I’d been promised the future of tennis was in the desert.

From the stands of the Next Gen ATP Finals in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, I watched as the eighth seed, Abdullah Shelbayh, was given the most dramatic of entrances. Inside one of the stadiums in King Abdullah Sports City, which features a sprawl of soccer fields and indoor arenas across nearly 4 million square meters, an announcer summoned a brief list of the player’s accomplishments, first in Arabic and then in English. The music swelled. Bright white lasers illuminated the lines of the court before the screen at the other end of the stadium opened up to reveal a player tunnel, from which Shelbayh emerged, looking awkward and confused as spotlights swirled around him and the volume of the music rose once again. It was the most impressive light show I’d ever seen at a tennis event, far surpassing anything I’d witnessed at the sport’s biggest tournament, the US Open — a lot of pomp for a guy ranked 185th in the world, playing in an arena that was nearly empty. In a stadium that could seat 3,700, I counted fewer than 50 spectators in total, including the players’ teams and tournament workers.

Later, a spokesperson with the Association of Tennis Professionals (or the ATP, the men’s side of the tour) would tell me they were thrilled with how the tournament was going — the light show, so cool, right? I asked if the turnout was disappointing, and while they agreed that it was, it was also expected. Traveling to Jeddah was a tough ask for many fans, and tennis does have a lot of history in Saudi Arabia. That interest would, hopefully, grow with time.

Months earlier, the Kingdom’s Public Investment Fund had struck a deal with the ATP to host Next Gen in Jeddah for the following four years. Next Gen is touted as a proving ground of sorts. There is the competition itself, which features the top-ranked men under 21. In the past decade, Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner have both won this tournament, later going on to win Grand Slams.

It’s also a trial for the sport itself. Next Gen is where the ATP tries out new things: “innovations,” it touts, as it tests everything from dramatic rule changes to wearable tech that captures players’ biometrics. And this year, a lot of lasers, apparently.

An illustration of a tennis player arguing with a chair umpire.

An illustration of a tennis player arguing with a chair umpire.

Between matches, I wandered around the grounds. From the outside, you’d never guess there was a live sporting event happening. The parking lot was nearly empty. There appeared to be more people working the event than attending, many just idling around, looking at their phones. Out of boredom, I bought a candy bar from a concession stand, and the cashier told me I was the first customer they’d had all day.

Next Gen is a hard-court event — the most common surface — though it is unusual for several reasons. Since there are no doubles matches, the court is stripped of the lines that would frame the doubles alley, giving the area of play a narrower dimension that is destabilizing for any spectator used to looking at a normal court. The scoreboard, too, was laid out differently. Rather than the traditional scoreline, the interface prescribed more hierarchical logic to each game; the love, 15, 30, 40 order of scoring was now more legible. It was confusing to those familiar with tennis, but I could see how it might be more intuitive to someone who wasn’t.

Matches had a different rhythm, too. Games were first to four points, skipping the usual win-two-points-in-a-row drama at deuce. Sets were won in four instead of six games, with tiebreaks at 3-3. Time between serves was reduced. There were no on-court warm-ups at all.

Many of these changes were intended to speed up the match. Later that week in the finals match, Serbian Hamad Medjedovic would be allowed to take two 10-minute breaks between sets. His opponent and the tournament’s top seed, Frenchman Arthur Fils, would not be thrilled about it. “The rule is terrible,” Fils told French newspaper L’Équipe afterward. “It’s really stupid that this could happen here.”

During the event, I talked to the ATP’s chief sporting officer, Ross Hutchins, who explained that the rule changes at Next Gen were part of an initiative from the top of the organization to challenge all the sport’s assumptions, to reimagine each of tennis’s traditions to see how to break the rules “for the benefit of the fan to enjoy our sport.” Hutchins is a former player, once ranked 26th in the world in doubles, and I was surprised by how much time he spent talking about fan engagement.

He was existentially concerned about TikTok. For the better part of the last century, sports have been a monoculture because they have always been broadcast on TV — the industry term for this is “linear.” Now, people look at their phones. Surveys have shown that Zoomers don’t watch TV and, more shockingly, do not watch sports, at least not the way that their parents or older siblings do.

Hearing Hutchins’ ideas for Next Gen revealed the ATP’s anxieties. The light show had been made to look good for “short-form highlights.” (I.e., should the game be tailored to TikTok?) He even proposed going as far as completely rewriting the scoring system of tennis. “Do we simplify and go first to 21 points?” (I.e., is the sport too confusing?) And the new rules of Next Gen made matches quicker. “If you take the total amount of time in a match of two hours, how much, actually, is watching action versus watching someone look at their strings or changing their shirt or toweling themselves down? And can we try and reduce the dead time in a match?” (I.e., is tennis boring?)

Some of what Hutchins was putting forward was merely to illustrate just how far they were willing to go. He suspected some of the more radical ideas out of Next Gen wouldn’t make it to tour. But he estimated that, historically, four out of every five things they tried eventually had. The point remained: the institutions of tennis were willing to rewrite the rules of tennis.

“People have to move faster these days because of the way the entertainment world is forcing change… if you don’t grow at a certain pace, you will be left behind,” Hutchins told me.

Like any culture, there’s a tension between tradition and modernity, and during Next Gen, I tried to be a good sport and embrace the latter. Watching tennis live is as much of an aural experience as it is a visual one. During the matches, I closed my eyes and focused on the sounds: the thwack of the ball, the squeaking of sneakers, and the boom of the PA announcer declaring the point’s winner. In Jeddah, though, when I would ordinarily hear applause, all I picked up was silence, like a space waiting to be filled. But with what? I wondered.

the cameras
The full Hawk-Eye setup consists of a dozen cameras hard-wired around the perimeter court — eight in use, four for redundancy — a system that uses over $100K in equipment.
An illustration of the 12-camera set up of the Hawk-Eye Live electronic line-calling system.
The cameras are calibrated, a process that takes three days.