NEW YORK — Jannik Sinner beat Taylor Fritz in the U.S. Open final at the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, 6-3, 6-4, 7-5 on Sunday, in two hours, 15 minutes.

The No. 1 seed prevailed over the No. 12 seed in a comfortable win, bar a few games of excitement in the third set. It was ultimately decided by Fritz struggling to win points behind his serve, Sinner’s tactical adjustment of his return position, and Fritz’s still-developing variety in his game not quite being enough.

It is Sinner’s second Grand Slam title of his career and his second of 2024. He joins Aryna Sabalenka in holding both the Australian and U.S. Open titles for the year, and cements his position as men’s world No. 1.

The Athletic’s writers, Charlie Eccleshare and Matt Futterman, analyze the final and what it means for tennis.

Why did Taylor Fritz’s serving performance dip?

In the very first game of the match, Fritz saved a break point with a forehand winner, after some excellent Sinner defence. It was a short-term win for the American, but having to win points like that behind a serve that regularly clears 120mph is not a path to winning a match. To stand any chance, Fritz would have to serve well enough to nullify Sinner’s defensive prowess.

Fritz couldn’t manage this in the first set, during which time he was broken in three of his five service games, including the first. In that game, he sent down a 127mph serve on break point, which Sinner sliced up in the air. Fritz missed the put-away shot and went behind immediately.

His low first-serve percentage (38 per cent) was a factor in losing the first set 6-3, but even more important was the proportion of points won behind those serves. Fritz won just 55 per cent, way down on the 81 per cent he had averaged for the rest of the tournament.

Fritz was missing the lines with his first serve, and when he got them in, Sinner was able to get the ball back deep and put the American on the back foot. Fritz struggled to bring his forehand into play early in points as a result, and the struggles he had on his serve meant that, despite a pretty good returning day, he was too often behind the eight ball.

Charlie Eccleshare

How did Sinner sweep Fritz’s feet from under him?

Just when it looked like Fritz had gotten his feet under him, straightening out his first-set serving problems and staying even with Sinner through the second, the wheels came off.

The first player to break the other’s serve was likely to win the match, and Fritz had gone from landing just 38 per cent of his first serves in the first set, to nearly 90 per cent in the second set, through his first four service games.

Jannik Sinner dragged Fritz into long rally exchanges that he couldn’t sustain. (Kena Betancur / AFP via Getty Images)

Then came the fifth and most crucial service game at 4-5, in which Fritz made only three out of five first serves, and the points stretched longer — the kind of situation in which Fritz’s less reliable ground game can break down.

Three unforced errors gave Sinner two set points. He only needed one, moving into the court and sending a forehand deep that Fritz couldn’t get back.

All points and games are supposed to be equal in tennis. They’re not. Lose your serve in the first game of a set and you have several more chances to draw even. Lose it when you’re a set down and 4-5 behind, and you’ve lost at least 40 per cent of a match.

Beating Sinner from ahead or while staying even is hard enough. Climbing out of a two-set hole to do it is nearly impossible.

Matt Futterman

How did the crowd feed off scraps — and then burst into life?

As well as the serve, the main weapon Fritz had on Saturday was the crowd.

Broadly speaking, there are two main ways to get the fans going. One is having a Frances Tiafoe-like ability to work a crowd; the other is keeping the scoreboard close enough that they get properly engaged.

Fritz is never going to be a guy who connects with supporters like Tiafoe, it’s just not in his nature — so he needed to create some tension by putting Sinner under pressure, much like the similarly understated Jessica Pegula did with Aryna Sabalenka in Saturday’s women’s final.

When Taylor Fritz sparked into life, the crowd did too. (Kena Betancur / AFP via Getty Images)

Fritz really struggled to do this for the most part, for which his opponent also deserves a lot of credit. Sinner has such a good poker face that he gives a crowd very little to work with.

Finally in the third set, Fritz and the crowd started working together in harmony. First, after Fritz held for 3-3 having saved break points, they properly erupted for the first time. Buoyed by this, Fritz gave them a couple of big celebrations in the next game, which sent the crowd wild. They started getting on Sinner’s case, cheering when he missed a serve and willing a double fault into existence to give Fritz the break and what looked like the set.

Then Sinner came back again and, although the crowd remained engaged, they couldn’t help their guy over the line.

Charlie Eccleshare

As Sinner figures out his losses, who will figure out how to beat him?

There simply aren’t many ways to beat Jannik Sinner these days, other than hoping that he is having something off an off-day, especially on his serve. Sinner is now 55-5 in 2024, with a 35-2 record on hard courts, losing to Andrey Rublev in Montreal and Carlos Alcaraz in Indian Wells.

Alcaraz appeared to be onto something at Indian Wells in March. Down 1-6, he made a mid-match adjustment and started varying the height of his groundstrokes, jumping the ball up and down to break Sinner’s rhythm. The Italian prefers to plant his feet just behind a baseline, firing back forehands and backhands on a wire all afternoon.

Since then, a whole line of players have tried the tactic, and Sinner now sees it from a mile (or 80 feet) away — especially against someone like Fritz, who can’t get the trajectory and revolutions to make things awkward. Sinner straightens up and hops back as soon as he spots some elevation, and turns a high ball into a belt-high forehand.

He has also started making mid-match tactical adjustments of his own. The best example Sunday afternoon was drifting back near the back wall, changing his return position deep into the second set after Fritz had pinned him back for the majority of it.

Jannik Sinner spent most of his time returning in the green behind the court. (Frank Franklin II / Associated Press)

Suddenly, Sinner became Daniil Medvedev. He knew that he could hit long, loopy returns against Fritz — a player who rarely serves and volleys, and is still incorporating variety and advanced net play into his game. By extending the length of rallies, he played Fritz’s service games on terms favorable to him.

It was a good, low-risk place to start changing things up — or in Sinner’s case on Sunday, to finish them.

At 4-5 30-30, Fritz was serving to win the third set and turn Arthur Ashe Stadium into a cauldron. He launched into one of his best serves of the day, a 133mph serve down the T. Sinner’s return position gave him time to send a return onto a pixel square in Fritz’s backhand corner. Somehow, the Italian had gained the upper hand in a point he had no business winning. He did it on that one, and the next one and the next one. Suddenly it was all even at 5-5, and the crowd’s hopes had diminished. Another break two games later, and it was done.

Matt Futterman

What did Jannik Sinner say after the final?

On court:

“The last period of my career was really not easy,” Sinner said, before dedicating the title to his aunt who is unwell.

“I don’t know how much I still have her in my life … She was a very important person in my life.”

What did Taylor Fritz say after the final?

On court:

“I know we’ve been waiting for a champion for a long time. I’m sorry I couldn’t get it done this time, but … I’m gonna keep working, and hopefully I’ll get it done next time.”

In his press conference:

On his serve not working for much of the match

“My plan A is not working. The plan B that I fall back on would normally be being a little bit safer, grinding it out.

That works, along with my serve, against a lot of other players, but against him, he’s just gonna bully me a little bit too much.”

On the feeling that Grand Slams are more open now

“I don’t think you have to, I don’t know, play unbelievable to go deep in tournaments and contend.”

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(Top photo: Angela Weiss / AFP via Getty Images)

It’s a comeback story years, sometimes decades in the making.

Indiana hasn’t played in the Rose Bowl since its futile attempt to stop USC running back O.J. Simpson on Jan. 1, 1968, making the team’s return this week to face UCLA something of a now-or-never pilgrimage for those who played in that game.

“We have a very thin group of guys who are still around,” said Harry Gonso, the Hoosiers’ quarterback that day 56 years ago, “if you understand what I mean.”

Minnesota was once such a Rose Bowl regular — appearing in the New Year’s Day game as the Big Ten champion in 1961 and ‘62 — that Dave Mona, then a freshman writing for the school’s student newspaper, decided not to splurge on the $49 round-trip train fare to Pasadena to attend the latter game.

“I casually said, ‘No, I won’t go this time — they go every year,’ ” Mona said, “having no idea that it would be more than 50 years later before they would be back.”

Iowa has played in the Rose Bowl only three times in the last half-century, making its return in early November a novelty on par with the team playing a game last season against Northwestern at Wrigley Field in Chicago.

“It’s amazing how many people are already making plans to go out there,” Hawkeyes coach Kirk Ferentz said this summer.

All three traditional Big Ten schools coming to the Rose Bowl this season to face conference newbie UCLA expect to bring their largest contingent of fans traveling to any road game in 2024, reflecting the stadium’s allure in pockets of the country used to longingly seeing the stadium on television.

“Compared to our other Big Ten road games, UCLA has far and away the biggest level of interest among our fans right now,” said Mike Wierzbicki, the Minnesota senior associate athletics director for external affairs who expects at least 10,000 Golden Gophers fans to attend the game on Oct. 12.

To capitalize on the interest, Minnesota’s athletic department is sponsoring two- and three-night travel packages that include accommodations at the JW Marriott Los Angeles L.A. LIVE, a group tour of Los Angeles and a pregame tailgate, complete with open bar, at Brookside Golf Club. There will also be a “’Sota Social” at Barney’s Beanery in Pasadena on the evening before the game.

Mark Jessen, a lifelong Golden Gophers fan, said he planned to attend every event on the itinerary to savor each moment leading up to kickoff and, if he’s lucky, a picturesque sunset over the nearby San Gabriel Mountains.

“My whole life, 61 years, I’ve dreamed of going but it was for a different reason, right?” Jessen said, referring to the possibility of Minnesota making the trip as Big Ten champions. “It was because we had a good team and we were going to get to go to the Rose Bowl. And so at this age it’s like, well, I don’t know if that’s going to happen, especially when you look at our conference and what’s happened here.”

The Big Ten’s expansion and the accompanying demise of the Pac-12 means that teams can now only go to the Rose Bowl by playing UCLA in the regular season or by qualifying for the 12-team College Football Playoff, which will utilize the Rose Bowl game as a quarterfinal in December.

At Big Ten media day, UCLA coach DeShaun Foster delivered a special welcome to the conference’s fans planning a return to Pasadena after many years away.

“You know, they should come out here and just take in Los Angeles and treat it like a vacation — even the players,” Foster said with a smile.

Indiana, Minnesota and Iowa do not have long histories against UCLA. The Hoosiers have never played the Bruins. Minnesota has faced UCLA just three times, including a 21-3 victory over the Bruins in the 1961 Rose Bowl. The only time Minnesota played UCLA on the road during the regular season, in 1978, the Bruins were still playing home games at the Coliseum.

Iowa has gone 2-7 against UCLA, including a 45-28 loss when the teams last met in the 1986 Rose Bowl — the Bruins’ most recent triumph in the game.

Ferentz, who was Iowa’s offensive line coach during the Hawekeyes’ 1982 Rose Bowl appearance after a 23-year absence, understands the pull of Pasadena for fans in the frigid Midwest.

“That was a huge thing,” Ferentz said of going back to the Rose Bowl, where the Hawkeyes haven’t played since a 2016 loss to Stanford, “so I think there’s that attraction for a lot of our fans — they’re going to love it, so I’m all for that.”

In a nod to the level of interest in the game, Delta Airlines added a direct flight from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to Los Angeles to accommodate Hawkeyes fans heading to Pasadena. Iowa has sold 2,700 tickets, according to school athletic officials, with the rest of the Hawkeyes’ road games selling between 1,000 and 2,000 tickets. Many more fans wearing black and gold who live in Southern California are expected to show up on game day.

The large swaths of visiting fans inside the Rose Bowl will not only help fill a stadium that has set record lows for attendance in recent years — leading to the installation of giant tarps in each end zone — but also provide UCLA an essential infusion of cash from ticket revenue at a time when its athletic department faces a $167.7-million budget deficit.

UCLA’s other conference home games this season will be against Oregon and USC, former Pac-12 rivals who are familiar with trips to Pasadena. The Ducks and Trojans are also known for bringing throngs of fans, meaning the Bruins could be in for a big attendance bump after averaging only 47,951 fans at the Rose Bowl last season. A school athletic official would not divulge season ticket sales figures for this season, citing an ongoing sales campaign, but said the expectation was for a 10% to 15% increase in season tickets sold from last year.

“One of the many benefits of being in the Big Ten Conference is a bigger audience, whether it’s Southern California-based Big Ten alumni and fans, or UCLA alumni in the other Big Ten locales,” UCLA athletic director Martin Jarmond said. “Some of the Big Ten schools have not had the opportunity to play in the Rose Bowl in decades, if ever, and there is no better setting for college football than the Rose Bowl. Having new opponents come out here is also exciting for our fans and our student-athletes, and we’re looking forward to starting new rivalries within the conference.”

More than half a century after he threw his last college pass, Gonso remains the only Indiana quarterback to play in the Rose Bowl. His memories of that day are fond … in terms of the weather.

“Fortunately, we had a lot of good sunshine,” said Gonso, now 76, “and unfortunately, we played against a very good team.”

A photo spread in the Los Angeles Times of the 1968 Rose Bowl Game between USC and Indiana.

(Los Angeles Times)

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USC had five players that would go on to be taken in the first round of the 1968 NFL draft, not to mention Simpson, a junior running back. Simpson’s second touchdown run — an eight-yarder in the third quarter — secured the Trojans’ 14-3 victory.

Gonso sends his regrets that he won’t be going back next week; he’ll be watching on television from home in Indiana. The Hoosiers have sold a little more than 1,500 tickets, the most for any road game this season.

As (bad) luck would have it, Mona will miss Minnesota’s return after agreeing to host a fall colors tour in New England before the Big Ten schedule was released. He’s expected to return to Minneapolis a few hours before kickoff.

“I’ll get home in time to watch it on TV and keep my fingers crossed that the Gophers either win the Big Ten and get chosen to go to the Rose Bowl [as part of the CFP],” Mona said, “or more realistically, probably in two or four more years they’ll go back as a visiting team.”

Fortunately, Mona can hear all about what it was like to be there from Jessen, a longtime friend who will add the Rose Bowl to the list of college football meccas he’s visited. Clemson’s “Death Valley”? Yep. Texas’ Darrell K. Royal Memorial Stadium? You bet. Jessen also once saw Pete Carroll’s Trojans whip the Bruins at the Coliseum. Among Big Ten venues, he favors Michigan Stadium and Beaver Stadium.

“It’s 112,000 people in white,” Jessen said of Penn State’s home.

Jessen will head to Southern California as part of a group of 25 friends. Another friend has chartered three planes for about 600 more fans. They will be joined by a large contingent of Minnesota alumni who live in the Los Angeles area, most of whom have never seen their beloved team play in the Rose Bowl.

Win or lose, given their team’s decades-long absence, they all will have come back.

Welcome to the ‘Beverly Hills of Britain’, where the only thing missing is sunshine.

There are luxury cars, fancy restaurants, gated mansions and enough high-level professional footballers to create the United Kingdom’s most dominant five-a-side league.

‘Elmbridge Borough Council welcomes you to Cobham’, the sign reads as you enter the village made famous by Chelsea Football Club, whose training ground named after this place is a four-minute drive from its high street (and actually in nearby Stoke d’Abernon).

Chelsea moved to Cobham, part of London’s southern commuter belt, 19 years ago from Harlington, near Heathrow Airport on the western outskirts of the city. Since then, the village itself and surrounding areas, including Oxshott, have become home to footballers past and present, the streets — many of them private roads — lined by multi-million-pound mansions hidden behind security gates.

Over the past two decades, residents have become accustomed to seeing Premier League footballers wandering down the high street (Belgium international Eden Hazard was a regular in the village’s high-end Waitrose supermarket during his 2012-19 spell at Stamford Bridge), stopping for a coffee or enjoying a meal in one of the restaurants.

Even on the gloomy September morning when The Athletic visits, an array of fancy cars — Land Rover Defenders dominate — are passing through or pulling over to park outside one of the local stores.

Just over 20 miles south-west from central London, but away from the glare living in the UK capital would bring, Cobham and Oxshott are two of the most desirable — and expensive — locations in the country, where houses regularly sell for millions of pounds.

On any given day, you could bump into John Terry, the former Chelsea and England captain, or Sir Andy Murray, the British men’s tennis player who retired from that sport after the recent Olympics in Paris.

It is the south of England’s answer to the north’s ‘Golden Triangle’ of villages — Hale, Alderley Edge and Wilmslow — which is home to many Manchester City and Manchester United footballers.     

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Welcome to the ‘goldplated’ villages the Premier League elite call home

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(Dan Sheldon/The Athletic)

Nicknamed the ‘Beverly Hills of Britain’ due to the number of celebrities who now call it home, this area has long been popular among London-based stockbrokers and hedge-fund managers. There are elite private schools, fancy hair salons, Pilates studios and yoga classes at the disposal of players and their families.

Trevor Kearney, founder of property company The Private Office Real Estate, sums up what life is like as a Premier League footballer based around here: “If you go to Grappelli on a Saturday night then, no matter who you are, there is always someone more famous than you in the room.” 

Grappelli, an Italian restaurant only a couple of hundred yards away from The Ivy Cobham Garden, is frequently visited by footballers and, alongside its pasta dishes, is known for its ebullient front-of-house manager, Eddy, who has become a friend to many of them.

(Dan Sheldon/The Athletic)

During Eddy’s chat with The Athletic over coffee, several passers-by stop to say hello, while Chelsea player Cesare Casadei parks his Mercedes on the other side of the road before disappearing into a shop. Eddy says Casadei, a 21-year-old midfielder, is a “good guy”.

“Most of the footballers that come here are Chelsea players,” Eddy says. “Lots of old players still live in the area, so we have Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink, Ashley Cole… they are regulars and good friends with the owner.

“We have had John Terry, Ashley Cole, Noni Madueke, (Marc) Cucurella, Roberto Di Matteo, Gianfranco Zola, Andriy Shevchenko, Mauricio Pochettino, Joao Felix, Robert Sanchez… I don’t watch football, but I started following it because I needed to know who they are!”

During our conversation, Ryan Bertrand, the former Chelsea and England defender, pulls up in his car down the road. Yes, Eddy knows him, too. But with the most prominent players away on international duty at the moment, this is a relatively quiet morning in Cobham.

On the day The Athletic visited, Ahmed Alsanawi, a barber with 1.2 million Instagram followers whose social media posts show him cutting the hair of Hazard, Phil Foden, Jack Grealish and Reece James, among others, turned up in his yellow Lamborghini Urus.

“It’s trendy, it’s cool, but it has all the right fundamentals of what makes up a great community and environment,” Kearney says of the area. “When Chelsea arrived at Cobham, there was a mandate that the players need to live in a two-and-a-half-mile radius of the training ground, so that meant Cobham and Oxshott has seen a new breed and type of buyer. 

“All of a sudden, you had this new breed of person, wealth and fame injected into it. It transformed it, but it was already headed in that direction.

“Chelsea didn’t change the market, they just turbo-fuelled it.”

Kearney estimates that around 100 footballers are living in this part of the county of Surrey, including the towns of Weybridge and Esher a few miles to the north. Many of them, particularly those of a Chelsea persuasion, reside near Cobham, though.

A typical house in the area — where gated mansions dominate (Dan Sheldon/The Athletic)

“Chelsea moved here and then other players at different clubs, let’s say (their west London neighbours) Fulham, who didn’t want to be in central London, saw everyone was in Oxshott or Cobham and moved there instead,” Kearney says. “It’s the same at (south Londoners) Crystal Palace.

“It became the south’s hub for players. If you were at a north London club, you would stay relatively north. But if you lived more towards the south, then you were coming to Cobham or Oxshott.

“Even if you were further south, let’s say at Bournemouth (on the south coast), you would live in Cobham or Oxshott and commute. I had two friends playing for Stoke City (in the Midlands, north of Birmingham) who lived in Oxshott and got the train there because the family didn’t want to move as it was the perfect area for them.

“That shows the allure and pull of the area.”

It became common for the players from other top clubs in London, such as Palace, to make Oxshott their home and they would frequently travel to the training ground together. A Palace contingent of Joel Ward, Gary Cahill, Martin Kelly and Scott Dann, for example, used to link up in the mornings, collecting team-mate Jason Puncheon at the nearby Reigate junction of London’s orbital M25 motorway along the way.

According to data from Foxtons, a UK-based estate agency, the average price of a house in Cobham has doubled since Chelsea made this area their home in 2005. On average, houses were selling for just over £600,000 then, compared to more than £1.2million in 2024. The gated enclaves lining the private roads and populated by footballers are selling for much more than that latter figure.

Including Oxshott, Kearney estimates that footballers are spending around “£4m to £7m” on a house. Houses in Oxshott, though, are, on average, more expensive than those in Cobham, which is under four miles away.

“What Oxshott has is the Crown Estate,” Kearney explains. “The Crown Estate was once Crown land (property of the Royal family) and has an incredibly high-end housing estate with values from £3m to £20m. They are gated enclaves, safe environments, roads that were run by management companies and it is a super-smart setup.

“Oxshott was in that radius and it has an incredible school called Danes Hill. People were training in Cobham and a couple of minutes up the road is an amazing place to live, with knockout houses and a brilliant school, and it works for them.

“Cobham has a few of those estates, too, but not as big or as powerful as the Crown Estate. Oxshott has a little high street, but it hasn’t got an Ivy or a Grappelli’s. People who live in Oxshott would visit Cobham for the coffee spots, hair salons and restaurants.”

The drive of the Crown Estate (Dan Sheldon/The Athletic)

In 2022, Didier Drogba, the Ivory Coast international striker who left Chelsea in 2015 to play for Montreal in MLS, put his six-bedroom house on the Crown Estate up for sale for £6.25million, according to the UK’s Daily Mail. In 2014,  the same newspaper also reported Terry sold two Oxshott properties for a combined £21.5m.

Players who choose to rent instead of buying, especially if they are arriving from a different country and are reluctant to commit to spending millions on a house, are spending anywhere from £15,000 to £30,000 a month. “The rental market is interesting because there isn’t enough good enough stock to come and rent,” Kearney says. “If I had a house that someone could move into today, it would go instantly.”

When it comes to a player getting a mortgage, banks will consider their career and trajectory before deciding on the terms of a deal.

Kearney notes how a lot of them can “very easily get high-leverage” mortgages, sometimes “up to 100 per cent”. The majority of these are spread over the length of the individual’s club contract, although exceptions can be made if a player is more established or quite clearly on their way to becoming a superstar.

Aside from a modern exterior and interior, along with a big enough garden to install a five-a-side pitch — Kearney says this is a more common request than you may think — the most important thing house-hunting footballers are looking for is safety and security.

The houses are imposing and worth millions (Dan Sheldon/The Athletic)

Footballers are often deemed easy targets by criminals who will know when a player is likely to be at training or playing in a match, maybe at the other end of the country or possibly overseas, due to their club’s schedule and fixture list.

In recent years, players’ houses have been targeted, including in Oxshott.

Chelsea and England forward Raheem Sterling’s home was broken into in December 2022, leading to him flying back from the World Cup in Qatar.

Four men were jailed in July 2017 after targeting Terry’s home in Oxshott in February 2017, as reported by the BBC, with the former Chelsea defender being told by Judge Susan Tapping in court that it “might have been a mistake to post a family photograph on social media to show that he was away on holiday”.

During that raid, the convicted burglars stole more than £220,000 of jewellery and designer handbags worth £126,000. “His home was deliberately targeted and the master bedroom suite was ransacked,” Judge Tapping said.

Sterling returned home from the World Cup in Qatar after his Surrey home was broken into (Julian Finney/Getty Images)

According to police.uk data, from October 2021 to the end of June 2024, 193 burglary offences were committed in Cobham and Oxshott, with the most prevalent crimes being violence and sexual offences (1,075) during the same period.

“Safety and security is paramount,” Kearney says. “I’ve also got a company that is a security service around players and that works phenomenally well. If you are buying a new house, they go in and make sure the basics are right, such as intercoms, CCTV, and everything like that, but also layering additional security depending on your needs.”

Safe rooms, panic buttons and patrol dogs have become commonplace. “They want to live really normal, unaffected lives, with the best technology and security systems in their house,” Kearney says.

Given the focus and attention placed on footballers, especially those playing at the highest level, living an ‘unaffected life’ almost seems implausible. But in Cobham, Oxshott and the wider Surrey area, that is something they, within reason, have been able to do. Their fellow local residents have become used to seeing them on a daily basis, whether that is Terry, who played 78 times for England, or the lesser-known ones such as Casadei.

As in Beverly Hills, the Los Angeles district that is home to actors, singers and other A-list celebrities, a Premier League footballer can turn up to a supermarket or restaurant in Cobham and, like Kearney says above, there is a good chance they will not be the most famous person there.

(Top photos: Daniel Sheldon/The Athletic; design: Eamonn Dalton for The Athletic)