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The Australian Open’s animated tennis players: A YouTube sensation and the future of sports media

Published

1 year ago

January 22, 2025

The Australian Open’s animated tennis players: A YouTube sensation and the future of sports media

MELBOURNE, Australia — One moment, they are playing tennis. The next, they disappear from the court, or melt into a puddle, or do a backflip mid-point. Their rackets flail independently from their hands and sometimes disappear completely. Their heads are oversized. They are the best tennis players in the world; they are the undisputed stars of the 2025 Australian Open.

They are also cartoons.

There’s Daniil Medvedev, last year’s finalist, whaling his racket into the net.

There’s Madison Keys, this year’s semifinalist, running down a ball before backflipping into the air and disappearing, causing Elena-Gabriela Ruse to miss a volley.

And there’s Jack Draper, feeling the effects of five three-set matches in a row and dissolving into the court.

These clips are courtesy of AO Animated, a YouTube livestream produced by the Australian Open that delivers video-game-style broadcasts of the matches played on Melbourne Park’s three show courts: Rod Laver Arena, Margaret Court Arena and John Cain Arena. It uses tracking data from the Hawk-Eye system used for electronic line calling (ELC) to map the movement of the players and the trajectory of the ball, before overlaying the skins — facial features, kits, the racket — that turns that data into a cartoon player.

This means that for all the fun of the glitches, the feed is a faithful reproduction of the live tennis, just on a short delay. There’s real commentary, crowd noise and chair umpire calls, alongside bobble-headed figures who bear only a passing resemblance to the players they’re representing. In a throwback to old computer games, the protagonists occasionally have minds of their own.

The tournament trialed a primitive version in 2023, with no players and just a ball being tracked back and forth. In 2024, there was animation for just one court, but this year, there are three and the viral moments have captured the tennis world’s imagination. Viewership has increased from 246,542 in the first six days of last year’s event to 1,796,338 in the same timeframe this year.

The cartoon players, prone to glitching limbs, lost rackets and sometimes swapping places on the court, have won acclaim from their real-world counterparts.

“It’s funny,” Carlos Alcaraz said in a news conference last Wednesday. Leylah Fernandez, the world No. 30, was scouting an opponent on YouTube and clicked onto one of the streams thinking it would be useful before getting a pleasant but strange surprise.

Then Daria Kasatkina, the Russian world No. 10 who runs a vlog through YouTube, cut to the heart of why this seemingly quirky bit of fun is also a harbinger for the future of tennis media, as well as the growth of the sport. There is no subscription to pay, no ticket and travel to buy, and no need to search a litany of television rights and providers to figure out which broadcaster is hosting the tournament in the place that a budding tennis fan might call home.

“It’s for free,” Kasatkina said in a news conference.

The economics of Grand Slam media rights — determining which channels show the four biggest tennis events in the world — are relatively straightforward. The Australian Open, the French Open, Wimbledon and the U.S. Open sell their media rights to broadcasters; historically, television networks that built their portfolios on the strength of cable television. Some of them (including ESPN, Warner Bros Discovery and, most recently, Tennis Channel) also have direct-to-consumer streaming.

ESPN will pay $2.04billion (more than £1.5bn) to air the U.S. Open through 2037, while Wimbledon’s broadcast deal with ABC and ESPN networks comes in at $52.5million per year, according to SP Global. Warner Bros Discovery has a 10-year deal worth $650m in place to broadcast the French Open in the United States beginning in 2025.

Grand Slam tournaments also have to protect the value of their in-person experience. If fans can watch a major with relative ease from anywhere, there is less value in having a real ticket. As a result, those broadcast deals come with aggressive restrictions on sharing, editing, and uploading clips on sites such as YouTube, TikTok, X and Instagram — the places where the most people would have the most opportunity to discover tennis.

These restrictions extend to the Grand Slams themselves, which give up a degree of control over how they can promote themselves on social media. Since AO Animated is created by the ELC tracking data and not the broadcast feed from television cameras, it can stream live alongside the real match, creating a free-to-air tennis broadcast just two minutes behind the real action. Rather than bristling at AO Animated potentially taking eyeballs away from their live footage, Eurosport and beIN Sports are hosting it on their online platforms.

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“We knew we were sitting on this asset, ELC, and it started with that,” Machar Reid, Tennis Australia’s director of innovation said in an interview at Melbourne Park this week.

“We’re using it for the skeletal data, with 29 points on the skeleton. That’s being tracked 50 times a second by the 12 cameras. That allows you to create a 3D mesh and then you put the skin over the top. There’s almost an infinite number of avatars you can have.

“There’s something in it, around building a community to allow people to chat about what’s happened and connect with the sport differently.”

The community chat is a staple of YouTube, Twitch, TikTok and other streaming platforms, which tennis has been institutionally slow to embrace. The NBA, NFL and NHL have used this gamified version of sports broadcasting: in December, Disney+ broadcast the NFL game between the Dallas Cowboys and Cincinnati Bengals as The Simpsons on Monday Night Football. It complements the Formula One drivers who stream on Twitch, the world-famous footballers who love esports, and the athletes who use TikTok.

Taken together, these platforms and free avenues into tennis widen how fans can discover the sport. They might go from being a fan of Coco Gauff the TikToker to Coco Gauff the tennis player to tennis the sport. Or they might see a funny clip of a cartoon version of an elite athlete dissolving into the floor and wonder what on earth is going on.

These characters are drawn by Tennis Australia’s Mark Riedy, who works on the Australian Open’s gaming content.

Riedy works in a bunker, surrounded by computer screens and feeds of all the matches being converted into animation. Riedy designed the graphics, the players and the stadiums; he regularly pops into the YouTube chat to engage viewers with questions and answer some of their queries. He likes to keep it lighthearted, embracing the glitches that have captured the imagination.

Mark Riedy in the animation room at Melbourne Park. (Tennis Australia)

Sitting in the bunker during Emma Raducanu’s third-round match against Iga Swiatek, he tells The Athletic that the idea first came to him because he thought a gamified version of tennis would attract fans with no viable route to the broadcast footage. The tournament has the rights to the pre- and post-match action, so when the warm-up ends and a player takes to the service line to start the match, the footage dissolves into the cartoon world. It’s like a reverse Wizard of Oz and its mid-film switch from black and white to glorious technicolour.

This also means there is no way of checking everything’s working until the very first point, which creates another layer of jeopardy. That includes the main characters, with their big heads, oversized tennis balls and volatile rackets.

But part of the success of AO Animated is that its creators are not too precious about it. They want it to be fun and engaging first and foremost, like the look of the players — which, with their big heads, are hardly realistic.

“It’s definitely intentional,” says Xavier Muhlebach, the tournament’s head of original content.

“We wanted something that was cutesy and kid-friendly, but not exclusively for them. I can sit back and enjoy and have a laugh and watch that and not feel like I’m stuck in a loop watching Blue’s Clues or something.”

Riedy adds: “It’s fun to have a bit of a cartoony look to it. There’s the real version if you want accuracy.

“We might get a scenario where we have proper models for every single player, but at the moment, it’s like a character editor in a video game. You just pop it up and you can change the shape of the head, eyes and everything. It was about creating a character that was editable and changeable and, at the moment, there are enough different hairpieces and caps and things.”

The following day, he sends over an AO Animated version of this reporter, suffering against Alcaraz.

There are other challenges that make the stream tend towards the surreal. The ELC cameras are mainly behind the players, so when they hunch over, the racket — a challenge to track because of the speed at which it moves — can disappear. There is no finger animation (on Riedy’s wishlist for next year) and the cameras stop tracking the players at around six metres behind the baseline, or if they bend down. This explains Draper’s apparent melting into the court against Alcaraz.

Riedy gets on the front foot in the comments by poking fun at any misfortune. “That’s a big drawcard. Just putting this up without the chat, I don’t know if that would have had the same response,” he says.

“It would be different and be very passive, whereas this is more community driven and they’re actually talking about the tennis but also the tech,” Muhlebach adds.

The race to future-proof tennis from an ongoing decline in cable television revenue, which will eventually start to affect the value of broadcast rights, has also created something of a media arms race between the majors. The French Open introduced umpire head cams last year, which were intended to check line calls but instead became famous for making the players look like whinging toddlers.

Tennis Australia has set up its first venture capital fund, the A$30million (£15.2m; $18.6m) AO Ventures, which it says will “provide early backing to high-growth technology-led startups that are innovating in the worlds of sport, entertainment, media and health.”

Further developing AO Animated is another aim, with a desire to add “emotion tracking” so that players can celebrate and despair. There are plans to animate the entire complex, as well as adding commentators that include color not to the real tennis being animated, but to the quirks of the animation itself.

As much as the most important figures in this initiative are the tournament and the fans, as with the sport of tennis, it’s the players who create the value and draw the crowds. The animated tennis is only as good as the tennis being played. World No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka was jokingly unimpressed by her character, sharing a clip on Instagram.

“We’re with them and asking for feedback,” Muhlebach said. “Others might be a bit more standoffish because they’ve been working on their own video game.” Sponsorship changes may also have an impact in the future, with players not infrequently signing new deals or, less often, changing their racket or clothing sponsor.

It’s unlikely that every major, let alone every tournament, will be populated with animated versions of Alcaraz and Swiatek bobbling around the court between points and occasionally backflipping into the stands all that soon. AO Animated is nevertheless one of the clearest signs yet that tennis understands how sports media is changing and that getting left behind could quickly become a death sentence.

One day, these animated tennis bobbleheads might rule the world. Until then, there’s always Daniil Medvedev and his disappearing racket.

(Illustration: Dan Goldfarb for The Athletic)

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Jon Jones requests UFC release after Dana White says legend was ‘never’ considered him for White House card

Published

9 hours ago

March 10, 2026

Press Room

Jon Jones requests UFC release after Dana White says legend was ‘never’ considered him for White House card

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Mixed martial arts legend Jon Jones ended his retirement from UFC simply because he wanted a spot on the “Freedom 250” fight card at the White House in June.

But, when UFC CEO Dana White announced the card during UFC 326 this past weekend, Jones wasn’t among the fighters. As a result, he has requested a release from his UFC contract.

White was candid when asked about Jones following the UFC 326 card.

Jon Jones of the United States of America reacts after his TKO victory against Stipe Miocic of the United States of America in the UFC heavyweight championship fight during the UFC 309 event at Madison Square Garden on Nov. 16, 2024 in New York City. ((Photo by Sarah Stier/Getty Images))

“Never, ever, ever, which I told you guys a hundred thousands times, was Jon Jones ever even remotely in my mind to fight at the White House,” White explained, per CBS Sports. “Some guy with Meta Glasses filmed him talking about his hips – that his hips are so bad. And I don’t know if you guys saw that flag football game where he can barely run. Jon Jones retired because of his hips. He’s got arthritis in his hips. Apparently, doctors say he should have a hip replacement.”

White added that “the Jon Jones thing is bulls—,” saying that he texted the fighter’s lawyer saying he would never be on the White House card despite Jones saying he was in negotiations for it.

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The Meta Glasses incident White is referring to came from a viral video, where Jones, unaware he was being filmed, discussed issues with his hips to a fan.

On Monday, Jones composed a thorough response to White’s comments about him and the White House Card. He previously posted and deleted social media explanations, but Monday’s appeared to be his final statement on the matter.

UFC President Dana White speaks after UFC Fight Night at Toyota Center on Feb. 21, 2026. (Troy Taormina/Imagn Images)

“Yes, I have arthritis in my hip and it’s painful, but that doesn’t mean I can’t fight,” Jones, who retired a heavyweight champion in 2025, said. “So let me get this straight, if I had accepted the lowball offer, suddenly my hip would be fine and I’d be on the White House card? That doesn’t make sense. I even received stem cell treatment last week to get ready for the White House card, and training camp was scheduled to start today. I was preparing to be ready.

“I understand business deals fall through sometimes, but going out publicly and saying things that aren’t true isn’t right. After everything I’ve given to the UFC, the years, the title defenses, the fights, hearing that I’m ‘done’ is disappointing. Especially when as recently as Friday UFC was calling me trying to get me on that White House card for a much lower number.”

Jones finished his statement by saying he “respectfully” asks to be released from his UFC contract.

Jon Jones enters the ring before facing Stipe Miocic in the UFC heavyweight championship fight during the UFC 309 event at Madison Square Garden on November 16, 2024 in New York City, New York. (Chris Unger/Zuffa LLC)

“No more spins, no more games. Thank you to the real fans who know what’s up,” he wrote.

The UFC did not immediately respond to a request for comment by Fox News Digital.

Jones is considered one of the best UFC fighters of all time, owning a 28-1-1 record, which includes his last bout with Stipe Miocic, knocking him out to take the heavyweight title belt. He is also a two-time light heavyweight champion.

Follow Fox News Digital’s sports coverage on X and subscribe to the Fox News Sports Huddle newsletter.

Scott Thompson is a sports writer for Fox News Digital.

Sports

With U.S. at war with Iran, political upheaval could engulf World Cup

Published

9 hours ago

March 10, 2026

Press Room

With U.S. at war with Iran, political upheaval could engulf World Cup

Twelve days ago the U.S., a World Cup host country, launched a full-scale bombing campaign against Iran, a country that has qualified to play in the tournament. That’s never happened before.

Five days later, that same World Cup host began military operations inside the borders of Ecuador, another World Cup qualifier, half a world away. That’s never happened before either.

With the tournament scheduled to kick off in three months, those events have soccer scholar Jonathan Wilson questioning whether it’s wise for the World Cup to go on at all.

“It seems to me, for each passing day, it’s less and less likely that the World Cup can happen,” he said.

That take seems unduly alarmist said David Goldblatt, a British sportswriter and sociologist who is a visiting professor at Pitzer College in Claremont. Anything short of a full-scale war inside the U.S. would not be enough to pull the plug on the tournament now, he said. Especially with FIFA expecting revenues of as much as $11 billion.

“I mean, it’s not a good look,” Goldblatt conceded. “And certainly when set against FIFA’s official pronouncements on its role in encouraging world peace and cosmopolitan celebrations of a universal humanity, none of that sits terribly easily.

“But in terms of actually running the World Cup, I don’t think it’s going to make very much difference at all.”

However, with the Trump administration open to engaging in more international conflicts, there’s little doubt this World Cup, the largest and most complex in history, will also be the most political in history as well.

Complicating things further is the fact the current conflict in the Middle East hasn’t been limited to just the U.S. and Iran. Iranian missiles have hit both Qatar and Saudi Arabia, among other countries, and Jordan has fired on U.S. assets.

Those three countries are World Cup qualifiers as well.

The fate of a soccer tournament pales in importance to the death and destruction the conflagration in the Middle East has produced, of course. But the need for unity is the very reason there’s a World Cup in the first place.

When French soccer administrator Jules Rimet founded the tournament 96 years ago, he believed soccer could be a tool for international peace. And in the early years of the tournament, Rimet, FIFA’s longest-serving president and a talented diplomat, was able to limit the impact of geopolitics on the World Cup, watering down Mussolini’s influence on the 1934 World Cup, for example, and steering the 1938 tournament away from Hitler’s Germany.

FIFA President Gianni Infantino has taken a far different approach, courting President Donald Trump’s support despite his growing number of global conflicts.

A week before bombs began falling on Iran, Infantino appeared at the inaugural meeting of Trump’s Board of Peace wearing a red cap with ‘USA’ on the front and the numbers ‘45-47’ — a reference to Trump’s non-consecutive presidencies. That act was so blatantly partisan, IOC president Kirsty Coventry said her organization would investigate whether Infantino, an IOC member, breached the terms of the group’s charter, which requires members to act independent of political interests.

FIFA president Gianni Infantino holds up a USA hat as he attends the inaugural meeting for the Board of Peace at the Institute of Peace in Washington on Feb. 19.

(Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images)

“Infantino has absolutely breached every FIFA protocol on neutrality,” said Wilson, author of “The Power and Glory: The History of the World Cup.”

“Absolute neutrality is always impossible and not desirable, but it has clearly gone way, way, way beyond. The peace prize looked grotesque at the time. It looks even worse now. And I can’t see how the future will look kindly on Infantino. I think Infantino has to some extent legitimized Trump.”

This is hardly new behavior from Infantino, who had close relationships with Vladimir Putin ahead of the 2018 tournament played in Russia and Qatar’s leaders ahead of the 2022 tournament despite their well-known human rights violations.

The list of countries Infantino is asking to overlook poor relations with the country hosting the majority of World Cup games this summer is growing.

Consider that Denmark, which administers Greenland, an autonomous territory Trump has also threatened to invade, can qualify for the tournament in a European playoff that will take place later this month. Then there’s World Cup qualifiers Haiti, Ivory Coast and Senegal, who aren’t at war with the U.S. but whose citizens have been banned from entering the country to cheer for their teams. That completely contradicts a promise from Infantino, who said “everybody will be welcome” at the 2026 World Cup.

“If I had a crystal ball I could tell you now what is going to happen,” Heimo Schirgi, the World Cup chief operating officer for FIFA, said Monday. “But obviously the situation is developing. It’s changing day by day and we are monitoring closely. [But] the World Cup will go on right? The World Cup is too big and we hope that everyone can participate that has qualified.”

Goldblatt, the Pitzer professor, said Infantino’s action are understandable since he has few cards to play against Trump.

President Trump speaks as he receives the FIFA Peace Prize while FIFA president Gianni Infantino applauds Friday.

“What’s Infantino going to do? What levers can you pull?” he asked. “You can threaten to take it away. That’s not happening. Moral admonishment? Who’s going to take that from FIFA? It is a farcical idea that anybody thinks that the president of FIFA has any kind of collective moral authority or any role as a spokesperson for the progressive part of the world.

“They may fantasize that this is the case. But it is morally and politically absurd that any of us should expect that of these people. So if you are Infantino and that is the case, you know what works with Trump? What works is flattery. So of course he’s gone down that path.”

The games, Goldblatt said, will go on even if bombs are still falling. And that may not be an entirely bad thing.

“Football’s a great distraction. That’s partly why it’s so popular,” he said. “It will be virtually impossible, if the war continues, for that not to be a central element of like, the meaning and the purpose of what we’re all doing here.

“How we’ll feel and what it will look like, I don’t know. It will be very strange. Football is unpredictable and extraordinary. Something will happen that will warm our souls.”

⚽ You have read the latest installment of On Soccer with Kevin Baxter. The weekly column takes you behind the scenes and shines a spotlight on unique stories. Listen to Baxter on this week’s episode of the “Corner of the Galaxy” podcast.

Sports

Australia grants asylum to 5 Iranian women’s soccer players amid Iran conflict

Published

21 hours ago

March 10, 2026

Press Room

Australia grants asylum to 5 Iranian women’s soccer players amid Iran conflict

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Australia granted asylum to five players from the Iranian women’s soccer team who were visiting for a tournament when the U.S.-Israeli attacks against Iran began.

Australian federal police officers on Tuesday transported the five women from their hotel in Gold Coast, Australia, to a “safe location” after they made asylum requests to meet with Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke and to finalize the processing of their humanitarian visas.

“Last night I was able to tell five women from the Iranian Women’s Soccer team that they are welcome to stay in Australia, to be safe and have a home here,” Burke said on X.

The move comes after the team refused to sing the Iranian anthem before their first Women’s Asian Cup match early last week against South Korea, although they later sang and saluted the anthem in two subsequent matches, including ahead of their final match, when they were eliminated by the Philippines.

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Australian Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke poses with five Iranian women soccer players who have been granted asylum in Australia, Tuesday, March 10, 2026. (Australia Ministry of Home Affairs)

“I don’t want to begin to imagine how difficult that decision is for each of the individual women, but certainly last night it was joy, it was relief,” Burke told reporters after signing the documents. “People were very excited about embarking on a life in Australia.”

The five women said they were happy for their names and pictures to be published, according to Burke, who emphasized that the players wanted to make clear that they were not political activists.

The Iranian team arrived in Australia for the tournament before the war against Iran began on Feb. 28.

After the team was eliminated from the tournament over the weekend, they faced potentially returning to a country still under bombardment. The team’s head coach, Marziyeh Jafari, said on Sunday the players “want to come back to Iran as soon as we can.”

An official squad list named 26 players, as well as Jafari and other coaches.

While only five players were granted asylum, Burke said the offer was given to everyone on the team.

IRAN FLAG REMOVED FROM PARALYMPICS OPENING CEREMONY AFTER SOLE ATHLETE WITHDRAWS OVER TRAVEL SAFETY CONCERNS

Iran players during their national anthem ahead of the Women’s Asian Cup soccer match between Iran and the Philippines in Robina, Australia, Sunday, March 8, 2026. (Dave Hunt/AAPImage via AP)

“These women are tremendously popular in Australia, but we realize they are in a terribly difficult situation with the decisions that they’re making,” Burke said. “The opportunity will continue to be there for them to talk to Australian officials if they wish to.”

It remains unclear when the remaining players will leave Australia.

“Australians have been moved by the plight of these brave women,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told reporters. “They’re safe here and they should feel at home here.”

“They then had to consider that and do it in a way that did not present any danger to them or to their families and friends back home in Iran,” he continued.

The asylum offer came after U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday called on Australia to grant asylum to any team member who wanted it.

Trump had blasted Australia on social media, saying Australia was “making a terrible humanitarian mistake” by allowing the team to be “forced back to Iran, where they will most likely be killed.”

Supporters react towards a bus transporting Iranian woman players following their Women’s Asian Cup soccer match against the Philippines on the Gold Coast, Australia, Sunday, March 8, 2026. (Dave Hunt/AAP Image via AP)

“The U.S. will take them if you won’t,” Trump said, despite his administration’s efforts to limit the number of immigrants in the U.S. who can receive asylum for political purposes.

Just hours later, Trump praised Albanese in another post.

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“He’s on it! Five have already been taken care of, and the rest are on their way,” Trump wrote.

Albanese said Trump had called him for “a very positive conversation,” about the issue. The prime minister said he explained “the action that we’d undertaken over the previous 48 hours” to support the women.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.