I Don’t Like Two-Week Masters

By Juan Ignacio Astaburuaga

Miami was the first two-week Masters tournament, in 1997, and Indian Wells followed it in 2004. Since then, these two have been the only tournaments outside of the four Grand Slams to be played across two weeks. The famous Sunshine Double. 96-player draws, 32 seeds ―all with byes―and seven rounds, just like in a major.

Now in 2023, and following the latest intervention of ATP chairman Andrea Gaudenzi that is his “long-term strategic plan” for the ATP Tour, we saw both the Madrid and Rome Masters 1000 events also expanded to two weeks and 96 players. The WTA had no other option but to follow this decision, of course.

But these won’t be the only ones. When the tour returns to China this September after four years, the Shanghai Masters 1000 will also feature this new format. Canada and Cincinnati too, (but only from 2025, as next year the Paris Olympics will leave no space for a pair of two-week tournaments between Wimbledon and the U.S. Open). These tournaments will be played in three consecutive weeks, just to give you an idea of how tight the schedule is going to be ―how they will solve this in 2028, another Olympic year, is an interesting question. For now, Monte Carlo and Paris-Bercy are the only Masters 1000’s that will remain with the classic one-week 56-player-draw system.

All these decisions are made and managed exclusively between the ATP and each tournament. The WTA just follows from behind and has to abide when it’s a combined event. Apparently with the incorporation of the CVC investment group into the WTA board, there will be a lot of changes coming next year regarding the structure of the calendar, but, for now, Doha, Dubai, Wuhan, and Beijing are also remaining single week tournaments.

But so, if this format had already been used for almost 30 years in Miami, and Indian Wells for 20, why is it that until a month ago it had caused generally good impressions, and that just now with the changes applied to Madrid and Rome big discussions around it started to appear among the tennis community?

The Sunshine Double plays a weirdly specific role in the tennis calendar, for both tours. When Indian Wells starts, it’s already been 5 weeks of no big tournaments being played on the ATP Tour, since the end of the Australian Open. There are plenty of minor 250 and 500’s tournaments in the meantime: South American clay, North American and Middle East hard courts, and European indoor, plus the Davis Cup qualifiers. But few of them frequently offer top-tier encounters.

On the other hand, for the WTA, February is the month with the least number of tournaments  in the entire year. Yes, it includes a WTA 1000 tournament in the Middle East, but the month as a whole is an uneventful one, especially for players outside the Top 40 that don’t even get a chance to attend the big event. March comes, then, to reactivate the tour with two big tournaments. Players and fans are ready for a big event.

Additionally, as spring clay season starts afterward, Indian Wells and Miami don’t lead to any other important tournament on the same surface. On the contrary, they’re the high point after the sort of transition month that February is. Two bigger tournaments finishing the first third of the season, almost Grand Slam style, makes sense.

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In 2021, in a weird move that no one really understood, it was actually the WTA who was first to expand a 1000-level event outside of the Sunshine Double, when Madrid, although still featuring only 64 players, started being played across two weeks, with a Thursday start, while the ATP kept the usual one-week, Monday-start format. That meant that for four days the Caja Mágica only featured WTA action. But honestly, it felt more like a blatant attempt to set the women aside for the second week, as there would barely be any women’s matches by the next Monday, leaving the main attention solely for the ATP matches. Which is not surprising, given the tournament’s history of disrespect towards women.

Probably few remember or even noticed this change in the previous two seasons, which shows how counterproductive it was, and that, at the end of the day, it is the ATP who moves the compass―the ATP 250 events in Munich and Estoril gathered most of the media attention during that weekend anyway.

But the big changes have come now in 2023. Both 1000-level tournaments in Madrid and Rome took place over a 4-week span in total, just like Indian Wells and Miami, with expanded draws, more players, more seeds, more byes, more matches, more money, more everything… except entertainment. If I was skeptical about this idea when it was officially announced a year ago, now I’m even more convinced that this only worsens the watching experience and is tougher for the players.

The spring clay swing has always been the favorite part of the season for me. I really do love clay-court tennis. And after almost eight months of nothing but hard courts, I was especially looking forward to what this year’s clay would bring us. Madrid and Rome, back-to-back frenetic tournaments in previous years, were straight up boring, and felt unnecessarily long and stretched out.

My first problem is about the seven rounds that these tournaments now feature, which is the same number as in Grand Slams. (Although the 32 seeds have a bye, so for them it’s just six matches to win the title.) While the ATP’s majors have a best-of-five-sets format and these Masters 1000 are played best-of-three, there is still a clear hierarchical distinction between these two categories. But on the WTA there is no best-of-five. It’s the exact same concept in WTA 1000’s and in Grand Slams: seven rounds and two sets to win a match. Does just a first-round bye for the 32 seeds represent such a major difference? I don’t think so. 

Look at Naomi Osaka and Bianca Andreescu. Both were unseeded and won seven best-of-three matches to take their respective 2018 and 2019 Indian Wells titles. Then just six months later, they both won the US Open. For that…they won seven best-of-three matches as well.

Masters and WTA 1000’s statistically represent tougher challenges than the majors at this point. Between Doha 2018 and Rome 2022, WTA 1000 champions faced a higher average ranking (19 – 36, almost half!), more top 10 opponents (29% – 11%), and more top 20 opponents (46% – 29%) than the Grand Slam champions in that same period. Since 2016, there was a different WTA 1000 champion every two tournaments, while there was a different Grand Slam champion every 1.7 tournaments.

Adding an extra round and expanding the number of players will obviously bring all these numbers down, but it is evident that the new 1000’s are looking more and more like Grand Slams (which is indeed the idea Gaudenzi had), yet only award half as many points, and much less prize money―which is not even equal between the tours in Rome, Canada, and Cincinnati.

Unseeded players, which start in the first round, are 100% guaranteed, unless a withdrawal happens, to face at least one top 32 player, and also have a really high chance of facing another one already in the third round, as seeds only need one win to get there. That also means that top 32 players already since their second match are facing top 32 opposition. In a Grand Slam you can often reach even the quarterfinals without having played against a single Top 50 player (e.g., Świątek at the last U.S. Open). For the ATP, of course, things are different – top players have more margin for error due to the best-of-five format; hence, fewer top seeds tend to bite the dust early in majors.

Another issue is that the number of points awarded per round, especially for the earlier ones, just does not accurately reflect the performances put in by players to reach those stages. Getting one, two, and three wins in a seven-round WTA 1000 gives a player 35, 65, and 120 points, respectively. The same but in a WTA 250 gives 30, 60, and 110. It’s 350 for a 1000 semifinal (5 wins) and 280 for a 250 title (also 5 wins). The differences are minimal for tournaments that are two categories apart, and let’s not forget that the matches at 1000 level are against more difficult opposition. On the ATP side, the story is no different: 25, 45, and 90 for three Masters 1000 wins, and 20, 45 and 90 for three ATP 250 wins. At least with a six-round format, one win already awards 65 WTA and 45 ATP points. So basically, leaving the monetary topic aside, and sticking just to the sporting side, winning matches in the new 1000’s is the same, while tougher, than in a 250.

Christian Garín won five matches in Indian Wells, coming from qualifying to reach the fourth round, and left California with a mere 106 points. Winning the title of a regular Challenger 100 tournament gives just six points less by facing considerably weaker opposition, and by winning that same number of matches.

Another important problem is what players are supposed to do during the second week if they’re eliminated early. We tend to overlook how cruel the tennis single elimination system is (the math doesn’t care). After just two rounds of a 96-player tournament, it’s just 32 players that remain alive in the draw, a majority of which are the 32 seeds. That means that by the first Saturday, if not even earlier, there are 64 players not having any tour-level event to play in the next eight to twelve days. Assuming that all seeds advance, on average a player wins only 1.3 matches in a 96-player draw. Rounded up, one win and one loss. So, in the four weeks in which Madrid and Rome are played, on average, players win no more than two matches. That is in a whole month. It’s just not enough for players that are looking to get match rhythm on clay, and to prepare well for Roland-Garros – which comes just one week after the Italian Open finishes.

The solution for this that both tours offered was to schedule WTA 125 and Challenger 175 level tournaments during the second weeks, awarding 160 and 175 points for the champion, respectively. Notice already that these are not tour-level events―WTA 125’s might sound like it, but are really just the equivalent to an ATP Challenger, i.e., separate from the proper WTA Tour.

At first one would think this would increase the opportunities for players, but in reality the WTA 125 tournaments played this last month barely gathered any of the early losers from the WTA 1000’s. But at least all who lost in the first three rounds have the option to attend these―if signed up four weeks prior, of course. The ATP side is less friendly. The second round finished in both Madrid and Rome only on Saturday. That means that advancing to just the third round already means that the player can’t play anything the following week. 

Jiří Lehečka, ranked 39th at that time, had entered the Challenger 175 event in Torino as one of the top seeds, to be played during the second week of Rome (where he was the 32^nd seed). On Saturday, he had not even played his first match in Rome (a second-round match, as he had a bye) when he was automatically withdrawn from the Torino Challenger main draw because of still being in an ATP tournament at the moment the draw was going to be made. He then lost his match against the revelation of the week, Fábián Marozsán. Lehečka had played only one match, and already had nothing else to play for nine more days, not even on the Challenger tour. “Fortunately” for him, he was then able to enter the qualifying rounds of the same tournament as a last-minute alternate, but only because someone else had pulled out. But he retired after losing the first four games of his match against the world number 845.

Ugo Humbert’s case shows how losing matches in these expanded masters could actually be… beneficial? He lost in the first round in both Madrid and Rome, and being free from those events, he went on to win titles in Challenger 175 tournaments held during their second week. Winning one or two matches in the Masters 1000’s would have probably been the maximum he could aspire for, which is 45 points at best, also preventing him from entering the second week challengers. But he lost. So, he could play those and gained 350 points, which is basically the same as for a Masters 1000 semifinal.

This shows how limited the options to play other tournaments, even at Challenger level, are for the players. For the 2021 Australian Open, the WTA held a 250-level tournament at Melbourne Park during its second week. Why has this idea never been replicated since? Why are Challengers and WTA 125s but not 250s the tournaments that have to be played in second weeks? A 250 played in the same venue of the main tournament, with a Tuesday or Wednesday start to allow more players to enter the draw, and leaving the majority of places to on-site entries, instead of forcing players to sign up four weeks prior, allowing more flexibility, would be a much more ideal scenario.

Also, if the second week tournament is not tour-level, it immediately restricts Top 10 players from entering, as per tour rules. On WTA Top 10 players also face certain restrictions in 250s, but at least the option would still be available in the case of an unexpected early loss.

From a wider perspective, 2-week events mean that the calendar gets much more restricted in regard to its structure and playing opportunities. The week before Roland-Garros, the amount of top 50 players from both tours that attend one of the 250-level tournaments is not significant, as they prefer to get to Paris and start practicing there. Before the Roland Garros qualifying week, though, this year there were only TWO weeks of clay court tournaments outside of the Madrid-Rome double on the WTA, and three on ATP.

The clay surface is already heavily underrepresented in both tours, especially on the WTA, and this expansion only made that problem worse. From the start of Indian Wells until the end of Rome – an eleven-week span – only one WTA 250 event was held (Bogota), and just two WTA 500s. And these numbers have only decreased in the last few years. In 2019, the last year with Madrid and Rome being one-week WTA 1000’s, there were six 250’s.

And then there are scheduling issues. One-week masters follow an extremely simple structure that is hardly modifiable. First round played between Monday and Tuesday, and from Wednesday one round per day until the Sunday final. As simple as that. This also greatly helps the viewing experience for spectators, as it’s much easier for us to be aware of what stage of the tournament we are in.

These two-week tournaments, though, have left a lot of space for the creativity of organizers. Four have been played this year, with three different round-per-round schedules. Indian Wells had the simplest of all, as both draws started on Wednesday, and all rounds were played across two days except for the fourth round, entirely played on Monday. But Miami, Madrid, and Rome all had different starts for the WTA and ATP draws, with the former commencing on Tuesday and the latter on Wednesday. So on the first Saturday, the WTA was playing its third round, but the ATP its second. On Tuesday, one is playing the quarterfinals while the other one the fourth round. This only leads to confusion for spectators.

On this subject, too, night sessions have received a more important status. With more days to schedule matches, there would be supposedly no hurries that would make the idea of starting matches not before 8 p.m. a bad one. Well, there were. Rain problems aside (Madrid had roofs on both its two biggest stadiums, yet these issues still occurred), terrible scheduling decisions meant that on more than just a couple of days, which indicates it was definitely not just a coincidence or bad luck, night sessions finished past midnight.

I could write an entirely different article on this, but in short, it was, as usual, the women’s tour that was hurt almost every time by the terrible planning decisions. The Rome WTA singles final starting past 11 p.m. because of an initial schedule of “not before 7 p.m.” on a Saturday being delayed due to rain was the epitome of four disastrous weeks for women’s tennis. Again, two-week tournaments leave a lot of details free for the imagination of organizations. And what they did with it was the opposite of effective.

How can you still manage to make players play in back-to-back days in a twelve-day tournament? Rome had its men’s semifinals on Saturday and its final on Sunday. The women were on Friday and Saturday, respectively. But this also kept happening in earlier rounds, with players facing each other, one having rested for almost 48 hours, while the other one had finished their previous match just the night before. In one-week tournaments, the schedule is much more homogeneous for all players.

Madrid and Rome just felt unnecessarily long and stretched out. Since quarterfinals start in the second week, each tour has no more than just two matches played each day. That is, only fourteen total matches in the last six days of the tournament in both draws. 

Does the frenetic start in the first days with expanded draws and more matches compensate for this? Not really. The first round feels more like an extension of the qualifying rounds, as no top 30 players take part in it. Some seeds don’t make their debut even until Saturday on the ATP. When it is already Friday, and the tournament has been going on for five days, it still never felt like big things were happening. But as all Miami, Madrid and Rome chose to schedule the fourth round entirely on one day instead of dividing it in two, it’s basically just three days, from Saturday to Monday, when there is truly that big energy, with a lot of big matches and action going on everywhere all the time.

I have read, though, that many people actually prefer this over the wildness that one-week 1000s were until the Friday, as it is easier to focus on the big matches and names, instead of having them all overlapped every day. I guess that’s each person’s choice. Personally, I much prefer the constant activity and energy of the previous format―which is also a reason for why I have realized my favorite part of Grand Slams are the first six days, even if still no big matches have really happened yet.

Another common argument, given what we saw in Madrid and Rome, is that these expanded draws gave the chance to players that would usually never get the opportunity to attend a Masters or WTA 1000, to play one. Clear examples are Jan-Lennard Struff reaching the final in Madrid as a lucky loser, Aslan Karatsev reaching the semifinal as a qualifier also in Madrid, or Yannick Hanfmann making the Rome quarterfinals also coming from qualifying. None of them would have entered the draw with a 56-player system. But, do these outlier cases, rather quite improbable, that had barely occurred previously in Indian Wells or Miami also with an expanded draw, justify or make up for all the other problems?

We could extend this same argument into other tournament categories. Let’s say that prior to the 2021 U.S. Open, it was decided that Grand Slam draws would also be expanded, so that Emma Raducanu, instead of having to start in qualifying, would have made it directly into the main draw. As things turned out, she would have won the title anyway. Would that be a real argument in favor of expanding Grand Slam draws to 192 players, because it gave the chance to a lower ranked player to enter the tournament directly and to win it? Maybe we would start seeing players ranked outside the Top 200 making it deeper in majors, just like we are now seeing Karatsev reaching a Masters 1000 semifinal from outside the Top 1000. So, do we have to expand Grand Slams too? I doubt anyone will agree with that.

Daniil Medvedev said in a press conference that he liked this new format because it requires more matches to reach final stages, rewarding consistency and preventing deep runs because of some lucky retirements or walkovers, and that for the Top 8 seeds having a bye as in the previous system was actually a disadvantage. An easy solution for this? Don’t award byes to the top eight seeds and make all 1000-level tournaments 64-player draws.

Iga Świątek also declared that despite being allowed to normally have a day off in between matches, it does not mean that with this format it is less exhausting for the players, as it still requires for the whole duration of the Madrid-Rome double – four total weeks of match and practice concentration and routines. Days off are no vacation days for players. These two tournaments, Roland-Garros, and Stuttgart (that is held before Madrid and is the biggest other clay court event on the WTA Tour), take a total of over seven weeks across an eight-week span. Just four tournaments. Considering that during both Madrid and Rome the focus is still on Roland-Garros, the main target, these levels of physical and mental demands can become even counterproductive for players. It’s different than in the Sunshine Double, where those tournaments work just by themselves.

It was also argued that expanding Rome would make the transition from Madrid easier for the players that made it far in Spain, but reality is that that did not happen, and barely any player repeated their success in Italy. I do agree, though, that the previous format was indeed too tough on players in this regard. I see two plausible solutions: awarding first round byes in Rome to the four semifinalists of Madrid, just like it was done in Beijing with the women that reached the semifinals in Wuhan the week prior, or to not hold Madrid and Rome in back-to-back weeks but leaving one in between for some 500 or 250-level tournaments.

There are two arguments that I do believe work in favor of this format, though. One is that expanded draws are financially the best deal for players that happen to be ranked outside the top 50, which are also frequent members of tour-level events but are just not ranked high enough to enter one-week masters, as well as bringing an incredible chance for people from outside the top 100, who especially on the WTA Tour, struggle to make a comfortable living out of tennis. More days, more total spectators (even if during the first rounds main stadiums look desert because of the low interest that unseeded matches represent, alongside the ridiculously high prices that, for example, Rome had), and more matches, mean more money for the players.

And for how one-week tournaments work, the weekend, when for obvious reasons more people are able to spend a whole day in the tournament or to watch and tune in for matches, just two semifinals and one final seem like quite little to offer for the days that are a synonym of sports watching everywhere in the world―that is a reason for why in recent years Wimbledon’s Middle Sunday make little to no sense for me. Two-week Masters make the first weekend a tennis party, with tons of matches and activity, as are the days in which all seeds are already playing.

I must recognize that in previous years I used to really like the Sunshine Double as a pair of two-week masters. I thought it had something “special”. But now, if it was up to me, I’d make them seven-day tournaments too. Apart from the reasons mentioned previously, also to leave more space to the clay season, which gets shortened and shortened every year even more. 

I don’t see this happening at all. I’m just dreaming while I’m awake. But I wish this decision would be reversed, and that we would have our classic frenetic one-week Masters back. I just don’t like two-week Masters.