The Boom in the Boot: How Italian tennis continues to rise

As the Italian Open begins in Rome, native son Jannik Sinner is being welcomed back like a king returning from exile—specifically, a controversial three-month suspension for an unintentional doping violation.

However, “emperor” might be a better, if more fanciful, description of Sinner's role in his sport.

Sinner, the top-ranked player in the world, leads a small army of compatriots that now holds sway not only within the borders of Italy, but throughout tennis. The Roman Empire lasted for roughly 1200 years, so the bar is set high, but the evolution of Italian tennis has been stunning. One honor and one prize after another has been claimed by gli azzurri.

At the start of the millenia, the venerated Italian Open (an ATP/WTA 1000 event) was a financially unstable, disorganized mess, even as sister Masters events in other nations flourished. General disinterest in the late 1990s caused Italy to lose some seven ATP tournaments that were never replaced. It had just one official WTA event, in Palermo.

This year, in addition to its flagship national championship, Italy will host the prestigious season-ending ATP Finals (in Turin), the Davis Cup Finals (in Bologna) and scores of lesser but sanctioned tournaments for men and women. It recently hosted the Next Gen ATP Finals, in Milan.

The capstone to this Boom in the Boot was set in place in early December last year, when the ITF awarded Italy the Davis Cup Finals for three years beginning this November, and why not? Italy has won the re-formatted event each of the last two years. Meanwhile, traditional tennis powers, including the U.S., France and Australia, have been unable to produce a male Grand Slam singles champion over the last few decades, or engineers the kind of upsurge in enthusiasm and growth experienced in Italy.

Italy currently has seven men in the ATP Top 50 (one fewer than the US, which has nearly five times as many people), and a two-time 2024 Grand Slam finalist in the WTA No. 5 Jasmine Paolini.

“If you asked me 25 years ago if this would be the situation I would have said, ‘No, it is impossible,” Ubaldo Scanagatta, the dean of Italian tennis journalists and founder of the popular Ubitennis website, told me recently. “Adriano Panata won the French championship (1976), the first year I went to Roland Garros. I thought we would have won a lot more. Instead, we didn't win anything until Francesca Schiavone won (the French Open) in 2010.”

Scanagatta and a core of knowledgeable colleagues, including the recently deceased Rino Tomassi and Gianni Clerici, were patient, give them that. Now 75-years old, Scanagatta is a spicy, free-speaking reporter who has earned a measure of notoriety for his press-room interactions with top players. He has covered—in person—51 consecutive Wimbledons, 50 Roland Garros, and a grand total of “about” 180 majors. His ship has finally come in, and he’s an expert on how and why that happened.

You can pick any number of trigger points for the Italian tennis boom. Schiavone’s 2010 Roland Garros win was the first ever at a major for an Italian woman. Who can forget the historic US Open semifinal of 2015, in which Italy’s Roberta Vinci ended Serena Williams’s bid for a calendar-year Grand Slam—and then lost the final to countrywoman Flavia Penetta? Italy’s women have collectively punched above their weight class in Billie Jean King Cup (formerly Fed Cup), winning five times, including 2024.

Scanagatta sees a more subtle tipping point: Marco Cecchinato’s 2018 run to the semifinals at Roland Garros.

“All the players who were playing with Cecchinato (now 32 years old), and beating him maybe on the practice court or in some minor tournament, they thought, ‘Oh, if he can do it, then we can do it too.’” Scanagatta said. That group included Matteo Berrettini, Fabio Fognini, Lorenzo Sonego and Andreas Seppi (Sinner was one year out from his breakout season).

By that time, long-awaited changes in how the Italian Tennis Federation (FIT) administered player development were well underway. Angelo Binaghi, president of the FIT since 2001 (he is still in office) dragged his feet for most of a decade, but finally yielded to calls for reform, including loosening the federation’s centralized grip on, among other things, high-performance training.

The FIT finally began to look beyond the select group of young players anointed by federation insiders who had always insisted that it’s the FIT way or the highway. Financial grants, high-quality instruction and technical expertise were made available to “private” players and their teams. Berrettini, Sonego, Lorenzo Musetti and others were allowed to continue training with coaches of their choosing, including many who had been the youngsters’ primary coaches.

“None of them came out as a product of the Italian Tennis Federation,” Scanagatta said of those stars (this applies to Sinner as well). “They all came individually, helped by private teams.”

Things began to move swiftly. Although the “terra battuta” red clay is the beloved, national surface of Italy, by 2010 the FIT had launched a “fast court project” that ultimately led to a fourfold increase in hard courts.

Filippo Volandri, one of Italy’s better clay-courters in the early 2000s, is currently head of the federation’s Tirrenia High Performance Center. Last fall, he told The New Yorker, “We’re trying to change the identity of our players. We’re training for modern tennis. That’s why we have players who don’t seem ‘Italian’ in terms of their technical style.”

The results can be summed up in two words: Jannik Sinner.

In his early teens, Sinner, a native of South Tyrol in the Italian Alps, moved on his own initiative to the Italian coast to work with independent coach Riccardo Piatti at the eponymous academy. Piatti had worked previously with Novak Djokovic, Maria Sharapova, Ivan Ljubicic and Milos Raonic—all hard c=0ourt standouts (Sinner earned all three of his Grand Slam titles to date on hard courts).

The Italian method, then, is less a “system” than a platform with three legs: the expertise, support and financial clout of the FIT, a network of federation affiliated clubs that run training programs, and abundant access to at-home competition—prep school for the ATP and WTA.

It also helps to have a free, dedicated tennis channel, SuperTennis. The FIT-owned network launched in 2008, and while it has accumulated broadcast rights to, among other marquee events, the US Open, the channel focuses mainly on Italian tournaments.

If you asked me 25 years ago if this would be the situation I would have said, 'No, it is impossible.' Ubaldo Scanagatta

Much of this would not impossible without deep resources, once a seemingly insurmountable challenge for a nation not especially known for organizational skills or fiscal discipline. But Binaghi is an adroit politician with a shrewd business mind that he has applied to tennis for a quarter of a century. He has sometimes ruled with an iron hand. The FIT once sued Scanagatta (unsuccessfully) over some harsh anti-Binaghi comments that were posted by readers on Scanagatta’s website.

Binaghi has tightened up the linkage between the federation and Italy’s sporting clubs in many ways. Some of them serve to discourage political challengers, others have funneled money into the FIT coffers. Even if you have no interest in actually playing the game, joining a tennis club for purely social reasons still requires joining the FIT. This has greatly increased the federation’s membership numbers, which in turn leads to increased financial support from the government.

Perhaps most importantly, the success of the Italian players has boosted tennis into the forefront of Italian sports because everyone loves a winner. Soccer no longer dominates the sports sections of newspapers as it once did. Italy has gone bonkers for the game, not least because the combination of Sky Italia (the network will broadcast some 80 ATP and WTA events this year) and SuperTennis feeds the fire with round-the-clock tennis coverage.

While the tipping point in Italian tennis can be argued, the moment that the movement hit critical mass cannot. In late 2023, while Novak Djokovic’s dominion over tennis was still unquestioned, Sinner beat him three times (twice times in singles, once in doubles) in the span of some 10 days, culminating with Italy winning the Davis Cup for the first time in almost 50 years.

“Nobody is so popular and famous now and more followed and loved as Sinner,” Scanagatta said, “So now, tennis is the second sport (after soccer) in Italy.”