Audience for European tennis at record highs, driven by young star players, digital engagement, and rising participation. Publishers missing opportunity due to lack of real-time data-driven, personalised, interactive coverage. Sportradar offers flexible data infrastructure enabling richer experiences, including women’s and non-Grand Slam events, for competitive advantage.
Owning the Data Story: Why European Publishers Must Lead Tennis Coverage - Sportradar
Owning the Data Story: Why European Publishers Must Lead Tennis Coverage
How data-driven content can transform engagement, grow audiences and unlock tennis’s full commercial potential in Europe
Tennis is in the midst of a golden era. A new generation of captivating champions – Carlos Alcaraz, Jannik Sinner, Iga Świątek – is drawing record audiences across Europe. The 2025 Roland Garros men’s final alone pulled in 9.5 million peak viewers in France. Across Europe, streaming audiences for the same match grew by 77% year on year. WBD’s social and digital platforms generated 883 million video views across the tournament.
Yet for many European publishers, the opportunity is still largely untapped. The modern tennis fan wants more than a scoreline. They want to feel inside the data. They want real-time serve statistics, contextualised match breakdowns, personalised player insights and second-screen experiences that reward their attention.
This report examines the scale and shape of European tennis fandom, explores what today’s audiences expect from digital coverage, and sets out how Sportradar’s data and media solutions can help publishers transform engagement, grow loyalty and create commercially durable tennis properties.
SECTION 1: THE EUROPEAN TENNIS OPPORTUNITY:
A Sport in Its Golden Era
Globally, tennis commands an audience of over one billion fans. In Europe, it consistently ranks as the third most-followed sport, behind only football and basketball, and in several markets, it punches far above that position during Grand Slam season.
The numbers bear this out. At Roland Garros 2025, France Télévisions recorded an all-time high viewership of over 46 million French viewers across TV and digital platforms. Italy’s Nova channel achieved a 44% peak audience share during the men’s final – one in two Italians watching simultaneously – with viewership peaking at 7.3 million. In the UK, TNT Sports’ debut Grand Slam broadcast delivered an 88% year-on-year increase in streaming viewers for the men’s final alone.
Participation Is Growing Across the Continent
It is not just viewing figures that are climbing. According to the International Tennis Federation’s Global Tennis Report, there are now 106 million tennis players worldwide, a figure that has grown by 25.6% over five years. Europe accounts for a significant share of that growth, with participation increases visible across the UK, Italy, Germany, Austria and France.
Great Britain alone has 9.1 million tennis players. Italy has grown from 2 million to 3 million players since 2018, overtaking Spain. Austria has more than doubled its player base, from 174,000 to 400,000. These are not passive followers: players are among the most engaged, data-hungry audiences in all of sport.
A New Generation of Stars Is Driving Growth
Tennis has historically been subject to star dependency – viewership spiking around Federer, Nadal, Djokovic and then contracting in their absence. But the current landscape is structurally different. The sport now has a cluster of elite, marketable young players simultaneously at the peak of their powers.
Alcaraz, at 22, has already won five Grand Slams. Sinner is the world number one. Świątek has redefined women’s tennis. Behind them, a tier of exciting talent, Holger Rune, Andrey Rublev, Jasmine Paolini, Mirra Andreeva, ensures the pipeline of compelling storylines does not dry up when any one player is absent. For European publishers, this means sustained audience interest between Grand Slams, not just a two-week spike twice a year.
SECTION 2: WHAT MODERN EUROPEAN TENNIS FANS ACTUALLY WANT
The Fan Has Changed. Coverage Mostly Hasn’t.
There is a significant gap between what tennis fans now expect from digital coverage and what most publishers are currently delivering. Understanding that gap is the first step to closing it and to building a genuine audience advantage.
IBM’s 2025 global sports fan study, conducted across more than 20,000 respondents in the UK, France, Germany, Italy and other key markets, reveals the shape of modern expectations clearly.
Five Things Tennis Fans Want From Publishers Right Now
Real-Time Data That Tells a Story
Modern tennis fans are not satisfied with a scoreboard. They want serve speed progressions across sets, first-serve percentages under pressure, winner-to-error ratios at critical points, and head-to-head historical context delivered as the action unfolds. Win probability charts, showing how momentum shifts with every ace and double fault, have become a standard expectation for engaged fans, particularly in the 18–44 demographic.
Publishers that can deliver this layer of live data, embedded within match streams, live blogs or second-screen apps, hold attention for significantly longer. Eurosport data from 2019 showed digital Grand Slam viewers already watching 36% longer when data-rich content was available. That gap has only grown since.
The 2025 IBM study identifies personalised content as the second-highest priority for AI-enhanced sports engagement, cited by 30% of respondents. Tennis is particularly well-suited to personalisation because fandom is so often player-centric. A Sinner fan and an Alcaraz fan may watch the same match for entirely different reasons and want different data layers surfaced.
Publishers that can create player-specific content pathways, automatically serving a user their favoured player’s serve stats, upcoming schedule, form trajectory and head-to-head data, build loyalty that transcends any single tournament.
Multi-device usage to follow sporting events rose from 27% to 29% between 2024 and 2025 and continues to climb. Among in-person event attendees, 91% engage with apps during live events, primarily for real-time commentary (44%) and stats or analytics (41%). This second-screen behaviour is not a distraction from broadcast — it is an extension of engagement that publishers can own.
Roland Garros 2025 demonstrated what interactive digital experiences can deliver: France Télévisions’ dedicated digital channel generated 7 million unique viewers, with 2 million engaging in live chat during matches. The 15–24 demographic grew by 8% year on year. The conclusion is clear: interactive, data-led second-screen products are how publishers win younger audiences without cannibalising their core broadcast base.
Broader Competition Coverage – Not Just Slams
One of the most persistent misconceptions in European tennis publishing is that interest is confined to the four Grand Slams and perhaps the ATP Finals. The data tells a different story. Tennis audiences in Europe follow the tour throughout the year, and engagement is consistent when players of interest are active.
2.2 million viewers watched the 2024 Roland Garros men’s final on Eurosport in Germany alone. Italy’s engagement with ATP events where Sinner competes extends well beyond Roland Garros. In the UK, Wimbledon is the headline, but Eastbourne, Queen’s and the ATP 500 events maintain a significant following. Publishers who only invest in Grand Slam activation leave audience and commercial value on the table for the other 48 weeks of the year.
Women’s Tennis as a Priority, Not an Afterthought
The WTA’s global cumulative audience rose 10% to a record 1.1 billion in 2024. Women’s tennis viewership grew by 20% worldwide in 2023. At Roland Garros 2025, Coco Gauff’s women’s final drew 3.15 million viewers in France — the best performance for a women’s final since 2005. On WBD’s streaming platforms in the UK, the women’s final audience more than doubled year on year.
Publishers who treat women’s tennis as a secondary offering, with fewer data layers, less pre-match context, and reduced editorial investment, are missing a significant and growing segment of the European tennis audience.
SECTION 3: THE FRENCH OPEN: A DEFINING OPPORTUNITY IN 2026
Roland Garros: Europe’s Grand Slam Moment
Roland Garros, held each May and June at the Stade Roland Garros in Paris, is the centrepiece of the European tennis calendar and the only Grand Slam contested on clay. It is, by some measures, the most narratively rich tournament in the sport: clay rewards endurance, tactical intelligence and physical resilience in ways that produce longer rallies, more momentum shifts and greater data storytelling opportunities than any other surface.
For European publishers, Roland Garros represents the single largest annual tennis audience activation window. The 2025 edition confirmed that when compelling players and compelling data coverage are combined, audiences respond at scale across every platform and demographic.
Publisher Activation: What to Build Before the Tournament
Publishers who treat Roland Garros as a reactive broadcast exercise – simply airing matches and posting scores – will find it increasingly difficult to compete with rights holders and digital-native platforms that offer richer experiences. The following activation pillars represent proven approaches to building an audience ahead of and during the tournament:
Deploy automated draw analysis tools the moment the bracket is published. Surface each player’s historical record on clay, their head-to-head data against likely opponents, their serve performance and return stats in Roland Garros conditions specifically. This content drives high traffic in the 72 hours following the draw and establishes editorial authority.
Integrate live data visualisations, serve speed, first-serve percentage, rally length, break point conversion, momentum index, within match streams and live blogs. Win probability tools should update with every point. IBM’s research at the US Open demonstrates that data point capture at this level (2.7 million data points per match) creates a rich, continuously updated experience that drives sustained session length.
Build automated player dashboards showing form across the clay season (Monte Carlo, Madrid, Rome as lead-ins to Paris). Surface trends: is Sinner’s first-serve percentage improving? How does Alcaraz perform in five-set matches historically? Does Świątek’s dominance on clay show any statistical vulnerability? These trackers generate return visits and social sharing throughout the tournament fortnight.
Use data-driven content tools to auto-generate match summaries the moment a match concludes. Deliver contextualised stat highlights — ‘Alcaraz hit 73% of first serves in the final set, compared to 56% in the third’ — that editorial teams can publish in seconds. This combination of data depth and publication speed is a competitive differentiator during a tournament when 32 matches may be played on a single day.
SECTION 4: HOW SPORTRADAR POWERS THE DATA-DRIVEN PUBLISHER
The Infrastructure Behind Modern Tennis Coverage
Sportradar is the world’s leading sports technology company, working at the intersection of sport, media and technology for over 25 years. For publishers seeking to build genuinely data-driven tennis coverage, Sportradar provides the infrastructure, the data depth and the product flexibility to make it happen, at any scale, across any platform.
Flexibility: Data Solutions Designed Around You
No two media organisations have the same product architecture, audience profile or commercial structure. Sportradar’s data solutions are built to integrate into existing platforms and workflows, not to impose a standard model. Whether a publisher needs a lightweight data API to power a live stats widget, a full suite of storytelling tools for editorial teams, or broadcast-grade data graphics for linear coverage, Sportradar’s modular approach means deployment can be calibrated to match operational requirements and budget realities.
Critically, Sportradar does not operate on legacy contract structures that lock partners into rigid, decade-long terms. Transparent partnerships mean cleaner commercial relationships, faster iteration and the ability to scale usage up or down as the tennis calendar demands.
Innovation: Infrastructure for the Next Generation of Sports Experiences
Sportradar’s official ATP partnership means publishers access a 100% ATP Tour coverage feed with industry-leading latency, the fastest available. Every serve, every rally, every break point is captured and structured in real time, enabling the kind of live data experiences that modern fans expect. This same rigour extends to the WTA and every major Grand Slam.
Beyond the Grand Slams, Sportradar’s 2026 partnership with the UTR Pro Tennis Tour (PTT) brings real-time data and streaming for over 20,000 professional matches per year to partner publishers. The PTT uses the Universal Tennis Rating (UTR) system for player matching and seeding, creating a uniquely rich statistical context for each match. For publishers covering the full pipeline of professional tennis, not just the top tier, this is a significant additional content infrastructure.
League Coverage: Broader and Deeper Competition Coverage
Sportradar covers tennis more comprehensively than any other data provider. Coverage extends across ATP and WTA Tour events from 250s to Masters 1000s, all four Grand Slams, the Davis Cup, Billie Jean King Cup, ATP Finals, WTA Finals, and the emerging professional tier through the UTR Pro Tennis Tour.
For publishers, this means a single partner relationship provides the data infrastructure to cover the entire tennis calendar from a first-round Challenger match in January to the Roland Garros final in June, without coverage gaps that create inconsistent audience experiences.
Value: Transparent Partnerships, Built for Media
Sportradar’s media and technology partnerships are structured for the economics of modern publishing. There are no opaque legacy fees or bundled packages that force publishers to pay for coverage they will never use. The commercial model is transparent, scalable and designed to deliver measurable returns.
Publishers working with Sportradar gain access not just to data, but to a partner that understands the audience engagement challenge. Sportradar’s Sports Insights product translates data into editorial intelligence – helping content teams understand which stories, statistics and angles are driving the most engagement, and informing coverage decisions with audience data rather than instinct alone.
SECTION 5: KEY RECOMMENDATIONS FOR EUROPEAN PUBLISHERS
Five Actions to Take Before Roland Garros
Audit your current tennis data layer. Are you surfacing live serve statistics, win probability and player form data during matches? If not, this is the most impactful single improvement available to you before the tournament begins.
Build a second-screen experience for Roland Garros. A dedicated match-day app experience or enhanced web product, combining live data, editorial commentary and social interaction. This will drive session length, return visits and interest of the 15–34 demographic that live data most effectively retains.
Invest in women’s tennis coverage at the same data depth as men’s. The audience growth is documented and significant. Publishers who deliver the same data richness for Świątek and Sabalenka as they do for Alcaraz and Sinner will capture a fast-growing audience segment.
Extend data coverage beyond Grand Slams. The clay season begins in Monte Carlo in April. Publishers who are activating player form data through Rome and Madrid, not just from the Roland Garros first round, build audience habituation and editorial authority that pays dividends throughout the tournament.
Review your data partnership structure. If your current tennis data provider cannot supply real-time ATP and WTA coverage, automated editorial tools, broadcast data graphics and UTR Pro Tour coverage through a single flexible commercial relationship, it is worth exploring what the market now offers.
European tennis has never been a bigger commercial and editorial opportunity. A new generation of champions is drawing record audiences. Digital platforms are hungry for data-rich, interactive content. And the gap between what fans now expect and what most publishers currently deliver has never been wider, which means the opportunity for those who act is substantial.
The publishers who will own European tennis coverage over the next decade will not be those with the largest broadcast budgets. They will be those who best harness real-time data to tell the stories behind the sport, the serve that cracked under pressure in the third set, the momentum shift that changed a final, the clay-court form curve that predicted an upset before it happened.
Sportradar exists to make that ambition achievable for publishers of every size and configuration, on terms that make commercial sense, with infrastructure built for the next generation of sports experiences.
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