PARIS, France – During the recent French Open, the executives and officials who run tennis did what they do several times a year.
They gathered in a fancy location (in this case, the 16th arrondissement of Paris).
They watched a lot of tennis.
They sipped wine and ate catered lunches that someone else paid for.
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They discussed the state of chaos that characterizes tennis. They disagreed: about the solutions, which tournaments should be played when, who should collect and divvy up the money and who should control a sport seven or eight different organizations have controlled for about 50 years.
Then they agreed that they disagree, and then they agreed to do all this again in a few weeks. They will reconvene at Wimbledon, in London.
When they will likely disagree some more.
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On the outside looking in, with his default demeanor of disdain for the process and love for the sport, was a 54-year-old French tennis coach, promoter (of himself, his events, his players, and tennis) and owner of one of the world’s top tennis training academies.
Patrick Mouratoglou is fairly certain that the people who run tennis are something like various captains and hosts aboard the Titanic.
Yes, that Mouratoglou – the former coach of Serena Williams, the current coach of Holger Rune, an early patron of Coco Gauff, and a familiar face across social media, dispensing Reels and TikToks about “dominant eye” theory in sport and opining on the best composite tennis player.
As he sees it, while the people who run tennis worry about a schedule, the particular sauce served with the shrimp cocktail, and the brand of Champagne they will pour, their sport — the one to which he has dedicated his life — is speeding towards an iceberg that everybody can see.
“Everybody is thinking for himself,” a frustrated Mouratoglou said during a recent interview. “We don’t think about the future of tennis and the fans, which is the only discussion that makes sense, because if the world has changed, and nobody can deny that, the way people consume has changed.”
Mouratoglou has always found his way in front of a camera to put across his case for not focusing on egos, whether that’s in a coaching box or a television studio, and he has never been shy about calling tennis out on its perceived hypocrisies and shortcomings. He and his minions, including the parents of players he supported, often wear the black baseball caps with the big block “M” on the front. This is how you build a Mouratoglou brand.
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The part of that brand that pertains to blowing up tennis is Ultimate Tennis Showdown, better known as UTS, which he founded in 2020 along with Alex Popyrin, the Australian business figure and father of ATP tour player Alexei.
UTS has become increasingly central to Mouratoglou’s identity in recent years, the clearest showcase of his inclination toward disruption, and the contradictory aspect of that inclination coming from someone who profits so handsomely from playing a significant role in the tennis status quo.
The newest edition will take place the week before the U.S. Open begins at Flushing Meadows in late August, at the West Side Tennis Club in nearby Forest Hills, and Mouratoglou expects it to include some of the biggest names in the sport. Past participants have included Rune, Daniil Medvedev, Alexander Zverev, Andrey Rublev, Alex De Minaur and Jack Draper, who won more than $500,000, the biggest payday of his career, at a UTS competition in London last year.
UTS matches are exhibitions that completely alter the conventional structure of tennis competition and decorum.
They are played to a time clock, with eight-minute quarters. Whoever has the most points at the end of a quarter wins it, but that doesn’t happen after the eight minutes: whoever is losing at that point is given a death-or-glory-esque opportunity to tie the score without losing any further points. So if, after eight minutes, Draper were beating Rublev 15-10, Rublev could win five points in a row to get to 15-15 and force a deciding point, but if Draper were to win one more point, he would win the quarter.
The first to win three quarters wins the match; if it gets to 2-2 in quarters, the first player to win two consecutive points in ‘Sudden Death’ (a curtailed tiebreak) is the victor.
Players get just one serve per point, and they can make novel strategic decisions with ‘bonus cards’, such as making a point count for more than one point.
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The events have a party atmosphere. There is little in the way of a behavioral code for either players or fans, who are free to move about and make noise whenever they want, and music is played throughout.
Mouratoglou has long tried to counter any killjoys — those who label UTS blasphemy, or an assault on the grandeur of the ‘sport of kings’ — with a single concept: a lot of tennis fans are old and getting older. The median age of a viewer of the Tennis Channel in the United States is 62, according to Nielsen, the data collector. Viewers of basketball’s NBA, by comparison, are roughly evenly divided among age groups.
A stagnating television audience allied to an alienating culture of politeness at the biggest events in the sport is his essential sales pitch.
“It’s not that we don’t want those fans, but we need to bring young fans, and new fans, to tennis,” Mouratoglou said. “And tennis has failed to do that for the last 30 or 40 years.”
He doesn’t think there is a lot of mystery about why that is.
Most tennis matches require a mode of crowd behavior that is akin to the punishments parents give to children when they misbehave — ‘Sit still and be quiet for the next three hours, except when I tell you you can speak’. When a few French Open attendees crossed the line from enthusiasm to abuse last month, organizers banned alcohol in the stadiums at Roland Garros, like a school teacher taking recess away from the whole class because one student misbehaved.
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Like UTS, Mouratoglou’s argument about fan conversion is compelling, at times incendiary, and limited in scope.
Grand Slam tournaments have constantly surpassed attendance records since the Covid-19 pandemic struck four years ago, with the attendance for the 2024 Australian Open coming in at 1,020,763 during the main draw, up from 839,192 in 2023. Younger audiences also consume traditional tennis tournaments in other ways, from streaming platforms (whether Tennis TV from the ATP, or Amazon Prime) to social media clips, particularly TikToks, that remix the format, narrative and lore of the sport’s existing competitions.
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Mouratoglou also sparks plenty of knee-jerk reactions as an individual.
One of his players, two-time Grand Slam champion Simona Halep, was suspended for four years following a positive test for a performance-enhancing drug in August 2023. She had taken a supplement tainted by trace amounts of roxadustat. The International Tennis Integrity Agency’s (ITIA) original ban was reduced to nine months by the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) in March this year but by then, Halep had already been sidelined for 18 months.
Mouratoglou, both publicly and in court, took responsibility for the mistake but did not receive a penalty himself because anti-doping rules largely penalize athletes rather than coaches, especially if the infraction is unintentional.
His stature as a tennis lightning-rod started long before that, however.
He realized as a teenager he was not good enough to play professionally, so he became a coach. Not just any coach, either — Mouratoglou is the latest in a long line of colorful tennis coaches who do double duty as publicity-friendly impresarios, who then get their hands into every facet of the sport — as agents, tournament organizers, and television commentators — people like Ion Tiriac and Nick Bollettieri, who built lives of fame and fortune off the game despite having had little or no success competing in it themselves.
Mouratoglou’s renown is considerable, but in seeking to be part of blowing up tennis — or at least lobbing a grenade into it here and there — he runs into the fact that the currency of that renown is the Grand Slams, Masters events, trophies and ranking points that he feels aren’t attracting sufficient variety in their followers.
When conceptualising UTS, Mouratoglou said he looked at other sports and saw a lot of basic common elements that tennis lacks that might work pretty well for fans — such as when a match will start, when it is most likely to end, and who will be playing in it, so people know which players they will see when they are trying to decide whether to buy a ticket. This is a well-documented problem with the schedule outside of Grand Slams, when the sport’s best players can be competing in different, concurrent tournaments hundreds of miles apart.
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Since no one knows when most matches start or when they will end, fans have a terrible time figuring out where or when their favorite players will be on court, and television executives do not know what to promote or when. Since most competitions are single-elimination tournaments, the most high-profile matchups come about mostly by chance.
But these ‘problems’ are also a cornerstone of the changing nature of tennis fandom, in which younger audiences adopt individual players as favorites and then follow them obsessively, no matter where they are playing, in an echo of the star culture that now follows pop singers, movie actors and other entertainers.
Mouratoglou’s UTS events can be perceived as a solution to a problem, but also as a solution which is at times searching for a problem, when both it and the things it purports to solve might also be considered as pluralistic elements of an approach to growing tennis that better connects the longterm and diehard fans with new adopters easily captivated by a fascinating personality or some amazing shotmaking.
Take the ATP and WTA Tours’ decision last year to expand the highest-level tournaments outside the four Grand Slams.
Turning the Masters 1000 tournaments from single-week shootouts into two-week events has frustrated most players, with the longer gaps between their matches still not constituting true downtime, and any losses leading to them having no matches for maybe 10 or 12 days, unless they drop down to Challenger-level events in between. Before they know it, some players have played just three times in a month, while the people who consistently make semifinals and finals are seemingly never not at a tournament.
Everyone likes a bit of certainty in their lives, even itinerant tennis players.
Mouratoglou said he was encouraged last year when he learned that the Grand Slams were joining together to try to make tennis more like Formula 1 motor racing. They have proposed a streamlined schedule of 14 key events, with more freedom for players to fill out the rest of the calendar as they choose.
Mouratoglou said the idea came as a breath of fresh air, “the first time I’ve seen something like that in 50 years”.
His events would no doubt benefit from such a calendar, but the men’s and women’s tours, who often serve tournament owners more than the players, have pushed back, trying to maintain something very close to the status quo, with the two sides at loggerheads.
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That was the dynamic during all those meetings at the French Open in the past two weeks, according to two participants. The final proposal will probably be somewhere in between.
“At least we’re talking,” one of them said.
Mouratoglou would love to be talking to them as well, out of his belief that there needs to be space for something different, something more than what he sees as rearranging the deck chairs on the ship as the iceberg grows ever closer.
“Something has to be done for the future of the sport,” he said. “I’m not saying that UTS is the solution. I’m saying UTS is a solution.”
(Top photo: Arne Dedert/picture alliance via Getty Images)