The tennis season is too long and things need to change, says Iga Swiatek as the world No 1 called on the “people who are in charge” to fix the crammed calendar.
Swiatek has not been afraid to voice her opinion about the lengthy tennis schedule in recent months as at the Cincinnati Open she complained that tennis authorities are “pushing and pushing for us to play more” and pleaded that “we deserve to rest a little bit more”.
The Pole added: “Obviously it is not our decision, but for sure I think we have too many tournaments in the season. It’s not going to end well.
Former world No 1 Yevgeny Kafelnikov did not agree with Swiatek’s comments and he lashed out on social media writing: “”Is someone pushing you to play??? All you fricking do is complain!!
“I’ll tell you what you deserve! You deserve to get paid a lot less than you do now!! How about that??”
Swiatek, though, is not the first player to complain about the schedule and she won’t be the last and the five-time Grand Salm winner stuck to her guns following her first-round win at the US Open when asked about the calendar.
“It would be easy to fix for people who are in charge, but they already made plenty of decisions and they promised so many things to tournaments, basically, I mean, WTA, for example, that it would mean for them to change their mind, which is tricky because it’s business,” she said.
But I think players are aware that this is crazy what’s going on and the schedule is really tough.
“I spoke about it in Cincinnati, for example, and there are people saying that I don’t have to play so many tournaments. But truth to the fact is that we have so many mandatory tournaments that we literally need to show up and we don’t have time to work on stuff or live peacefully because from one tournament we’re going straight to another.
We don’t even have time at the end of the year because literally the first tournament starts on the 29th of December. So yeah the season is for sure too long.
“I think it needs to be changed because also I think it’s going to be better for fans and because they’re not going to see their favourite players like pull out or getting injured so much, I think, and we can present better quality, I would say.”
Previously there were only 15 mandatory tournaments on the WTA Tour, but the rules were changed in 2019 and that figure now sits at 21.
Players now have to compete in the four Grand Slams, 10 WTA 1000 events, six WTA 500 tournaments and the WTA Finals (if they qualify).
On top of that, several of the WTA 1000 events have been expanded to two weeks, adding to the already compact calendar.
Swiatek added: “I said at the beginning, I saw from last year that we don’t have much influence on what’s going on upstairs and basically these rules have been changed without us even knowing about them.
“These decisions about mandatory tournaments were shown to us after we spoke to WTA about it, we want to at least be in the loop, you know, but it would be nice for us to have some impact because I don’t think our sport is going in the right direction because of that.
