Tennis 🤝 Football

Septuagenarian's want to save the youth from their pesky attention spans (again)

A short one today, touching on why many sports, tennis and football included, seem to be going through a bit of an existential crisis.

(To catch you up) TL;DR - Some of the top football clubs in Europe had agreed to form a ‘European Super League’ (ESL), which would have seen 12 elite clubs from European leagues (Premier League, La Liga, Serie A) supplant the UEFA Champions League, and play amongst themsleves in an effort to generate more revenue and ‘save football’. Those elite clubs still wanted to continue playing in their domestic leagues, World Cup and European Championships. And they would also have had no fear of relegation or qualification hurdles within the ESL.

The tennis equivalent is a bit like if the top 20 players, from only the biggest tennis federation nations (ie Britain, France, Spain, Germany, Italy, US etc), formed their own tour, and played amongst themselves with no threat of dropping out of the elite group of competitors, and with no ability for lower ranked players or poorer federations, to join. For comparisons sake, those 20 elite players would still seek to play in the normal ATP Tour (Premier league or La Liga etc) and the Slams (World Cup & Euro’s).

Unsurprisingly, many, many football stakeholders and fans had an issue with these plans, and the experiment imploded at the first hurdle.

The most interesting element to all this however, is the similarity of rhetoric across so many traditional sports at the moment. Let’s see if the following feels familiar to you tennis fans, proudly declared this week by Real Madrid President Florentino Perez and Juventus Chairman Andrea Agnelli (two of the three main spearheads of the ESL movement):

Perez: We have to save football… We have to analyse why young people, 16-24 year olds, 40% of them aren’t interested in football. Why? … They say the games are too long. If young people don’t want an entire game it’s because it isn’t interesting enough, or we’ll have to shorten the games.”

Agnelli: “The attention span of today’s kids, and tomorrow’s spenders, is completely different to when I was their age.”

Given the European Super League lasted just a day or so, you have to applaud both Perez and Agnelli’s method-level commitment to the attention span bit. Both have somehow achieved the speedrunning world record for formation and destruction of a sporting organisation. The zoomers would be proud.

I’m not going to debate the legitimacy of Perez and Agnelli’s claims about format and attention spans, as I’ve already written at length about that argument and its merits in tennis (part 2 is coming out soon). While it’s not necessarily wrong, format changes always feel like the easiest, surface-level solution to what is a complex, multifactorial problem of shifting consumption habits, demand curves, and streaming platform innovation. And frankly I’d be concerned for anyone that places too much faith in septuagenarian Florentino Perez when it comes to acutely understanding what Gen Alpha, Zoomers and Millenials want.

What is fascinating is the degree to which their comments echo similar machinations in tennis. Just last year Patrick Mouratoglou, coach of Serena Williams and founder of a new type of short tennis called ‘Ultimate Tennis Showdown’, blessed us all with this enlightening soundbite:

“Ten years ago the average age of the tennis fan was 51 years old. Today it’s 61. In ten years it’s going to be 71… Tennis is not able to renew its fanbase… The world has evolved in the last 10-20 years but tennis has never changed. Tennis is in trouble, I want tennis to survive…. We see that their attention span is much shorter than before, people don’t have time.”

Again, some parts of this aren’t wrong (although some are), but it should be especially telling that football, the most popular sport in the world, is struck with a similar panic when it comes to its future.

Matthew Willis @mattracquet

tennis football 🤝 older dudes saying we need shorter matches and blaming it on young attention spans

There are a few ways in which tennis currently wants its own internal revolution, although comparisons to football’s European Super League fall flat. The PTPA, a sort of tennis player union but not really a union, wants to put more power in the hands of the players. The uneasy power balance between the four Slams, the ATP, the WTA, and the ITF continues to split this sport into too many pieces to make consistent movements forward. And tennis’ own Laver Cup is an interesting if very loose comparison to football’s ESL (however given the Laver Cup event is just three days per year, is part owned/operated by the ATP & Tennis Australia, and at least selects global competitors based on fluctuating ranking, it’s not a good comparison). Therefore none of tennis’ movements, despite considerable current motion, even come close to being as outwardly greedy and self-serving as the proposal of football’s European Super League. The ESL was essentially seeking to transfer power away from one entrenched set of elite — UEFA, FIFA, Premier League, La Liga et al — into the hands of another — top European clubs — while not sharing the extra wealth with its players thanks to a proposed salary cap. It’s baffling how those proposing the ESL thought they would get sufficient buy-in from both players and fans.

There is however a reasonable bigger-picture argument that suggests that this whole experiment, successful or not, will serve as a bargaining chip in the ongoing desire to overhaul the UEFA Champions League.

As a result, tennis politics and structures for once look vaguely functional in comparison to another major sport. A rare and refreshing turn of events. But as we look forward to what’s in store for the old fashioned collective of hundred-plus year old sports, tennis included, that have gotten used to cushily dominating global attention for much of the last century, we should expect more and more of these existential epiphanies. The next five to ten years is going to see an extraordinary amount of change in world sport, and some of that change will inevitably be better thought out and justified than others.

At the end of the day we all just have to hope that the executives in charge, with their penchant for patronising the youth, don’t fuck up cause and effect too badly. After all, it would be particularly sad for these sports to have a misguided race to the bottom of attention spans just because Florentino Perez’s grandkids would rather play fortnite than football. Perish the thought.

Tennis 🤝 Football

— MW

See you on Sunday for match analysis.

Twitter @MattRacquet

If you have any questions or thoughts about what you just read you can leave a comment below and I’ll answer it. No question is dumb.

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Analysis of the Nadal Medvedev US Open Final Final: https://theracquet.substack.com/p/the-racquet-the-5th-set