In March 2021, a tour pro from Canada became the avatar for the problems in professional tennis.

During a match at the Miami Open, Vasek Pospisil delivered a profanity-laden tirade against the leader of the men’s tennis tour, the ATP.

“An hour and a half yesterday, the chair of the ATP f—-ng screaming at me, in a player meeting, for trying to unite the players,” the then-world No. 67 told a chair umpire.

At the time, tennis was still emerging from the Covid-19 pandemic. Players were exhausted after nearly two years of shifting restrictions and the stress of constantly facing the possibility of solitary confinement in a foreign city. Their prize money had taken a significant hit, as crowd restrictions sent revenues plummeting.

But in Miami, word began to spread that the former had fallen more sharply than the latter — by 60 percent from 2019.

So Pospisil called a significant chunk of the 96-player field to their hotel gym to discuss a boycott. The man who the next day would become the subject of Pospisil’s ire caught wind and rushed to head things off.

According to people present at the meeting, the two men spent much of it screaming at each other. In his on-court diatribe, Pospisil threatened to sue the tour; the ATP threatened to fine him thousands of dollars. Neither happened after Pospisil, who later apologized, agreed not to speak publicly about what had taken place.

But a little more than a year later, professional tennis still had problems. And Andrea Gaudenzi, the chairman of the ATP Tour and the subject of Pospisil’s vitriol, thought he had the silver bullet it needed.

The ATP Tour board, including its player representatives, was on the verge of approving the Italian’s plan to make its biggest events more like the biggest events in the sport: the four Grand Slams.

Five of its ATP Masters 1000s, which are named for the ranking points awarded to their winners, would grow in length and size, from seven days to 12 and from 56 players to 96. Tournaments in Madrid, Rome, Cincinnati, Montreal / Toronto and Shanghai would mimic the structure of the Miami Open, and the BNP Paribas Open at Indian Wells, Calif. The Paris Masters and the Monte Carlo Masters would keep their 56-player, one-week format.

“Our sport has huge upside and stands on the cusp of a new era of growth,” Gaudenzi said in a statement after the expansion. He hailed it as a unifying moment for the ever-battling factions in a sport so frequently consumed by inertia, and an opportunity for more prize money and transparency for the players who had considered fomenting rebellion.

The 1,000-level tournaments, five of which also expanded on the WTA Tour, sell more tickets and pay out more money to players than before. But what was designed as the solution has instead become the most contentious problem in tennis, a poster child for the law of unintended consequences and the bane of many players’ existence.

At the end of the first full season with all five in their new form, a litany of complaints has unspooled.

The longer events are supposed to offer players more rest. Instead, they are more exhausting. They are supposed to offer owners more revenue, but their schedules put finals on strange days. They are supposed to offer more entertainment for fans, but their length means narratives stutter, rather than catching fire.

“We went into it genuinely open-minded,” Ken Solomon, who helped create and formerly led the Tennis Channel, said during an interview; Bob Moran, a member of the WTA board of directors and tournament director of the Cincinnati Open, said in another interview that “year one was an education.”

Players have said the most. Grand Slam champions and current and former world No. 1s, including Carlos Alcaraz, Aryna Sabalenka, Iga Świątek and Novak Djokovic, have lined up to criticize the schedule, as have other players in both top 10s.

In August, Sabalenka arrived at the Cincinnati Open having skipped the WTA 1000 Canadian Open in Montreal, just as ATP No. 1 and No. 2 Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner had skipped the men’s event in Toronto, because it started just two weeks after Wimbledon ended.

​​“It’s crazy what they are trying to make us do,” Sabalenka said in a news conference. “It’s impossible to handle this intensity. Like every week is a mandatory tournament and the schedule is crazy, honestly.” The WTA has 10 mandatory 1000s, three of which last one week.

The Canadian and Cincinnati Opens now also overlap, with the Cincinnati finals played on a Monday. Moran is not a fan; Tennis Canada chief executive Gavin Ziv said in an interview in August that “there are things to work on there to make it more successful for the future.” There will be a three-week gap between the end of Wimbledon and the start of the Canadian Open in 2026.

“I don’t enjoy the two-week Masters events anymore,” 24-time Grand Slam champion Djokovic, who co-founded the Professional Tennis Players Association with Pospisil, said in a news conference at the U.S. Open.

In an interview last month, Gaudenzi, who said he spoke to Alcaraz and Sinner about their missing the Canadian Open, said players, tournament organizers and the sport as a whole are reaping the benefits of the expansion. He argued that it was too soon to judge the schedule. Making a perfect one in tennis, he said, is impossible when its stars might play 80 matches across 19 tournaments in a season, but the majority of the tour, which loses more frequently, might play 40 to 50 across more events, at more levels.

“I have been in no business where you change everything year one,” Gaudenzi said.

“You go out with something, you give it some runway, you try. If it fails after a while, you make a decision. This is year one … Give it a bit of time. Be patient.

“That’s my ask to the players.”

At this year’s ATP Tour Finals, Gaudenzi said he foresaw changes in tennis — fewer small tournaments, a longer off-season — but that the two-week Masters 1000s would continue.

In addition to on-the-record interviews, reporting for this story involved discussions with a half-dozen people at the highest levels of tennis who had direct involvement in Gaudenzi’s push to expand the sport’s biggest events, and with its fallout. Several of them spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect relationships in the sport.

This is the story of how Gaudenzi, the kingmaker of men’s tennis, has sent the sport into turmoil in a bid to make it as big as he believed it could be.

Even before Gaudenzi, 52, became the chairman of the ATP Tour, he believed that the gap between Wimbledon, the French, U.S. and Australian Opens and its biggest tournaments was keeping tennis from realizing its potential.

His plan to close that gap was central to the pitch that earned him the top spot in men’s tennis in 2020.

Gaudenzi spent most of his first year scrambling to endure a crisis that hemorrhaged funds from a sport that can’t function unless players can travel and compete, preferably in front of thousands of spectators. The ATP and WTA Tours shut down in March of 2020 and didn’t return until August, just before the U.S. Open. Only a handful of events took place the rest of the year.

Play resumed in 2021 in Australia, with quarantines, regular testing, reduced crowds and reduced prize money. By March’s Miami Open, Pospisil’s rant epitomized how the players — the stars who bring in the revenues — were reaching a breaking point.

To Gaudenzi — who had been speaking with Rafael Nadal, Roger Federer, Andy Murray, and Djokovic about his plan — compensation and transparency were at the heart of the dispute. Tournaments did not disclose their revenues and profits.

That left players in the dark about whether they were earning what they considered a fair share of the revenues. Prize money in tennis, whether at the Grand Slams or elsewhere, lags behind almost all the major American sports leagues when taken as a proportion of revenue. At the majors, it usually comes in around 12 to 18 percent. At tour events, the figure is closer to 30 percent.

Tournament organizers had their reasons. Their contracts didn’t include long-term guarantees, so the financial risk of committing a large sum, only to lose their event in quick time, was too great.

For Gaudenzi, a new contract for those tournaments, including long-term guarantees for protection and an expanded schedule to increase revenues, seemed like a formula for solving many problems at once. Those agreements would allow organizers to secure loans to finance the expansion needed to host more players for longer, because the contracts would guarantee future revenues.

Working with tournament owners and lobbying the Players Council (only one of whom from that time, Félix Auger-Aliassime, is still active), Gaudenzi offered more days of competition and 30-year hosting agreements.

In exchange, Gaudenzi got them to agree to an increase in prize money and share their profits with the players. That agreement created the ATP Masters 1000 Bonus Pool, which this year accounts for $ 21 million, distributed between the best performers in those events and the ATP Tour Finals on a sliding scale.

Valentin Vacherot, who won the Shanghai Masters as the world No. 204, stands to receive over $ 216,000 on top of his prize money.

The carrot needed a stick. After months of negotiation, Gaudenzi and the other stakeholders worked out a penalty system for players who skipped tournaments, which would dock a percentage of bonus-pool entitlement per event. It was supposed to guarantee that the top players would show up.

But Gaudenzi, re-elected for a second term in 2023, was not the first ATP Tour chairman to have this idea. His predecessor, Chris Kermode, had considered it during his six-year tenure.

Kermode, now a member of the ATP Board of Directors, looked at the plan and decided it was fool’s gold, according to people briefed on his thinking. Extra days would explode tournament expenses. Everything would cost more, from the care and feeding of the players to security, police, ushers, and concessions workers.

Tournaments could sell more tickets and provide more matches to media partners, but they would be early-round matches, with the least demand. At the Grand Slams, the top 32 players play on the first days. At these expanded tour events, they receive first-round byes. Expanding the draws would give more players more opportunities to win career-changing prize money, but Kermode reasoned that the extra days would make the 1000 events look less like Grand Slams, not more, according to the people.

Gaudenzi didn’t see it that way. There are only four Grand Slams. Under his plan, he thought, the tour would have seven tournaments in grand cities that would look a lot like Grand Slams, propping up an 11-month season leaning into the near-24/7/365 availability of the sport that remains one of its hallmarks.

The tournaments in Indian Wells and Miami, which had been 96-player draws and 12-day events for decades apiece, were by far the most lucrative events outside the Grand Slams. Make more tournaments like them, get more prize money, better stadiums and facilities, and more tickets. It seemed like a win-win.

As the agreement took shape, the tour filmed videos of Gaudenzi answering questions about the changes with some of the biggest stars of the day, including Nadal and Stefanos Tsitsipas. By 2024, Tsitsipas would be writing on X that “the two-week Masters 1000s have turned into a drag.”

When it finally passed in 2022, Gaudenzi hailed it as “a game-changing moment for the Tour and a huge collective effort.”

To Gaudenzi’s counterparts at the WTA Tour, it didn’t feel like that, even though Gaudenzi had presented then-WTA Tour chairman Steve Simon with the plan in 2020.

Outside of the Grand Slams, the men and women compete at the same events seven times each year: the BNP Paribas Open, the Miami Open, the Madrid Open, the Italian Open, the Canadian Open, the Cincinnati Open, and the China Open.

The tournaments in Canada and Beijing are a little different from the others. In Canada, the men and women switch between Toronto and Montreal. In Beijing, the men’s event is 500-level, not 1,000. But both are considered joint events.

Simon and his board were happy with the schedule. They had already slightly expanded their events in Beijing and Madrid, from seven days to nine. They were not looking to ask their players to spend more days on the road.

But once Gaudenzi made his move, the WTA Tour followed suit. People who took part in the debate over whether to expand said there was barely a discussion at all. The optics of continuing to play a seven-day tournament for roughly $ 4 million in prize money at the same event where men were playing across 12 days for up to $ 12 million would have been awful. The WTA felt it had to sign on, or risk being left behind.

Gaudenzi said its leadership was well-informed of his plans.

“They never fought against it,” he said.

At the time, players on both tours said little about the expansion. There was haggling over the penalties connected to the bonus pool for skipping a tournament. But as far as many of them understood, they were getting the main thing they had been seeking — more money and a better view of the sport’s economics.

They had long complained about the length of the schedule, and about the off-season that lasts just a few weeks. Gaudenzi said he also believes the season is too long, not just for players, but for fans who need a break. It’s easier to market something that people miss.

But coming out of a pandemic that had robbed players of normality, a few days extra at the best tournaments felt doable, given the financial payoff. There would be rest days between matches. The sport’s most priceless and limited commodity — time — would be reconfigured, but, it seemed then, not stolen away.

Much of Gaudenzi’s strategy has gone to plan for both tours.

In Cincinnati, Ben Navarro, the tournament’s owner, put up half the money for a $ 260 million expansion of the site, including a gleaming new building dedicated to player services. Moran said it would have been hard to justify that expansion without the firm commitment of the additional days and the 30-year commitment that came with them.

Despite the challenges, he said the additional time with the players delivers a value that can’t be matched.

“Fans are going to get better at understanding what it is, what the opportunities in the first week are,” he said.

The Madrid Open is building a new stadium. In Rome, the Foro Italico, which hosts the Italian Open, has new courts with expanded capacities. That $ 21 million bonus pool is nearly double what it was three years ago. Gaudenzi recently projected that it would hit $ 35 million by 2028. The WTA Tour last year reached a deal with its largest tournaments to equalize pay with the ATP events by 2027.

But in tennis, as in physics, every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

With the tours grabbing more days from the calendar, the Grand Slams followed suit. The Australian and U.S. Opens added a 15th day this year. They stock the week before the main draw starts with exhibition events, with the New York tournament moving its $ 1 million mixed doubles event to that slot too. Alcaraz and Świątek, this year’s champions in Cincinnati, had to hustle onto a flight to get there in time for the next morning.

Wimbledon is planning a major expansion of its site to raise the profile of its qualifying tournament, which now takes place seven miles away in Roehampton.

Meanwhile, top players, who tend to go deep at these longer events, say the calendar is increasingly unsustainable despite the financial benefits attached.

Gaudenzi, the leaders of the Grand Slams, and player representatives have gone around in circles on this issue.

“They just want us to be smaller while they grow faster,” Gaudenzi said of the Grand Slams. “That’s unfair. Players, on the other hand, they want to be free to play everywhere and they want to make more points and more money by playing less. The equation doesn’t work.”

Tennis Australia, which has been at the center of the four majors’ negotiations with the Grand Slams over the future of the sport, said it believes that “everyone in tennis — the Slams, tours, and the players — must work together to grow the sport and deliver real value to fans.”

Players also doubt that Gaudenzi’s equation — longer tournaments with the same number of matches — means a better chance of a break. Seven matches, or six with a bye, in 12 days, rather than six in seven, they say, does not mean more rest.

They say that a day off at a tournament isn’t really a day off. They spend those days at the tournament site practicing, doing a short gym session, sometimes picking up some extra money doing a meet-and-greet with a sponsor. Real downtime does not exist.

The extra days and expanded draws have allowed more players to participate in the biggest events, but on both tours, the 1,000-level events have exclusive rights to their weeks. And if top stars skip tournaments because they go deep at too many in a row, their bonus-pool earnings quickly disappear and go back to the tournaments.

Gaudenzi said he understands the criticism, and that he is not wedded to a 12-day format. There will be a review of the expanded tournaments in 2030, in which parties might discuss why he does not want to budge on 96-player draws — because it would make the gap to the Grand Slams too large.

But the 96-draw events could work within a shorter time frame, he said.

“You could find a compromise,” he said, including a format where seeded players start on Sunday rather than Friday, so the tournament retains the value of the weekend.

“If we’re talking about a day, OK, let’s not make it a big deal,” he said. “I’m open to a debate.”

In time, he hopes that the top-level events will be so lucrative, offering $ 20 million to $ 25 million in prize money, or about $ 10 million more than now, that top players will feel less of a need to play smaller events for appearance fees.

This would, he believes, make the schedule less onerous, but the ATP’s rules stipulate that leading players must play four 500-level events. WTA players must play six, which Gauff described in a news conference in China as “impossible,” before Świątek used the same word. As early as 2028, there will also be a 10th ATP Masters 1000, in Saudi Arabia, but it will last a week, with 56 players.

A WTA spokesperson said that “athlete welfare is always a top priority” and emphasized the $ 400 million increase in player compensation that the new rules on mandatory events — accelerated by Gaudenzi’s grand vision — have underpinned.

Pospisil retired from playing in July. He has mostly moved on and left the battles over work and pay to others, but the players association’s lawsuit against the tennis tours and Grand Slams is centered on the equal-and-opposite reaction to Gaudenzi’s belief in more prize money: an attendant tightening of the tours’ control over players’ lives, despite their being independent contractors.

Still, in Gaudenzi’s world, everybody will play less and rest more, something he wishes he had done. If the sport could find a way through the pandemic, it can solve this.

“It’s going to take some time, we’re going to get there,” Gaudenzi said.

Time, though, is the one thing the players can never seem to find.

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

Sports Business, Tennis, Top Sports News, Women's Tennis

2025 The Athletic Media Company