“We need to bring the young fans on board – and we don’t” – Like Tiafoe, Mouratoglou believes tennis needs to embrace the current sporting culture

Like Frances Tiafoe, Patrick Mouratoglou believes that tennis needs to embrace change in order to engage a younger generation of fans.

Patrick Mouratoglou at the 2023 Australian Open Image Credit: AI/Reuters/Panoramic

Chris Oddo

April 3, 2023

Frances Tiafoe‘s recent comments about tennis embracing a fan experience that would presents more like an NBA game have struck a chord with coach Patrick Mouratoglou. He agrees with Tiafoe that the sport needs to embrace change in order to gain popularity with younger fans.

“We need to renew our fan base. We need to bring the young fans on board – and we don’t,” he said on her own social accounts on Sunday.

“The young generation is not following the tour”

Mouratoglou says that he received some pushback on social media after supporting Tiafoe, and he’s not surprised.

“When Frances said that he wished that tennis would be more like basketball, a lot of people went against him, and when I retweeted, a lot of people went against me, too,” he said. “Tennis is a very traditional sport with a lot of history and with fans that are very conservative and traditional and they want tennis to stay the way it is.”

But the Frenchman believes that change is necessary in order to engage younger fans. That’s the idea behind the Ultimate Tennis Showdown – aka UTS – which will make its return later this summer, from July 20 to July 23 (location tbd).

“The young generation is not following the tour, is not watching matches, is not watching full matches,” Mouratoglou says. “And this includes the professional players who never watch full matches either.

“So that’s why I thought it was very interesting to propose a different tennis, besides the normal tennis, the classical tennis, this other tennis is called UTS, and the goal is to explore what would be the ideal product to seduce the younger fans and make them really love tennis.”

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