For professional tennis players, the coronavirus pandemic has meant canceled tournaments, lost entries and frozen rankings, with men’s and women’s tours pausing their systems in mid-March.
The rankings are, in many respects, the currency of the tennis realm: the determining factor in the ability of players to participate in events, receive seeds and even earn some bonuses from sponsors.
And the break created a new math challenge for this global sport. As the tours prepare to resume in August, what is the best way to thaw the rankings that usually change week by week?
The Association of Tennis Professionals, which runs the men’s tour, and the Association of Women’s Tennis, which runs the women’s tour, have discussed long and hard about the fairest and smartest way to move forward. So did the International Tennis Federation, which runs lower level professional events and oversees junior, senior and wheelchair circuits.
They talked together, but their decisions are imminent and may be different. What is clear is that both ATP and WTA are poised to deviate for the first time from the 52-week system that has been in place since their classification systems started in the 1970s. The world ranking system for golf, by comparison, is based on results over two years.
Normally, the tennis rankings are updated weekly by adding the results of the previous week and subtracting those of the equivalent week of the previous year. Take an example: Naomi Osaka, the Japanese star, lost in the Australian Open 2020 third round after winning the single title in 2019. After subtracting the 2000 points from her 2019 victory and adding the 130 points earned for reaching the third round in 2020, his ranking dropped to n. 10 from no. 4.
The pandemic broke that family rhythm. With the rankings frozen, the April-June 2019 results have yet to be subtracted and remain part of each player’s ranking.
If and when the game resumes in August, there will be a delay for the rankings and also a logjam of reprogrammed events.
This creates opportunities for competitors to play and earn revenue, but players may be more cautious about the events they enter to avoid injury and fatigue at the start of the season.
For men, the program offers five major events, including two Grand Slam tournaments, in just seven weeks on two continents and two surfaces: clay court and clay court.
Veteran stars like Rafael Nadal, 34, and Andy Murray, 33, are understandably skeptical that they can handle it and fear that the classification system will quickly become distorted.
“It is not certain that the players will move from the semifinals or the final to New York, even in the quarterfinals, and then you will play Tuesday in Madrid at altitude on the clay court, when the players have not competed for a long time,” Murray said. “You will have the potential in which many of the best players do not participate in many of the most important events.”
The tours are also trying to help lower level players get the chance to accumulate points by adding lower level tournaments along with the main tour events.
Both ATP and WTA have considered unlocking the leaderboard in early 2021 and playing the rest of the 2020 season without points. But this option was discarded because it would essentially turn tournaments into exhibitions, a prospect rejected by events such as the United States Open, which has contractual arrangements with sponsors and broadcasters linked to the tournament ranking points.
Another plan that was discarded had been awarded points for the rest of 2020, which only counted to qualify for the November year-end championships.
This leaves two main options on the table, both of which would allow some of a player’s ranking points to exceed 52 weeks in an attempt to reduce the impact of re-entry.
“Both are good and bad in different scenarios,” said ATP Chief Player Officer Ross Hutchins last month in a conference call with the players.
The first option would gradually deduct points from the players’ frozen totals when they earn points when the tour resumes. The final points of the non-frozen total would have been eliminated by August 2021.
The second, more complex option, which has been gaining momentum in recent weeks, would seek to maintain the traditional system of matching equivalent events despite all the shifting of the calendar.
This would mean, for example, that the points of the French Open 2019, which ended in June 2019, would not have been in play until the end of the French Open 2020, which is now scheduled for 11 October.
This plan has the advantage of returning to the traditional 52-week system more quickly. “Having a ranking that is a subsection of our current ranking is very demanding for a longer period,” said Hutchins.
For the remaining events in 2020, the plan would allow players to preserve their result from 2019 if it were a better milestone, regardless of whether they played in the 2020 event or not.
The option is considered an attempt to protect players who cannot play in certain events due to public health problems or travel restrictions. It would also reduce the impact of the leaderboards if the pandemic further interrupted the tournament schedule.
The problem is that it could create friction with prestigious events like the US Open.
The choice would mean, for example, that Nadal, who won the US Open men’s singles title in 2019, could keep those 2,000 points in his ranking even if he doesn’t play in the US Open this year.
Although the goal, in theory, is to reduce the pressure of the players to immediately perform at full throttle, the knock-on effect is that they could skip the big events entirely without penalty. Nadal has the great incentive to chase a title for the 20th Grand Slam, which would allow him to tie Roger Federer’s men’s record. But according to this plan, it may be even more likely to prioritize the reprogrammed French Open over its beloved red clay, rather than risk going too far by competing first in the US Open in New York.
If others decide to adopt such an approach, this could significantly weaken the field at the US Open, which is expected to be played without spectators and with significant health restrictions in place, in a city that was once one of the global coronavirus centers.
