Alexander Zverev is not happy that the ATP season is constantly being prolonged, even though it hurts players.
Currently, three of the four highest-ranked players in the ATP Rankings are struggling with some kind of injury or physical discomfort. It’s a worrying number, as two of the biggest young stars, Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner, won’t play in Rome.
For the sport, it’s important to keep these biggest stars healthy and playing, as they attract the most fans, and having them miss tournaments doesn’t help to generate interest.
Ahead of his 2024 Italian Open campaign, Zverev was asked about the tennis season being constantly prolonged, and he admitted that tennis players are not happy about it, even though it’s not about them not wanting to play tennis.
“Look, I mean, I’ve been on tour now for 10 years. The conversation has always been how can we make the season shorter. By making the season shorter is not only because we want to play tennis. No, we love to play tennis.”
“It’s about how can we have time to prepare our bodies for the physicality that tennis is and how do we have time to heal our body. If we have an 11-month season, like we have now, for example, the Davis Cup Final, I talked to Alex de Minaur about it. He played the Davis Cup Final the 29th of November, and his first ATP Cup match was the 29th of December, which is exactly one month.”
Quite the opposite, tennis players want to play, but they want to be healthy as well. The off-season is important to prepare their bodies for the new season, and some changes, like two-week Masters, also don’t make many players happy.
“It’s just simply not enough time. It’s not enough time to rest your body. It’s also not enough time to physically prepare your body. Physical preparation is not how much you practice on a tennis court, how much you play tennis, no.”
“It’s how much work you put in the gym, how much work you put in on the track, how much work you put in outside the tennis court. That you cannot do during the season. It only gives us a period of time of resting and preparing our body of four weeks, which no other sport has.”
