewer minutes. It needs more meaning per minute.

Some of that meaning is who is on court. Some of it is how much of what they are doing the person watching can "see" and derive meaning from. Formula 1 fitted 300 sensors to each car and turned that stream into telemetry on the broadcast: tyre wear, delta laps, brake temperatures, all on screen as the cars pass. Cricket built live analytics into the coverage. Tennis has begun. IBM and the USTA launched Serve Quality at Flushing Meadows this fortnight, scoring every serve in every singles match on efficiency, accuracy, consistency and ball toss. The ATP has integrated Shot Quality into its Masters 1000 broadcasts, rating every serve, return, forehand and backhand out of ten in real time. That is the layer we work on at All Court, applied to the games of the players we mentor.

Who knows. Maybe it will also provide meaning to those who watch tennis.