It became clear that the fractured dysfunction that courses through professional tennis was getting worse on a bright November morning in Turin, Italy.

Andrea Gaudenzi, the chairman of the ATP Tour who views himself as the sport’s ultimate mover and shaker, was holding court in the sparkling hospitality dining area at the 2024 men’s Tour Finals before the room filled for lunch with corporate guests. White tablecloths, crystal stemware and silver flatware covered the tables.

About 100 yards away in the Inalpi Arena, a couple of exercise bikes and some rubber mats jammed into the dark corner of a basement corridor comprised the warmup and cooldown area for the players who are the lifeblood of men’s tennis. Just two months before, the men’s game’s most important young star, Carlos Alcaraz, had added his voice to the chorus of complaints about the inability of the people in charge of the sport to fix the 11-month, globe-crossing schedule.

“Probably, they are going to kill us in some way,” he said in a news conference at the Laver Cup in Berlin.

Players on both the ATP and WTA Tours spent most of the year in that chorus, largely lamenting the expansion of most 1,000-level tournaments — the rung below the four Grand Slams — from nine days to 12. The essentially two-week events reduce unbroken time off; the tours say that having a day of rest between matches in-tournament makes up for it. In 2025, just two of nine ATP Masters 1000 tournaments will finish in one week and players must play eight of them. On the WTA Tour, three of 10 are shorter; all 10 are mandatory.

In Turin, Gaudenzi had his chance to chime in. There is flexibility and space for change, he said. There was a but.

“We also have to consider that, if you do that, you’re destroying the product.”

Gaudenzi, who played in the 1990s, also lamented that five-set tennis matches are now reserved for Grand Slams.

“We started taking off, taking off, taking off from the product,” he said.

“Taking away from that product, in my opinion, is the wrong strategy. We have to take away somewhere else. Our commitment at the Masters is eight tournaments. Eight tournaments per year is not a lot.”

So says the man in the suit in the hospitality suite.

Players do not agree — even Stefanos Tsitsipas, who not so long ago sat down with Gaudenzi for a video promoting the changes to Masters 1000 tournaments. “The two-week Masters 1000s have turned into a drag,” the Greek wrote on X in November.

Alexander Zverev, a member of the ATP Player Council who was also in Turin, said he was already focused on 2025 and described his results as secondary to his preparations for the next season. He was spending a good hour practicing after his matches because the off-season offers so little time for rest and preparation.

Gaudenzi had thoughts on this, too.

“You need as a player a couple of weeks of holiday, a couple of weeks of rebuilding your body,” he said, “and then another couple of weeks where you start hitting the ball before you go to competition and head out towards, you know, Middle East and Australia.”

A reality check. Baseball players finish at the latest by the first week in November. They report to spring training in mid-February. NFL Players are done by early February. They have a handful of off-season workout weeks, but training camp begins in July. NBA players are done in mid-June. The vast majority finish by mid-May. Training camp begins at the end of September. The best golfers are largely done at the end of September and don’t start up again until January.

Gaudenzi was pitching a two-week holiday at the end of a nearly 11-month season, plus, potentially, the inclusion of a new 1000-level tournament to open the season in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, one week before the Australian Open and eight time zones away from Melbourne. It was this concept that sent the sport into turmoil in 2023, exposing the fissures that make it fractured and the inertia that keeps it so.

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When Gaudenzi spoke among the silverware, more than a year had passed since tennis’ latest reckoning with its endless schedule, its nonsensical governing structure, and the competitive infrastructure that even devout fans sometimes struggle to understand. This exercise occurs roughly every 10 to 15 years.

Through an endless string of meetings, phone calls, negotiations, and sidebar dealings among allies and enemies in the alphabet soup of nine organizations that rule the sport, tensions and disagreements appeared to be giving way to a consensus around a more streamlined tour and schedule then billed as the ‘Premier Tour‘. It would take in the four Grand Slams and 10 further events that would always have the best ATP and WTA players in the same city at the same time, all with the same prestige as the current 1000-level tournaments. The fractured professional ranks of tennis would head in the direction of Formula One, offering fewer events and more money, but locking out much of the globe from the sport.

That was meant to be proposed in November 2023. It was pushed to March 2024, when meetings and a fractious presentation in Indian Wells, California, revealed that the commercial underpinnings of the plan did not yet exist. By April 2024, in London and Madrid, the finances were there, with the leaders of the Australian, French and U.S. Opens and Wimbledon pledging to commit a portion of their lucrative media and sponsorship rights to the premium tour plan. The ATP and WTA were not enthusiastic, with their 250- and 500-level events essentially relegated to the minor leagues under the proposal.

For the rest of the season, there were many discussions but little more than detente. The players played more two-week 1000s; the Cincinnati and Canadian Opens prepared to expand to join their ranks from 2025. The ATP and WTA counter-proposals to the Grand Slams’ plan, hinging on an event for and sizeable investment from Saudi Arabia along with a commercial merger between the two tennis organizations, stalled too.

And then by the end of the year, as Gaudenzi and Alcaraz looked at the same sky, one said it was blue and the other said it was gray. Nearly a year and a half had passed since the turmoil began and everyone was back where they started. By some measures, a few steps behind that.

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As tennis traveled across the globe while its own inertia sapped the momentum at the top of the sport, the ATP and WTA Tours and their players spent much of 2024 engaged in a perennial shadowbox.

It was as early as April that Zverev, the highest-ranked player with some sway inside ATP meetings, said in an interview at the Madrid Open: “Four weeks is not enough for a body and for an athlete to recover, but also to get ready.”

“Days between matches are not recovery days, they’re not days that you’re resting.”

Iga Swiatek, then the world No. 1, had raised similar concerns, calling the switch to the 12-day events a big problem. The tours dug in on their increased prize money and commercial value to tennis, contending that guaranteeing top-ranked players makes selling tickets and securing money from broadcast and sponsorship easier. When criticized for the disparity in prize money between Sinner and Sabalenka in 2024, the Cincinnati Open attributed the difference to broadcast and sponsorship.

With those financial promises came stringent and, at times, arcane rules, which in the autumn helped Aryna Sabalenka take over the world No. 1 ranking because Swiatek lost points for missing the quota of six mandatory 500-level tournaments, as well as much of the Asian hard-court swing.

It was later revealed that Swiatek was sidelined for the latter because she was appealing a provisional suspension after a positive doping test, but it was the points deductions, imposed without explanation overnight into Monday, October 21, that first robbed the sport of the spectacle of Sabalenka and Swiatek battling for its top ranking.

“These rules have been changed without us even knowing about them,” Swiatek said during a news conference at the U.S. Open. “These decisions about mandatory tournaments were shown to us after. We spoke to WTA about it: that we want to at least be in the loop. I don’t think our sport is going in the right direction because of that.”

Iga Swiatek is one of the players to criticize changes to the WTA Tour rules. (Valerio Pennicino / Getty Images)

The WTA said it discussed the changes with members of the Players Council before enacting them. The organization’s new chief executive Portia Archer, who replaced Steve Simon, is still in her first months on the job and it is too soon to assess the impact of any changes she has made or has planned.

In a broader context, women’s tennis continues to struggle with something of a self-inflicted identity crisis. There is plenty of work for the WTA to do, from promotion to media management. The French Open largely refuses to schedule a women’s match for the prestigious Court Philippe Chatrier night session. The ITF held this year’s Billie Jean King Cup Finals in a pop-up bubble in the parking lot of the arena for the Davis Cup.

More broadly, vast swaths of empty seats at women’s tournaments during so many weeks of the season make the sport look less than important when television viewers happen upon it. A potential merger with the ATP that might provide some more juice on the commercial side in sponsorship and media sales remains a long-talked-about work in progress, as does the looming but far-from-confirmed 1,000-level combined event for Saudi Arabia.

Though top men’s and women’s players descended on Riyadh this season — the former for the Six Kings Slam exhibition and the latter for the first of three WTA Tour Finals there — the biggest asset of Saudi Arabia’s three-headed push into tennis remains just an idea, with uncertainty on both sides over the tournament’s size, timing and financing. It is still not expected before 2027 at the earliest, as was the case in October this year.

With the ‘Premier Tour’ in suspension, three of the four Grand Slams have continued their evolution into three-week events, building high-profile exhibitions and boosting up qualifying matches on-site during the week before the main draw. Wimbledon has made progress in joining their ranks by securing planning permission to add 39 courts — but they won’t be built for several years and the approval is under challenge from community groups. Everything in this sport takes time.

More challenges are in the works. Lawyers working with the Professional Tennis Players Association, co-founded by Novak Djokovic, have spent 2024 scouring the sport’s rules and structure, preparing for a possible anti-trust litigation with the potential to remake the sport. It has exchanged stern letters with the International Tennis Integrity Agency, which controls anti-doping regulations, in the wake of cases involving men’s world No. 1 Jannik Sinner and Swiatek, with allegations including officials acting outside the norms of due process. The ITIA has denied those allegations.

One of those antitrust lawyers, James Quinn, who has worked on suits against the NBA and the NFL, described the structure of tennis as “classic monopolization.”

It’s not hard to understand why tennis is in this position. Each of the organizations that influence the structure and oversight of the sport has its own interests to protect.

The Grand Slams want to maintain and expand their primacy. The 1000-level tournament owners have lobbied Gaudenzi, Archer and Simon not to devalue their events by giving in to player pressure on their length. Those tournaments fought to get those extra days as they agreed to raise prize money, with the events in Rome, Cincinnati and Canada pledging to equalize the women and the men by 2027. Those extra days mean selling extra tickets for extra fans who spend extra money on those tickets and at the events, as well as extra content to sell to networks and streamers.

The Cincinnati Open in Ohio will expand to two weeks for the 2025 season. (Al Bello / Getty Images)

Owners of the 250- and 500-level tournaments want to make sure Gaudenzi, Archer and Simon don’t agree to a premium tour and devalue their events. The International Tennis Federation, which controls the national team tournaments, the Billie Jean King Cup and the Davis Cup, is fighting to keep its spots on the calendar. It’s already not pleased about being right at the end.

Then, for the players who create the product, there’s the fact that they are given a smaller percentage of revenues than their counterparts in other sports.  Those outside the top 50 or so are often a few bad months from having to think about cutting back on coaches and support staff. They get paid to play. There isn’t a lot of short-term incentive to rest. For 2025, ATP players in the top 30 will have to play five 500-level events to qualify for the bonus pool attached to those tournaments, instead of four. That bonus pool is growing to almost $3million (£2.4m) from just over $1m.

Add it all up and there is no shortage of intransigence and little room for optimism.

The result, at least for the time being, is something of a circular stand-off, with every side pointing at everyone else and the sound of revolution feeling more and more inevitable. For now, there is silence.

(Top photos: Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton)