Italy has long valued some of life’s more refined pleasures – food, art, fashion, all set against the country’s crumbling architecture. Now, that cultural smorgasbord includes a new and perhaps surprising offering: tennis.
Surprising, at least, for those only just noticing the recent glut of tennis talent to emerge from the southern European nation. In the men’s game, Italy has nine players ranked inside the top 100 and five in the top 50, including the all-conquering Jannik Sinner – a four-time grand slam champion and the world No. 1 since June last year.
Given the country’s modest history in the sport, this is truly a golden age for Italian tennis, one which has vaulted to even greater heights thanks to Sinner’s success on the court and popularity off it.
“We are now particularly spoiled,” Ubaldo Scanagatta, a veteran journalist from Italy and founder of the Ubitennis website, tells CNN Sports about his country’s tennis boom. “Sinner is the top athlete, the top sportsman in Italy … He’s already an idol.”
Scanagatta has been involved in tennis for decades. He has covered nearly 180 grand slams, including 51 Wimbledons and 50 French Opens, but never has he seen the sport as popular as it is now.
Soccer has traditionally dominated the sporting landscape in Italy, and that seems unlikely to change anytime soon. But failure to qualify for the last World Cup, coupled with a lack global superstars – “we don’t have (Lionel) Messi, (Cristiano) Ronaldo, (Kylian) Mbappé, or some of the players who play in the Premier League,” says Scanagatta – has created greater room for tennis to flourish.
“We never had the front page of (sports outlet) Gazzetta dello Sport showing tennis, and now tennis is every day in all papers, whatever Sinner does,” Scanagatta adds. “I had last year 70 million (site) visits, which for tennis is huge. I mean, when I started the blog first and then the website, I was happy when I was doing, I don’t know, 1,000 a day.”
Tennis’ explosion, however, is down to more than just Sinner, more than just soccer’s waning influence. The national federation has for years been implementing plans to turn Italy into a powerhouse of the sport.
Among the most consequential changes was a move to support private teams and private coaches, rather than just those who had been cherry-picked by the federation. As a result, the best resources become available to the best players, regardless of where they are based and by whom they are coached.
That includes some of the most successful players to emerge from Italy in recent times: Sinner, world No. 10 Lorenzo Musetti, and former Wimbledon finalist Matteo Berrettini.
“Now, the federation helps the players who do well,” says Scanagatta. “They can host them in the national tennis center if they want to practice. And if they need a physio, if they need the doctor, if they need the nutritionist – they find everything.”
One man who has witnessed first-hand Italy’s changing approach to player development is leading strategy coach Craig O’Shannessy. A former member of Novak Djokovic’s coaching team, O’Shannessy has been working as a consultant with the Italian federation since 2016, while also helping Berrettini to climb inside the top 10 in the world rankings.
“Italy is way ahead of the game,” he tells CNN Sports about the country’s tennis drive. “They went all in, and in a very serious way … What they’ve done today was a vision 10 years ago.”
O’Shannessy is one of several overseas specialists hired by the federation to improve the standards of tennis coaching across the country through symposiums and workshops. His focus has been on strategy and patterns of play, using data analytics to tailor-make training sessions for each player.
“My philosophy was very much about getting these young Italian kids to play and teach them while they’re playing, rather than just: ‘We’re doing drills today,’” says O’Shannessy.
“I wanted to diminish that style of coaching and get them to play where the coaches would see very easily what the strengths and weaknesses of these players are. Then you could do more bespoke coaching to these players instead of a cookie-cutter approach.
“I get so many Italian coaches come up and go: ‘Thank you, Craig, you changed the way that I coach,’” he adds. “‘Before I would just feed balls and who knows who’s getting better. But now I have a purpose. You’ve given us analytics, you’ve given us the drills, you’ve given us benchmarks, and we get success,’ and everyone is just so much happier.”
As well as a coaching revolution, up-and-coming Italian players also benefit from easy access to tournaments.
A 2022 report from Tennis Europe noted that the country hosts 148 international competitions, accounting for eight percent of events across the continent – second only to Spain.
According to Scanagatta, there are also “at least four or five important junior tournaments” which are popular among fans – “spectators like to become a sort of talent scout,” he adds – but cheaper to run than top-level events.
More crucially, these tournaments are also instrumental in developing young players. Italy had 249 professionally ranked male and female players by the end of 2021, per Tennis Europe – second behind France’s 271.
“We are organizing more tennis than anybody else, and that helps a lot because the Italian players, they can play at home,” says Scanagatta. “They don’t have to spend a lot of money to go around the world, while (for instance) the South Americans, they have to leave South America in January, and they stay away for eight months or even more.”
Having so many tournaments enables organizers to give wild card entries to young, homegrown players. That allows promising juniors to measure themselves against more experienced players and, if successful, accrue more rankings points. In turn, more ranking points helps a player gain entry to more prestigious tournaments.
This plethora of lower-level events compensates for Italy not hosting one of the four grand slams, which provide a huge boost for a country’s tennis economy. And in the absence of a grand slam, Turin will host a fifth ATP Finals – the season-ending tournament in the men’s game – later this year, while the annual Italian Open in Rome is one of the world’s most iconic clay-court competitions.
As for broadcasting matches, all Italian households have free access to SuperTennis, a TV channel managed by the national federation.
SuperTennis has exclusive rights to the US Open in Italy up to 2027, plus limited rights to Wimbledon. Davis Cup and selected ATP and WTA Tour events are also aired on the network, making the sport easily viewable for fans at home.
Historically, success for Italian tennis has been sporadic. Before Sinner, Adriano Panatta was the only man in the Open Era to win a grand slam, doing so at the 1976 French Open, while no player had reached the top of the rankings.
On the women’s side, Francesca Schiavone became the first singles major winner at the 2010 French Open, followed by Flavia Pennetta at the 2015 US Open.
Then, several years later, success came thick and fast. Marco Cecchinato had a breakthrough quarterfinals victory against Djokovic at the 2018 French Open, before Berrettini surged up the rankings and became the first Italian man to reach the quarterfinals of all four majors.
At this year’s Wimbledon, four Italian men – eventual champion Sinner, Musetti, Lorenzo Sonego, and Flavio Cobolli – reached the fourth round for the first time, while Musetti has appeared in two grand slam semifinals over the past 18 months.
Jasmine Paolini enjoyed a meteoric and unexpected rise last year, reaching back-to-back singles finals at the French Open and Wimbledon and winning Olympic doubles gold alongside veteran Sara Errani.
Weeks later, Errani and Andrea Vavassori became the first Italians to win the mixed doubles title at the US Open, then claimed a second major title together at Roland Garros this year and defended their US Open title in the tournament’s reimagined format. Errani has nine grand slam titles across doubles formats, including alongside Paolini at this year’s French Open.
Add in back-to-back Davis Cup titles and these can truly be called the glory days of Italian tennis. For Scanagatta, it’s a case of success breeding success, one player inspiring a host of others.
“The psychological effect is the same that (Björn) Borg produced on (Mats) Wilander, (Stefan) Edberg, (Anders) Järryd, (Joakim) Nyström in the 80s when there were four, even five Swedish players in the top 10,” he says.
“It’s the same effect that Boris Becker and Steffi Graf made on German tennis, which produced afterwards Michael Stich, Tommy Haas, and (Nicolas) Kiefer. We have seen this happening in cycles in all countries.”
Sinner, of course, is the face of this remarkable era, his trophy haul only likely to grow in the years to come. At the upcoming US Open, he has a chance to win a third grand slam title this year, provided he isn’t hampered by the illness which forced him to retire from the Cincinnati Open final on August 18.
Italian fans, enamored by the 24-year-old’s ferocious ball striking and softly-spoken demeanor, will be rooting for his career to go from strength to strength. According to Scanagatta, not even a three-month doping ban earlier this year – deemed to be accidental and linked to a physio applying an over-the-counter spray – could tarnish his golden-boy image.
“Nobody in Italy, having known him more than has been known abroad, thought that he was trying to cheat (in testing positive for anabolic steroid Clostebol),” says Scanagatta.
“Everyone likes him as a person because he’s showed always to be humble, attached to the family, to the right values. He doesn’t have a big head. He’s not arrogant.”
The question now, with Sinner’s best years before him and only Spain’s Carlos Alcaraz able to challenge his rival consistently, is for how long Italy will have players at the very top of the sport.
For O’Shannessy, the way in which tennis has been organized and resourced in the country ensures that it will long be in good health, even if the top players get injured or suffer dips in form. The wheels of motion are now in place to ride out those blips.
“What Italy is doing is creating a machine – and I say this in the most polite, nice way – they’re creating a tennis machine that will make tennis explode when things are going well like they are now,” he says.
“Tennis is exploding in Italy, and it will also ride out the lower points as good as you possibly can … Things are cyclical, things will go up and down a little bit, so you want to say, ‘Okay, how do we best counter that? How do we best take advantage of the good days and how do we best counter the bad days?’
“What the Italian federation is putting in place is here to stay. They’re more likely to do best in all of those scenarios than any other country I see.”
