No tennis player had ever done this before. It happened last September at a tournament in Frankfurt. On one side of the net was Gaël Monfils, a veteran with uncanny agility. On the other was Andrey Rublev, ranked in the world’s Top 10.
Rublev was ahead, and it was Monfils’s turn to serve. He stood at the baseline, bouncing the ball with his racket. Could he find his way back into the match?
Suddenly, techno blared out from the arena’s speakers. Monfils froze and broke into dance. The audience cheered. Rublev grinned. Monfils, meanwhile, was having the time of his life. Soon, he ditched his racket and was doing spins on the floor. It was like a member of the Harlem Globetrotters had switched to tennis.
“I don’t even know what to say about it,” Monfils says via Zoom, laughing. He explains that the dance was completely “spontaneous.” Had Monfils done this during any other tournament, he would have been penalised on the spot. But the tournament in Frankfurt wasn’t like any other.
Welcome to the Ultimate Tennis Showdown (UTS), a league launched in 2020. After a two-year hiatus, it made a comeback in 2023. Its next event – billed the “Grand Final” – goes down in London from 15 to 17 December. The elevator pitch: the ATP Tour meets the UFC.
UTS matches are divided in four rounds. If there is a draw, players enter the realm of “sudden death.” Lose two points in a row, and you’re toast. There’s more: a DJ blasts beats between rallies. And in between rounds, players can trade zingers. They’re also free to let loose during matches, as Monfils did. Besides Rublev and Monfils, the UTS roster includes established stars such as world No 3 Daniil Medvedev, and stars in the making like Ben Shelton, the 2023 US Open semi-finalist. And just as at UFC fights, the crowd is raucous, albeit not quite as rowdy.
UTS is the brainchild of Patrick Mouratoglou. Born in 1970 in France, he’s the closest thing tennis has to a tycoon. The founder of the Mouratoglou Academy, he trained Serena Williams from 2012 to 2022, during which time she bagged 10 grand slam singles titles. In the last few years, he’s become a social media heavyweight known as “The Coach,” dispensing advice to more than a million followers.
To understand UTS, first you need to know what makes Mouratoglou tick. “Tennis is my life,” he says. Mouratoglou is sitting in his sun-drenched office on the French Riviera. With his thick head of greying hair and well-groomed stubble, he looks as much like a film star as a tennis coach.
But Mouratoglou didn’t always cut a dashing figure. As a child, he explains, he was “very shy” and chronically ill. As a result, he felt “very much alone.” Except when he was playing tennis. “The tennis court was my safe place,” says Mouratoglou. Soon he was playing at junior level and, as a teenager, emerged as a top prospect in France. A pro career beckoned.
Then, something happened that shaped Mouratoglou into the man he is today. His parents told him he should stop tennis. “My parents thought it was much too risky. So I couldn’t pursue my career, which created a big frustration.” Mouratoglou hung up his racket, painfully aware he could have been a contender.
If a young player cannot turn pro because of a lack of talent, it’s tough but they can eventually resign themselves to it. If they cannot turn pro because of an injury, they can blame it on fate. But if they aren’t permitted to chase their dream, as in Mouratoglou’s case, then it can be soul-crushing.
Years later, when Mouratoglou was in his mid-20s, he found his way back to tennis and launched his academy. “I love [tennis] so much,” he says. “I want to do everything to make this sport more popular.”
This was the impetus for UTS. For some time now, Mouratoglou has been alarmed “by the fact that the fanbase of tennis was getting older.” He did some research and found the average tennis viewer was 61. Younger audiences, by and large, don’t watch tennis, at least not entire matches on TV.
For Mouratoglou, one explanation is that the sport hasn’t adapted to the digital revolution, which has shortened attention spans. “You have a format that is more than a hundred years old and hasn’t evolved. So this creates a big gap between the generation that we want to aim at, which is the future, and the formatting itself.”
In recent years, other sports have tried to close that gap to attract new viewers. Take Major League Baseball, which just revamped America’s national pastime. Among other changes, pitchers only get 15 to 20 seconds to throw the pitch and bases are larger so players can reach them more frequently. “Fans want games with better pace,” said MLB commissioner Rob Manfred. Or take golf, which skews older than almost any other sport. LIV Golf, the new Saudi-backed tour, has given the game a facelift. There are only three rounds, as opposed to the four on the PGA Tour, and the dress code for golfers is more relaxed. Music is also played regularly. As LIV’s slogan goes: “Golf, but louder.” The results have been mixed. While MLB’s changes have generally been popular with fans, LIV Golf has struggled to pull in a committed audience, although accusations of sportswashing may be a significant factor.
“Tennis, but louder” could describe UTS. Mouratoglou makes clear that he’s not trying to replace the ATP Tour – players can still compete in both formats – but instead create “a second league with a second audience.” He explains, “The pitch was this one: if we had to create tennis today, knowing what we know about how people consume [content], what would it look like?”
The biggest change from regular tennis is the scoring system. Rather than have sets and games, UTS matches have four “quarters.” In order to avoid matches dragging on and on, each quarter lasts only eight minutes. Much like in a tiebreak, players serve twice and points are added up one by one. But, in UTS, players receive a “bonus card.” If they use it, the next point triples in value. At the end of the quarter, whoever is ahead only has to score one more point to win the quarter.
UTS events take place over a weekend. Players are divided into two groups. They face others in their group on Friday and Saturday. Then, the two highest-ranked players in each group move into the semi-finals and, eventually, the final, on Sunday.
“I think it’s fun, I think it’s great,” says Christopher Clarey, the author of The Master and a reporter who covered tennis at the New York Times for more than 30 years. He now writes Tennis & Beyond on Substack. “They really thought about some innovative ideas,” adds Clarey. “You’re not completely changing the very essence of tennis, you’re keeping the core of it, but you’re creating something that does look quite different.”
A noticeable difference lies in the pace of the game. UTS players only have one serve, not the customary two, and there’s no more than 15 seconds between points. “The thing that is really a problem with tennis is there’s so much dead time,” explains Clarey. For Mouratoglou, any lull in the game is dangerous because you risk losing viewers. As he puts it: “Traditional tennis is more of a marathon, and UTS is more of a sprint.”
For players, that sprint is no walk in the park. “I found it very hard, very intense,” admits Monfils. “It was a different way of approaching the game … every point counts. We are under pressure because we have only one serve. And I found it very physical too, because we don’t get much respite.”
The result makes for highly entertaining tennis. There are even shots you don’t see in regular tennis. When Mouratoglou was designing the UTS court, he made the net stop at the court’s edge and not past it. This enables players to hit more easily around the net – as Monfils did with a whipping return in his match against Rublev. “It’s incredible,” says Monfils, clearly excited about the new trick in his arsenal. “We get a lot of [potential] shots as soon as we move sideways, as soon as we play very crossed.”
But, for Mouratoglou, putting on thrilling tennis is only half the story. “The story about sport cannot be only two guys hitting a tennis ball. It has to be much more than that if you want to bring new fans onboard,” he says. Like in UFC, it has to be a contest between personalities. That’s why each athlete gets given a moniker (“La Monf” for Monfils, “The Chessmaster” for Medvedev, “The Mountain” for Shelton) – whether fans find that endearing or cheesy is a matter of preference.
There are also on-court interviews between each quarter, where players can trash talk, which is good-natured but speaks to another facet UTS is attempting to create. In regular tennis, players do their best to suppress their emotions. Think of the unflappable Roger Federer. But, in UTS, the more emotions the better. “Fans watching UTS have probably enjoyed watching players be more free versions of themselves,” says Matthew Willis, who writes The Racquet on Substack.
But it’s not just players who are freer, it’s the audience too. In July in Los Angeles, at its first event of the year, UTS drew 18,000 spectators and nearly sold out (plans for a women’s version of the competition are in the works). Unlike at Wimbledon, where you get side-eyed if you so much as sneeze, spectators are encouraged to make noise. “Tennis is the only sport in the world where you pay a ticket to go to the stadium, and you’re told to shut up,” quips Mouratoglou.
The audience is also online. Fans can stream events on the UTS website. The juiciest bits are posted on social media, where younger viewers can discover tennis in snappy instalments, thus changing how the sport has traditionally been consumed. UTS has garnered more than 55m views on social media, according to its own figures. Call it TikTok tennis.
The extravaganza hasn’t been to everyone’s liking. Tennis, after all, is notoriously conservative, and this isn’t the first time a sport has tried to reinvent itself by throwing in a few DJs and shortening games to appeal to younger audiences. When UTS first launched back in 2020, it garnered fierce criticism. Australian broadcaster Craig Gabriel called it a “joke.” (Gabriel declined an interview request via his publicist.) Stuart Fraser, tennis correspondent at the Times, tweeted that the first day of UTS “will be remembered as the day tennis was bastardised.” (Fraser didn’t respond to interview requests.)
Mouratoglou is unfazed. “All new ideas are criticised all the time, so I don’t give any importance to that. Success will say if it was a good idea or not,” he says with a smile. “It’s not me, it’s not anyone who makes any commentary. It’s how successful it’s going to be.”
