Tennis - Reformations of the Atp-tour

This year’s ATP season draws to a close, there are only two tournaments left, the BNP Paribas Masters in France and the Tennis Masters Cup in China. The players have around one month after that to get some rest and concentrate already on the beginning of the next season which starts on January 5th 2009, with the first three tournaments in Qatar, India and Australia.

There are several modifications planned for the new season, for example the calendar will be restructured, the prize money will be partially raised and some of the court surfaces will be changed as well. In total there are 63 tournaments advertised for the next season, which will take place all over the five main continents, where around 31 countries will serve as hosts.

One of the most important reforms in the calendar of the coming up ATP season is the change of names of the tournament categories. The Masters Series will now be called "Masters 1000" and the eleven tournaments of the International Series Gold are now named "500". The numbers indicate the points that the players will receive by winning one of the tournaments in these series. So if a player wins in the Masters, he will receive 1000 points and by winning a tournament at the former Series Gold, he will receive 500 points. For all the other ATP tournaments players are assigned 250 points. 

The tournament in the South African Johannesburg which was part of the ATP calendar from 1976-1995 as an outdoor tournament in a hard court will come back on 2009 season. On the other hand, the Austrian tournament in Kitzbühel won’t be part of the ATP calendar anymore. The first tournament of the year in Australia changes its location from Adelaide to Brisbane and the ATP finals of the best eight players at the end of the year will shift from Shanghai to London. The German fans won’t have to deal with any losses, the five tournaments in Hamburg, Stuttgart, Halle, Munich and Düsseldorf will continue in the calendar. In the USA and France the fans can enjoy more tournaments than before.

Another change was made for the court surfaces, the game on carpets will be totally taken off the agenda to make the games in general slower and in this way more interesting. “We don’t want to play anymore on surfaces which were fabricated seven or eight years ago. On the carpets back then, the games did not last more than one hour”, said the director of the tournament in Vienna, Peter Feigl, in an interview. And so the last indoor tournaments in Europe will now be transferred to the hard court.

The reformation was already announced in 2007 by the ATP manager, Etienne de Villiers. The players however don’t seem to be too happy about this decision. Two years ago there were around 60 players, amongst them the Swiss Roger Federer and the Spaniard Rafael Nadal, who collected their signatures and sent a letter of protest to the ATP. De Villiers contract expires on December 31st of this year and he announced that he will not extend it. Does his decision have anything to do with the accumulation of criticism?

It is possible that after the coming ATP conference everything will be different and that maybe the announced renovation will even be totally pulled back… we’ll see.