Why Isn't Tennis Growing?

The answer is not on the court. A record 27.3 million Americans played tennis in 2025, the sixth straight year of growth, and roughly 106 million people play worldwide. What is stuck is the audience for the pro game, and one of the biggest reasons is self-inflicted: tennis polices the highlight clips that every other major sport now treats as free marketing.

Ask Daniil Medvedev. His "Who they? The Illuminati?" exchange with an umpire in Madrid in 2024 was the sport's funniest viral moment in years, exactly the kind of clip that mints new fans. It took a copyright strike on X, The Athletic reported. The official channels kept their copies up.

The sport is growing. The audience isn't

Participation is the good news, and it is spectacular. US player numbers are up 54 percent since 2019, and more than half of American players are under 35. The ITF counted just under 106 million players globally in 2024, up 25.6 percent in five years.

Watching is another story. The last major sport-by-sport study of US TV audiences, using 2016 data, put the median men's tennis viewer at 61 years old, older than every major American team sport's audience. The NBA's was 42. Recent industry analyses still place tennis viewers in their late 50s. A 5,000-fan global study cited by the USTA's own CEO found roughly 70 percent of tennis fans watch only the four majors. And the audience is star-dependent: the 2025 Wimbledon men's final between Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz drew 3.2 million US viewers, up 26 percent, while the 2026 French Open men's final, with neither of them in it, fell 25 percent to the lowest audience in at least two decades.

The sport's own leadership says the quiet part out loud. ATP chairman Andrea Gaudenzi put the entire tennis ecosystem's revenue at around $3.5 billion in a June 2026 interview with the Financial Times, said it could be doubled or even tripled, and blamed a sport that is "too fragmented, too slow," with "too many internal battles."

Tennis takes down the highlights

Here is what that fragmentation looks like on your feed. Every Slam and both tours sell their footage separately, and each enforces separately, so the clip that grows the sport is treated as inventory to protect.

Players feel it first. Daria Kasatkina, ranked No. 12 at the time, put it plainly to The Athletic in 2025 about the match footage she wanted for her own YouTube vlog: "Goddamn, it's me playing the match. I was waiting there outside running, and now I cannot use the footage of myself." Daria Saville launched a petition at Wimbledon in 2024 calling it an "outdated copyright policy" that denies players the chance "to self-promote and inspire a broader audience." Taylor Fritz told GQ the tour's content rules are "absurd," asking how a player is supposed to build a following when tournaments require you to already have one before they let a videographer in. Morgan Riddle, one of tennis's biggest creators and Fritz's girlfriend at the time, said she had taken multiple copyright strikes just for posting videos of him.

Fans have it worse. A fan-run YouTube channel with 27,000 subscribers was terminated in July 2024 after repeated strikes from Wimbledon and other tournaments, per the same Athletic reporting. Buy a US Open ticket and the fine print goes further: the ticket terms bar commercial use of anything you record and grant the event an exclusive, perpetual license to your own phone footage.

We live this one firsthand. Showcase Tennis reaches 20M+ views a month across Instagram, TikTok and Facebook, and we have had clips removed and copyright strikes filed against our accounts, most aggressively around Wimbledon and Roland-Garros. The two weeks when the most new eyeballs find tennis are the two weeks the sport works hardest to make the content disappear.

Every other sport already ran this experiment

The NBA decided a decade ago that highlights are advertising. Commissioner Adam Silver calls them "snacks versus meals": give away the snacks free and fans still show up for the meals, the games. House of Highlights started as a teenager's account clipping NBA plays in a legal gray area; instead of suing, the league let it grow into one of the biggest sports media brands on the planet. The NBA says half its social followers are 25 or younger. Tennis's TV audience, remember, has a median age around 60.

The NFL learned it the hard way. In 2016 it threatened its own teams with fines of up to $100,000 for posting in-game highlights on social. By 2023 it was handing approved creators access to its clip libraries. MLB had Twitter suspend a beloved pitching-breakdown account in 2018; by June 2025 it had bought an equity stake in Jomboy Media, a company built on breaking down game clips, and commissioner Rob Manfred admitted on the record: "We got this wrong."

Then there is Formula 1, the cleanest before-and-after in sports. Under Bernie Ecclestone, F1 dismissed social media entirely; he told an interviewer in 2014 he'd "rather get to the 70-year-old guy who's got plenty of cash." Liberty Media took over in 2017 and opened the sport to digital and Netflix. By 2021 F1's average fan age had dropped four years to 32, and within five years of the takeover its US TV audience had more than doubled. Tennis got its own Netflix show from the very same producers. Break Point pulled a third of Drive to Survive's viewing hours, reportedly strangled by the need for agent approvals at every step, and was cancelled after two seasons. Drive to Survive is on season eight.

To be fair to the slams

The enforcement is not irrational. Broadcast rights are the sport's biggest paycheck: ESPN reportedly pays $2.04 billion for the US Open through 2037, and the French Open's US rights alone went for $650 million over ten years. Wimbledon told The Athletic it has to balance fan engagement against "illegally pirated content" and the contracts that "bring a significant amount of value into the tennis ecosystem." The US Open's organizers say they support players' desire to promote themselves and are evaluating changes.

The deeper problem is that nobody is in charge. Tennis is run by seven separate bodies, the two tours, the federation now rebranded as World Tennis, and four Slams, each protecting its own deals. No single one of them can free the highlights, so none of them do. Meanwhile the players are suing: the PTPA's 2025 antitrust case argues players are forced to sign over their name, image and likeness rights "for zero compensation," and in January 2026 it added the Slams themselves as defendants.

There is a thaw. The ATP signed a content partnership with TikTok in 2025 and expanded it across every Masters 1000 event in June 2026. The Australian Open built the most-subscribed Grand Slam YouTube channel as of 2024 by doing the opposite of its peers and flooding the feed. The WTA says player sharing rights will be "a discussion point in future rights negotiations." Negotiations, plural. It will take years.

What this means if you're the next generation

Draw the honest conclusion. If the sport's own superstars cannot post their own match points, tennis will not build your audience for you. That is doubly true outside the US, where your matches sit behind regional paywalls no coach or brand is subscribing to. The players winning this era, on the court and off it, are the ones who document the climb themselves on channels no rights-holder controls.

Tennis's growth problem is an opening for yours. The sport is starving for exactly the content you can make: your training, your matches where filming is yours to give, your story.