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Tennis matches are getting longer. Quite a lot longer actually.
In fact, Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) data sourced by The Athletic shows that the average length of a men’s grand-slam match has increased from 2hr 21min in 1999 to 2hr 54min this year. That’s an average increase of more than half an hour per match — or 23.4 per cent.
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By way of comparison, if football matches had increased in length by that same percentage, we’d be talking about games now lasting 111 minutes. At this year’s French Open, the increase was even more — up 24.8 per cent from that 1999 mark to a record-equalling (with last year’s US Open) average length of 2hr 56min.
Which means that going into Wimbledon next week, men’s grand-slam matches have never been longer. Novelty-length matches like John Isner’s 11hr 5min 70-68 fifth-set win over Nicolas Mahut in 2010 led to Wimbledon introducing a final set tie-break, originally at 12-12 and now 6-6 (as is the case at all the majors) but matches still keep getting longer.
Mahut and Isner after their 2010 epic (Photo: Hamish Blair/Getty Images)At the current rate of increase, men’s grand-slam matches will soon be, on average, longer than three hours. Back in 1999, three hours was considered a long match. The 2001 “epic” Wimbledon final between Goran Ivanisevic and Pat Rafter, for instance, lasted 3hr 2min, despite stretching to 9-7 in the fifth set.
At the French Open last month, by contrast, Novak Djokovic’s straight-sets 7-6, 7-6, 6-2 win over Alejandro Davidovich Fokina lasted 3hr 36min. And sure, the Roland Garros clay has tended to make for longer matches than at Wimbledon, but matches at SW19 are not much quicker.
Andy Murray’s straight-sets 6-4, 7-5, 6-4 win over Novak Djokovic in the 2013 Wimbledon final was eight minutes longer than the 2001 five-set 9-7 final. Similarly, while 2001 was only the seventh time in Wimbledon’s 124-year history that the men’s final had stretched to a fourth hour, eight of the last 15 — including all of the last three — have reached that mark.

On the women’s side, there’s been an increase in match length but it’s less pronounced — the three-set format provides less scope for major increases. Data from the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) shows that in 2008 — as far back as their data goes — the average grand-slam match lasted 1hr 35min. That figure is up to 1hr 40min this year, at an increase of 5.3 per cent. At last year’s Wimbledon, the average was 1hr 45 min, an increase from 2008 of 10.5 per cent. And anecdotally, some involved in the women’s game say you need to allow for three hours now per match rather than two at WTA events — Beatriz Haddad Maia’s win over Sara Sorribes Tormo at this year’s French Open took 3hr 51min.
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Return to the men’s game, and what we’ve seen is a sport transformed. Even as recently as Wimbledon 2004, Roger Federer beat Alejandro Falla in 54 minutes. Three sets in 54 minutes! That’s not that far off the first-ever recorded length of a Wimbledon final — 37 minutes in 1881. Looking at the final lengths of those early Wimbledon finals, it is extraordinary how the sport has evolved: 40-minute finals stretching to an hour, then two, then three, then four, then — hello! — nearly five in 2019.
Federer at Wimbledon in 2004 (Photo: Mike Hewitt/Getty Images)Other sports have experienced similar trends and taken measures in response — golf, cricket, NFL, baseball and F1, for instance — to varying degrees.
But more revealing than the odd extreme match and just the finals is the ATP’s data set which takes in more than 100 matches per event and more than 12,000 matches in total to remove any anomalies. It ensures, for instance, that if the odd tournament had an unusually high number of five-set matches that wouldn’t have a major effect on the overall average. The conclusion is that this is a sport transformed.
All of which poses a few questions.
Why has this happened? Is there a solution? Is it even a problem?
The Athletic spoke to tennis players and insiders to find out…
Why are matches longer?
A combination of the physical, the conditions and the — as some in the sport call it — “faffing”.
Starting with the first one, two-time Wimbledon champion Andy Murray puts the increased length of matches partly down to how physical and athletic players have become.
“Something that I think is the case across all sports: players are getting quicker and faster, so they’re then able to track down more balls,” Murray said when asked by The Athletic at last week’s Cinch Championships. “Some of the movement of the guys now is incredible, which makes it feel like it’s harder to finish points than it was before.”
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Frances Tiafoe, America’s world No 10, agrees. “I think the guys and the game are getting so much more physical,” he says. “Everyone is so athletic, everyone is moving so fast. Anybody at the top of the game is a great mover — you have to be. The game is just getting tougher and tougher. Guys are getting more skilled. The level is not very different from a guy ranked 80 to a guy ranked 10.”
Tiafoe adds: “It’s getting brutal with the racquets and everything.”
Murray and Tiafoe should know about this topic. Not only is Murray synonymous with epic matches (his two match wins at the Australian Open in January took almost five and then nearly six hours) but he and Tiafoe played out a three-setter in Antwerp two years ago that lasted 3hr 45min.
Tiafoe versus Murray (Photo: LAURIE DIEFFEMBACQ/BELGA MAG/AFP via Getty Images)Venus Williams, now 43, said to The Athletic after her 3hr 16min win over Camila Giorgi at the Rothesay Classic last week: “All the players are well-trained so the amount of time I spend in totality on the court (practising) and in the gym is more than I actually played today. So players are prepared for whatever might come.”
Murray picks up the theme that external factors have played a big part in tennis’s increasing length. “The generation before probably would have said that the courts were starting to slow down by 2005 when I first played (at Wimbledon), but certainly the courts at Wimbledon over the years have gotten slower and I’d say that most of the courts on tour are pretty slow,” Murray says. “The balls are slower. I think that’s just the way the sport’s gone. Everything’s slowed down. The courts, balls (and) conditions are a bit different.”
Just to break some of that down, at Wimbledon for instance, the All England Club started using different, more durable grass in 2001 that slowed the pace of play down and facilitated longer rallies. This was said to be partly in response to the super-quick serve-focused style that dominated in the 1990s, which reached a nadir with the dismal 1994 final between the huge-serving Pete Sampras and Ivanisevic, where the longest rally was six shots. “Samprazzz” was The Sun newspaper’s headline.
Sampras serves to Ivanisevic in their 1994 Wimbledon final (Photo: Bill Frakes /Sports Illustrated via Getty Images)A year later, Wimbledon made small modifications to the balls they used. The slowing down of courts to encourage longer points has been a general trend across the sport over the last 20 years, including the removal of events played on the extremely quick indoor carpet surface from both the men’s and women’s tours.
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Likewise, the switch to heavier balls that travel through the air less quickly. This has been an ongoing issue at various tournaments for years now, and at January’s Australian Open, Rafael Nadal was among a host of players to complain about the quality of the balls being used. A 70-shot rally between Karen Khachanov and Jason Kubler was used as evidence of how slow they — and the courts — were. Though the legendary American player John McEnroe said the players’ complaints were exaggerated and much ado “about pretty much nothing”.
“The balls are getting bigger and rallies are longer,” says Jordan Thompson, the world No 71 from Australia. “And we’re playing on grass at the moment, and it still feels quite slow. The courts are very, very slow these days. I don’t know if it’s the court or the ball, but the rallies are getting a lot longer, and it’s just normal for it to be more physical, because the slower the court is, the more serves that come back and you just get into a bit of a ding-dong battle where you’re rallying all day.”
Linked to this, the sense from those within the game is that there are more grinders in the sport — players for whom long matches are the rule rather than the exception.
“Some players, my heart sinks if I see their name on the night session,” says one source, who, like all cited in this piece, spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect relationships. “Sorribes Tormo now or David Ferrer back in the day.”
Those “ding-dong” battles Thompson refers to have also been facilitated by the growing prize money in the sport which has allowed more players to be able to afford to employ a team of physios, nutritionists, sports scientists, etc. This used to be the preserve of just the top players, but now it’s estimated that most top 50 players will have a decent support team. This has contributed to how athletic and physical the players and subsequently the sport has become.
As well as changes to the sport’s physicality and playing conditions — the latter of which has led to greater homogenisation of the surfaces and often more attritional tennis — the last two decades have also seen a monumental rise in various forms of “faffing”.
Djokovic and Nadal, for example, will retire as the two greatest male players the game has ever seen. But with the former’s interminable ball-bouncing before serves (less of an issue now) and the latter’s fidgeting between points, they’ve also profoundly contributed to more time being wasted in a tennis match.
Nadal serving in 2013 (Photo: Michael Regan/Getty Images)Nadal’s time spent between points was a major reason why a shot clock was brought in to enforce the rule of 25 seconds between points. Nadal played so slowly that his average time between points was sometimes more than the points time, prior to the rule’s introduction in 2018.
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Despite concerns players would use the maximum 25 seconds, in general, the shot clock has sped the sport up — but its introduction is symptomatic of how slow play had become.
Likewise, the need to limit the length of bathroom breaks to one lasting a maximum of three minutes per match from the moment the player enters the facility in November 2021 was a response to a growing number of players taking the piss in more ways than one. Stefanos Tsitsipas in particular had caused consternation a couple of months earlier when against Murray at the US Open he took a near eight-minute break at the conclusion of the fourth set — having taken a bathroom break earlier in the match too. Murray tweeted afterwards: “Fact of the day. It takes Stefanos Tsitipas twice as long to go (to) the bathroom as it takes Jeff Bazos (sic) to fly into space. Interesting.”
Fact of the day. It takes Stefanos Tsitipas twice as long to go the bathroom as it takes Jeff Bazos to fly into space. Interesting. 🚽 🚀
— Andy Murray (@andy_murray) August 31, 2021
Despite the rule change, the entering the facility part of it does still allow for pretty extensive breaks. Djokovic was booed at Roland Garros a few weeks ago after taking a break that meant close to a 10-minute interval between the end of the second and the start of the third set in his semi-final against Carlos Alcaraz. The Spaniard then took a break lasting around five minutes at the end of the first set of his first-round match against Arthur Rinderknech at Queen’s last week.
There’s no suggestion of any gamesmanship in those examples, but tennis insiders speak of the rise of the “dark arts” in the sport. The 2017 French Open champion Jelena Ostapenko is cited as someone who likes a crafty bathroom break — other players have taken medical timeouts just before their opponent is about to serve for the set or the match. “Some players definitely like to bend the rules,” as one source puts it.
As well as potentially putting off their opponents, this bending of the rules lengthens matches.
Medical timeouts have become another battleground, with the ATP announcing in 2021 that they would limit these to: “One three-minute time out per match to be taken during a changeover or a set break only.”
In his autobiography Championship Points, the former Wimbledon referee Andrew Jarrett says he would do away with them altogether — partly to avoid them being exploited.
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“If I had my way, we wouldn’t have medical timeouts at all,” he wrote. “If a player isn’t fit to play then they should shake hands, retire and walk off. Perhaps as a concession, I could say that if a trainer/physio comes on, it should carry some form of score penalty: maybe a point or a game. The same should apply to toilet breaks. That allows for emergencies and stops the play-acting.”
He added: “One of the talking points in every referee’s office is the pace of play… any number of players would towel down even after hitting an ace! In times gone by, players didn’t even sit down at the change of ends, only pausing briefly for a quick towel-down and a swig of drink.”
Just expanding on that, it was as recently as 2000 that a sit-down between sets was introduced. And nowadays, even though the end of the first game of a first set should just be a change of ends, it’s commonplace for players to towel down, have a drink and/or tinker with their equipment. The introduction of on-court coaching, and players having a near-constant dialogue with their support teams, has added to the “pace of play” issue that Jarrett refers to.
Another interesting angle to this is a suggestion that part of the reason for longer rallies and tighter matches is the huge growth of data in the sport. The theory goes that players now are so much more familiar with their opponents that it’s harder and harder to surprise one another and the end result can be more attritional tennis.
It’s certainly never been easier for players and coaches to scout their opponents. On the WTA tour, players can log on to a database and access all tour-level matches, excluding the slams. Gone are the days of USBs being handed around the locker room or players hastily searching for footage on YouTube (or, back in the distant mists of time, watching videos).
Is this a problem? If so, what’s the solution?
We’ve established that matches are far longer now than they were at the turn of the century, attempted to explain why it’s happened, and seen that it’s made for, at times, more monotonous tennis.
But does this really matter? Is it necessarily a bad thing?
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First of all, longer rallies and longer matches have also helped provide a disproportionate number of great matches over the last 15 or so years. The epic 2008 Wimbledon final between Federer and Nadal, the titanic 2012 Australian Open final between Djokovic and Nadal, the seemingly never-ending 2019 Wimbledon final between Djokovic and Federer. Would tennis have achieved the popularity it did in the Big Three/Big Four era without these, and many other, marathon matches?
Nadal after winning the 2008 final at Wimbledon against Federer (Photo: Clive Brunskill/Getty Images)The homogenisation of the surfaces has allowed the three players mentioned above to dominate across the surfaces in a way that wasn’t possible before. Whether that’s a good thing or not depends on your perspective.
As does the fact that the best of the five-set format and the increased length of matches make upsets less likely. To beat Djokovic over five sets with match lengths like they are now, you’re going to have to outlast him over a period of probably a minimum of four hours. That is a monumental ask, and essentially means that being a physical machine is a prerequisite to winning a men’s grand slam.
It also helps explain why Djokovic is more dominant than ever before. His biggest rival in the sport currently, Alcaraz, collapsed after only two sets against him in Paris earlier this month, while in 2021, Lorenzo Musetti won the first two sets at Roland Garros that in the best-of-three format would have won him the match. Instead, he won one more game and retired hurt as the match ended with a 6-7, 6-7, 6-1, 6-0, 4-0 scoreline that sums up the near-impossibility of beating Djokovic over five sets.
Alcaraz at this year’s Roland Garros (Photo: Antonio Borga/Eurasia Sport Images/Getty Images)Longer matches, it is feared, could put off a younger audience, who we are told have shorter attention spans. Research in 2017 showed that the average age of a tennis watcher was 61 for ATP matches and 55 for WTA ones.
Djokovic nodded to this five years ago when he said: “This new generation of fans and millennials, they don’t have the great(est) attention span. They want things to happen very quickly. So for the players, as well as to attract more people — more viewers of a younger audience — I think we have to keep matches dynamic.”
Murray, whose near six-hour win over Thanasi Kokkinakis in January finished at 4.05am local time, told the New York Times in 2018: “As a player, I really like best of five. It’s been good to me. I feel like it rewards the training and everything you put into that.
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“But then, when I sat and watched the match — Nadal v (Juan Martin) del Potro in the commentary booth (at Wimbledon 2018) — it was an amazing match, but it was really, really long to sit there as a spectator for the first time.
“A lot of people are going to be getting up and leaving the matches and not actually watching the whole thing. The people while in the stadium loved it, but I don’t think it is good for tennis.”
Marathon matches can also make it harder to sell the sport to television networks, and they increase the chance of ridiculous late finishes at the majors, where crowds start to thin out. Matches going on into the early hours of the morning with fans understandably heading for the exits — as has become commonplace at the Australian Open — is not a good look for the sport. And it affects competitiveness because it’s extremely difficult to recover from finishing a match so late.
The desire for shorter matches is why so many different formats have been trialled, including first-to-four-games sets at the ATP Next Gen Finals and the introduction of sudden-death deuce games in various doubles events. Meanwhile, tennis’s governing bodies have acknowledged that the sport has become too physical by removing the best-of-five format from all events other than the slams. Not too long ago, Davis Cup matches and the finals of the Masters 1000 and Olympic games were all best of five.
Grand slams remain untouchable, however. And there are good reasons for this. They continue to raise enormous sums from ticket sales, enabling increased prize money for the players, and on the face of it appear as popular as ever. For its advocates, the best-of-five format is tennis’s gold standard; the equivalent of Test cricket.
The grand slams themselves are certainly not considering a switch to best of three. “While there has been adjustments over the years (like the shot clock to try and accelerate serves or more recently all grand slams unifying their rules to end a tied match with a 10-point tie break), best of five is a key characteristic of a grand-slam tournament and there have been no discussions to remove it,” says Ugo Valensi, executive director of Grand Slam Tennis, managing the partnership between the four tournaments.
The fans and the tournaments are two crucial stakeholders, but what about the players? Having spoken to dozens from across the ATP and WTA spectrum, a mixed picture emerges. Plenty of male players would privately be open to the idea of best of three at the majors, but there are many traditionalists as well.
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The latter camp includes the world No 1 Alcaraz, who told The Athletic: “I like grand slams playing the best-of-five. I like the battles — I like to fight for a long time on court; to feel the difference between other tournaments and grand slams.”
Grigor Dimitrov, the world No 24, ATP Player Council member and former Wimbledon semi-finalist, says: “It’s not easy to win a grand-slam title. You have to go through the blood, sweat and tears to get to that point and that’s how it should be. I like the tradition, I think there have already been too many changes on the tour and I want things to stay the same.”
Dimitrov at Wimbledon in 2014 (Photo: Al Bello/Getty Images)Thompson agrees, and bemoans the decision to move away from best of five in the Davis Cup. “When they changed the Davis Cup (for the 2019 edition), I was shattered and I thought it was the wrong call. They have already, in my opinion, ruined one format. So I really hope they don’t do it to the grand slams.”
Others are less sure. “I don’t know if I fully agree with him (Thompson),” says Tiafoe. “I get what he’s saying. I mean, I think it’s true. I made it to the semis at the (US) Open, playing three out of five. You really beat somebody, three out of five — and if you do that for two weeks, you definitely deserve the title.”
He adds, laughing: “But, I mean, two out of three would feel great on my body.”
A number of women’s players think men should play best of three at the majors, as is the case for them. “I think maybe guys should play best of three,” says the one-time Wimbledon semi-finalist and former world No 3 Elina Svitolina. “Most of the tournaments they play best of three and I think that would be more entertaining.”
Better entertainment was cited by a few of the players, as was the fact that best of five is too physical. “For me, it’s very tough to watch,” says the world No 26 Anhelina Kalinina. “I can’t imagine how these guys are playing. Sometimes I just think about three sets and that’s scary. I don’t know how these guys are doing five.”
It’s been suggested that making men’s matches best of three would help remove some of the disparity in the scheduling between men’s and women’s matches. This year’s French Open was soured by nine of the 10 matches scheduled for the plum evening slot on the main court being men’s rather than women’s. It was the same ratio last year, and part of the justification was that men’s matches are longer so better value for money for spectators.
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Other suggestions for how to bring the two tours in line would be for both men and women to play best of three in every round, with no tiebreakers in the third set.
Shorter matches would also make it possible for the top men’s players to start playing doubles again — something that is simply not possible anymore with singles matches being as long as they are. That would increase the chances of fans getting to see greats like Djokovic and Nadal, which would surely be good for the sport.
The proposal that many fans like the idea of is a hybrid for both men and women at the majors. So best of three for both for the first four rounds, and then best of five for both from the quarter-finals onwards.
Tiafoe hints at assent at this idea, as he says with a smile: “Hey man, you said it, not me,” when the suggestion is put to him.
On the women’s side, Magda Linette, who sits on the WTA Player Council and is ranked No 23, says: “I don’t think women would be against it. I’m not against it, I’m fit enough and have proved that. I would also like to ask the men: ‘Would you want to go down to best of three?’
“Because sometimes we complain about women having easier matches but in best of five you get another chance so I would like to ask if men would want it.”
Linette at this year’s Rothesay Classic in Birmingham (Photo: Stephen Pond/Getty Images for LTA)It should be noted that women have played best of five before — the final of the year-ending WTA Finals used this format from 1984 to 1998 for instance.
Plenty of women players are very happy playing best of three, however, and concerns have been raised about the physical effects of switching to a longer format midway through a tournament.
The 2019 Wimbledon doubles champion and singles semi-finalist Barbora Strycova says women playing best of five would be a “stupid idea”.
“First of all, our bodies are not built to play five-hour matches. I also think that for the spectators, the level would be going down, set by set. I think most of the players would have the same opinion — we wouldn’t be able to move for weeks afterwards.”
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Kalinina adds: “It’s impossible because we would be physically destroyed.”
Other players like the three-set format throughout as it allows them to play singles and doubles. This is a point made by Barbora Krejcikova, a grand-slam champion in singles, doubles and mixed doubles. “I play singles and doubles, so I can’t imagine playing best of five,” she says.
It appears then that, despite all of tennis’s changes over the last 20 years or so, there’s no great appetite to stop the trend of matches (and tennis articles, it seems) getting longer and longer. At least not at the grand slams anyway.
Maybe there’ll be a tipping point at some stage but, for now, if you’re preparing to watch Wimbledon over the next couple of weeks, brace yourself for more marathons than ever.
(Photos: Getty Images/Design: Eamonn Dalton)
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