Tennis’ doubles trouble: What is ailing it, how India is placed, and what ATP can do

Indian tennis’ presence on the main tour is now overwhelmingly a doubles one. The ATP proposes to narrow that door to a slit. | Photo Credit: PTI

Switch on a tennis broadcast in the first week of any big tournament. On the show court, a top-ten seed is working through a qualifier. Sometimes there is an upset. More often there is an hour of baseline traffic that ends the way the seedings said it would. Either way, it is the match the main feed has chosen for you.

Then try a simple experiment. Count the doubles matches the broadcast cuts to. You will not need both hands. It is not because none are being played. Somewhere on an outside court, two of the best teams in the world are facing up to each other. Four players. Reflex volleys from six feet. Poaches, lobs, feints, points decided in the time it takes to blink. If you know where to look, and are willing to pay for it, you can find it on a separate stream. Nobody is going to point you there.

The ATP says audiences have abandoned doubles. It has never explained how they were supposed to find it. I know which match I would rather watch: the routine singles on the show court, or the artistry on display at its fringes. But the choice is made for me. And then the world is told that people like me do not exist.

That, stripped of its corporate mumbo jumbo, is the case the ATP is putting to its board in a couple of weeks. The men’s tour wants to halve doubles draws from 2028. Masters 1000 fields would shrink from 32 teams to 16; ATP 500 and 250 events from 16 to eight. Doubles’ share of the prize pool would fall from about 20 per cent to 10. So roughly USD 20 million would be rerouted to singles qualifying and early-round singles. The board, which comprises chairman Andrea Gaudenzi, four tournament representatives and four player representatives, will vote on it at the ATP Finals in Turin, which begin on November 15.

ALSO READ | Top doubles players call on ATP to rethink proposed changes

In its own words, the ATP wants “a more sustainable long-term model while maintaining doubles’ important role on the Tour”. Doubles, it insists, “will continue to be a core part of the ATP Tour”. Halving its draws and its prize money, I would opine is an odd way of keeping something core.

The numbers nobody has seen

A decision of this size ought to rest on numbers. The ATP has published none. How much of a tournament’s revenue does doubles generate? What does it cost organisers to stage? How do doubles audiences compare with singles?

And the million dollar question: will smaller draws buy the survivors better slots and more visibility?

The ATP is silent on all of this, including scheduling, show courts and visibility. Even on the last question, which is the end game of its own proposal, it has no answers to offer. These are the questions the board should put to management before it votes. Without any answers, “sustainable” is just a currently popular catchphrase, and not a case that the association is making.

Available is not the same as shown

To be fair to the ATP, the matches are not hidden. Tennis TV, the tour’s own streaming service, carries every doubles match at every Masters 1000 and ATP 500 event. The problem is not the camera. It is everything around it.

In July, Dale Roberts of the website The First Serve counted the content the ATP and Tennis TV had published in 2026 up to the end of Wimbledon. Of 3,568 items, 37 featured doubles: about one per cent. The ATP Tour’s YouTube channel had posted 270 long-form videos, and not one was about doubles. Of its last 1,000 Instagram posts, eight were.

Today’s superstars, Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner among them, show little appetite for doubles, and the sport has few pairings a casual fan could name | Photo Credit: Getty Images

When doubles did get a look-in, it held its own. Four of Tennis TV’s nine long-form doubles highlights passed 100,000 views, and four doubles Shorts averaged 145,000, every one of them in the top quarter of the channel. Roberts is careful to say that promotion alone will not save doubles. He is right. But it is hard to argue that the public has rejected a product it has barely been shown.

The phrase Gaudenzi uses for his ranking reforms, that rewards should follow where fans engage most, captures the instinct behind the doubles cut too. On the face of it, it sounds sensible. The problem is that it is a closed loop. Engagement follows exposure. Starve a discipline of promotion for two decades, then measure its audience, and you will find precisely the audience you manufactured.

We have been here before

None of this is new. In 2005 the ATP announced, during Wimbledon, that doubles would move to five-game sets with no-ad scoring and that, from 2008, the entry system would tilt towards singles players.

The doubles specialists, among them the Bryans, Mark Knowles, Jonas Björkman and India’s own Mahesh Bhupathi, took the tour to court in Houston. The ATP blinked. Sets stayed at six games, a match tiebreak replaced the third set, and players could enter on their doubles ranking.

Consider what that grudging reprieve produced. The Bryans went on to win 16 Major titles and 119 tour titles in all, and took Olympic gold in London in 2012. The discipline the ATP tried to shrink in 2005 gave it the most successful team in its history. Twenty-one years on, the same twins have signed another letter, making the same case to the same institution.

ALSO READ | Bryan brothers on ATP doubles proposal: This will kill the dream for young players

Two years ago it happened again, on a smaller scale. In July 2024 the ATP withdrew a plan to restrict doubles entries at five 250 events (Hamburg, Gstaad, Newport, Bastad and Kitzbühel) after more than half of the world’s top 20 doubles players threatened legal action. Twice in two decades the ATP has tried to shrink doubles by rule. Twice it has backed down. The third attempt is the most ambitious yet.

When the stars played doubles

There was a time when the best players in the world did not think doubles beneath them. John McEnroe won seven singles Majors and nine in men’s doubles. Todd Woodbridge and Mark Woodforde both reached the top 20 in singles, and as the Woodies, won 61 doubles titles together, 11 of them Majors. Yevgeny Kafelnikov won the singles and the doubles at the 1996 French Open; thirty years on, no man has done both at the same Major since. Even Rafael Nadal, in his early years, collected doubles titles: 11 of them, including Indian Wells in 2010 and 2012 and Olympic gold in Rio in 2016.

Those days are gone. Today’s superstars, Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner among them, show little appetite for doubles, and the sport has few pairings a casual fan could name. That is a real problem. But consider its cause. Iconic partnerships take years to build, and partners stay together when the partnership pays. Halve the draws and the prize money, and the churn only quickens. The ATP’s remedy would deepen the very malaise it cites.

India’s Doubles Wall of Fame

For India, this argument is not academic. It is existential. Leander Paes, Mahesh Bhupathi, Sania Mirza and Rohan Bopanna won 33 Grand Slam titles between them, every single one in doubles. The Slams are untouched by the ATP’s plan. But nobody arrives in a Slam final without a road, and for Indian men that road runs through the tour events the ATP now proposes to shrink.

Paes and Bhupathi built their partnership there. They won six tour titles together in 1997, the first of them at home in Chennai. Two years later they reached the men’s doubles final at all four Majors, the first pair to do so in a single year since 1952. They won Roland Garros and Wimbledon, and gave a cricket-obsessed nation a summer of tennis it would never forget.

Rohan Bopanna, written off more often than almost any Indian sportsperson in recent memory, spent two decades on that circuit. He won 26 tour titles, six of them at Masters 1000 level, before lifting the 2024 Australian Open with Matthew Ebden at 43. He remains the oldest man to win a Major in the Open Era, and the oldest to reach No. 1 for the first time.

In 1999, Leander Paes and Mahesh Bhupathi reached the men’s doubles final at all four Majors, the first pair to do so in a single year since 1952. They won Roland Garros and Wimbledon, and gave a cricket-obsessed nation a summer of tennis it would never forget. | Photo Credit: The Hindu Photo Library

Sania Mirza’s 91 weeks at the top of the women’s doubles rankings belong to a different tour. The inspiration she gave a generation of Indian girls recognises no such boundary. For a generation of Indian kids, tennis was not Sampras or Federer. It was Lee and Hesh on Centre Court, and Sania and Hingis lifting trophies together. Those images did more for the game in this country than any federation programme.

The road is still being travelled. Yuki Bhambri, a former junior World No. 1 whose singles career was wrecked by injury, rebuilt himself as a doubles specialist. He reached a US Open semifinal in 2025 and a career-high ranking of 18 this February. His five ATP titles tell the story: Mallorca in 2023, Gstaad and Munich in 2024, Dubai in 2025 and Almaty in October. Four are 250s, one a 500. Under the ATP’s plan, every one of those draws would be cut to eight teams.

Indian tennis’ presence on the main tour is now overwhelmingly a doubles one. The ATP proposes to narrow that door to a slit.

What the ATP should do instead

The ATP is not wrong about everything. Doubles does struggle to fill outside courts, and the stars are not queuing up to play it. But the answer to an under-sold product is to sell it, not to shrink the shelf.

Herein lies the problem: halve the draws and you do not trim the fat. You merely saw off the ladder, the 250 and 500 events where players outside the elite earn their points. With it go the prize money and the partnerships that keep a career alive.

As reigning Wimbledon doubles champion Dave Patten puts it: “They are talking about cutting lots of jobs effectively. In 10 years’ time, if these proposals go ahead, they are basically saying people like me shouldn’t be on the ATP Tour, which I take quite personally and I think is wrong.”

Someone needs to remind the ATP that an eight-team draw is not a tournament. It is a support act to the main event. And support acts remain just that if they don’t receive opportunities to be the main draw.

Instead, here’s what tennis’ apex body can do:

• Put one doubles match a day on the main broadcast feed at every Masters 1000, on a show court, in a real slot, not as filler during a rain delay.
• Promote what Tennis TV already streams. A discipline that takes a fifth of the prize money gets one per cent of the content. Fix that before blaming the audience.
• Market teams as teams, with their rivalries, their break-ups and their reunions. Fans love personal stories. They adore personalities. And clashes.
• Publish the data. If the case for cutting is as strong as the ATP claims, let the numbers make it in public, before the board votes, not after.

Most people who play tennis, play doubles. The Sunday four at the club, the father and daughter against the neighbours, retired bankers arguing about the lines: this is the tennis the world actually plays. The professional tour now proposes to promote it even less, and to play it less, at the very top.

Doubles in tennis is not dying. It is being buried alive, by the very people who chose never to sell it, and who now point to the silence as proof.

Published on Nov 04, 2026

Latest on Sportstar

1. Live Blog 2026-11-04T09:00:23+05:30

   Ranji Trophy LIVE Score Updates, Round 4 Day 3: Bengal in spot of bother against Maharashtra; Karnataka, Vidarbha complete bonus point wins
2. Tennis’ doubles trouble: What is ailing it, how India is placed, and what ATP can do

3. Live Blog 2026-11-04T06:40:00+05:30

   India vs New Zealand LIVE score, 1st ODI: Kohli fifty takes India closer to target after rain delay