A Quarter of Missing Challengers

The ATP Challenger calendar (PDF) has been released for the first quarter of 2013, and it looks mighty thin.

In the next three months, we can expect 21 challenger events, compared to 30 in Q1 2012 and 33 in Q1 2011.  (Thanks to Foot Soldiers of Tennis for raising the issue.)  For those challenger fans among us, that’s clearly bad news.  Less competitive tennis always is.  It could also hurt many up-and-coming players, which means it should concern all fans of men’s tennis.

For the last twenty years, challenger tennis has generally been on the rise, with 147 tournaments at that level last year compared to only 88 in 1992.  The number peaked in 2007 and 2008 with 173 and 175 challenger events, respectively.

Challenger tournaments per year, 1991-2013

However, while the challenger circuit has grown in size and importance, the ATP tour has shrunk.  Most of that movement occurred more than a decade ago.  The tour has remained steady with between 65 and 67 events each year since 2002.  As recently as 1994, though, there were 90 ATP events, which offered 36% more main draw places than did 2012’s 65 tournaments.

In other words, the growth of the challenger tour hasn’t substantially expanded opportunities for players outside the sport’s elite, it has simply filled the gap left by all those missing ATP events.  The number of challengers increased by 35% from 1992 to 2002, but the number of main draw places in ATP and challenger tourneys combined rose by only 6%.  Account for the reduction of tour-level qualifying events, and you probably have a net loss in point- and money-earning opportunities for tour pros.

The following five years brought the explosion of challengers noted above, but the pullback to 2012’s level of 65 ATP and 147 challenger events has reduced the field to only 7432 total main draw places, a 9.5% increase over ten years earlier.

A 10% jump over the course of a decade may be enough to keep pace with the global spread of tennis, but it won’t be if the current downward trend persists.

That’s the reason for concern.  21 first-quarter challengers represents a 30% decrease from 2012.  Drop 30% of the challenger events from the entire 2012 calendar, and you have only 103 events, the lowest number since 1996, where there were 97 challengers but a whopping 84 tour-level tournaments.

The ripple effect

So, when the size of the top-tier tennis world shrinks, who suffers?

Small as these paydays are, when the number of challenger-tour paydays drops, some fringe-level players earn fewer of them.  The relevant “fringe” here is the ranking range between 200 and 300, the guys who often make the main draw cut of a challenger when there were two or three in one week, but are relegated to a futures or (unpaid) qualifying draw when there is only one.

Less obvious is that even the top-ranked challenger-level contenders suffer.  Fewer tournaments generally means more travel–that is, greater travel expenses.  For Roger Federer, that’s just a different balance on his NetJets account.  For Diego Schwartzman, it means more weeks where he loses money playing competitive tennis, and fewer upper-level events that are feasible opportunities for him.

Needless to say, there are far more Schwartzmans than there are Federers.

And that brings us to the groups that really get hurt when the tennis calendar shrinks: Those who pay many of their own costs and those who don’t live in hotbeds of tennis.

Players who are heavily supported by the USTA might object to additional flight time, but they don’t feel the pain of travel expenses.  Someone who can easily reach the plethora of challenger events in Western Europe will find it easy to reach plenty of playing opportunities.  An up-and-comer in the the US and Australia will get just as many wild cards as he would have five or ten years ago.

But competitors from much of South America, the Balkans, and the former USSR often do not have any of those things going for them.  With every loss of a net-profitable playing opportunity, those guys are a little less likely to stick with professional tennis.  If Gregoire Burquier decided to pack it in, most tennis fans wouldn’t notice.  But what about the next Radek Stepanek, who ten years ago was within a whisker of running out of money and hanging up the racquet?

Let’s hope the decrease in challengers early in 2013 is a blip, not a trend.  It isn’t something anyone will talk about in the next big debate about prize money, but the quality of tennis and all professional levels depends on it.

3 thoughts on “A Quarter of Missing Challengers”

  1. This is very bad, for tennis in general and for young players. U20 players won only 5 Challnegers in 2011, and same number this year, so thats 10 titles from almost 300 tournaments. With less number of tournaments to be played in 2013, chances are not good for them to make some better results

  2. Tennis is evolving. There are much more Futures events and that’s good. You have roughly a couple hundred guys eligible to play CH, while you have a couple thousand for futures, where you can actually play your arse off week in week out (even if you play only in Turkey!).
    So there is no need of low level challengers, when you can make 5 Futures tournaments with the money and allow real u20 players to profit from it.
    Scwhartzman will play his 2013 without leaving South America, just as he did in 2012 and if he’s good enough he’ll have the opportunity to try his luck abroad.
    No drama here.

  3. futures events are stuck on the same prizemoney as 1998, challengers not much different. The only good thing that can come of this is if the prizemoney is diverted elsewhere, but I doubt it severely.The campaign at the top shouldn’t be for bigger R1 losers’ cheques at the Slams, but a better spread down the tiers.
    Nobody makes money from Futures events, and the gap from Futures to ATP events, even qualifying is too big – there has to be a reasonably strong batch of events in the middle. Sports are only as strong as the level beneath it – imagine if NFL or NBA didn’t have college sports, or if La Liga or the EPL didn’t have their own second tiers or other nations whose top leagues are a little weaker.

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