A Grand Slam-led “premier tour” is both logical and hard to imagine

The tennis season is drawing to a close, which means the “how can we change tennis?” season is getting underway again.

As 2023 turns to 2024, though, the rumblings of change seem a little more serious, and potentially transformative, than usual. We can blame—or thank—Saudi Arabia’s LIV golf tour for that. If there’s one thing that might get the various governing bodies of tennis to join together, it’s the specter of the Saudis or someone else dangling $200 million in upfront money to stars like Carlos Alcaraz or Iga Swiatek to come play for them, the way they did with Dustin Johnson, Phil Mickelson, and a dozen other big-name golfers last year.

As a preemptive counterattack, the Grand Slams have been working on a proposal for a “premier tour” or “super tour” resembling the structure used in Formula 1 racing, according to journalists Jon Wertheim and Matthew Futterman (see his report for The Athletic). The idea would be to streamline the schedule by having the Slams join with the Masters 1000s to form an elite circuit. Players would, potentially, earn a PGA-like “tour card,” and receive a guaranteed salary.

The positives, for tour officials, would be a sport that’s simpler to follow for fans; less of a grind and a risk for players; more appealing to streaming services; and easier to sell as a package to sponsors.

If you’ve followed tennis for any amount of time, you may have two contradictory thoughts going through your head: (1) It sounds logical, and (2) It’s extremely difficult to imagine.

Let’s take the logical part first:

The Slams are the most successful events in the sport by a wide margin, and having them lead the change from within is preferable to having it done by an outside force. The tours have been expanding their Masters events in recent years; linking them with the majors fits with that goal. Since the pandemic, the pros on both tours have been more vocal about creating a stronger safety net for players; more guaranteed money would surely be attractive to them (the way it would be to any human). The super-tour would also presumably unite men and women in dual-gender events, and align their financial interests for the first time. That has been a goal of many in the game for years.

Now let’s take the difficult-to-imagine part:

The Slams have always been a separate entity from the tours. Now they’re essentially going to run them? Where does that leave the ATP and WTA, and the dozens of 500- and 250-level events that fill up most of the current calendar? What happens to the nascent players-union movement if the game is split into tiers? How do you meaningfully shorten a season where the first major is played in January in Melbourne, and the last in September in New York? As for selling a multi-event sponsorship deal, the ATP tried and failed to do that two decades ago. Will it work any better this time?

The Athletic has a few possible answers:

“[The ATP and WTA] may be left to oversee a collection of the small and midsize tournaments, known as the 500s and 250s,” Futterman reports. “Under one scenario, developing players could largely make up the fields of those events, while players ranked in the Top 100, who could earn a “tour card” good for the season and a specified guaranteed salary, focus on the top-level tour but are still able to participate in smaller events if they choose to.”

Would “overseeing” 500s and 250s, stocked with unknown players, be a sustainable business for the tours? On the other hand, if those smaller tournaments continued to exist, would the new super-tour end up looking all that much different from the circuit we have today?

For years, many of the best players have largely restricted their schedules to the mandatory Grand Slams and 1000s, anyway. In 2023, Alcaraz, Swiatek, Novak Djokovic and Aryna Sabalenka all played fewer than 20 events and still finished in the Top 2. That’s not much more than they would have to play in a premier-tour schedule.

For others just below them, though, competing as often as possible in their prime years is a priority they would be unlikely to relinquish. In 2023, Jannik Sinner, Andrey Rublev, Stefanos Tsitsipas, Alexander Zverev, Holger Rune, Taylor Fritz and many others in the ATP’s Top 20 entered at least 23 events, half of which weren’t mandatory. Super-tour or not, these guys probably aren’t going to start skipping those tournaments and leaving that prize money on the table.

As for the schedule itself, presumably the Slams and most of the 1000s would stay in roughly the same spots in the calendar, and be played in the same locations. Other than the term “premier tour,” it might be hard for most fans to tell the difference from what we see now. Personally, I don’t believe that’s a bad thing, because I think tennis is fine as it is now, and what isn’t broken doesn’t need to be fixed.

But what I think, and what fans think, and what tournament directors think, doesn’t mean quite as much this time. The difference is LIV: Whether or not the threat of a Saudi takeover is real, the possibility gives star players leverage that they didn’t have in the past. That means, whatever the powers-that-be in tennis come up with, they’re going to need to consult the players and make sure the changes work for them.