It’s not Zendaya’s fault you can’t stop thinking about tennis.
Her magnetic performance in “Challengers,” a movie about a ménage à trois that happens to have tennis in the background, might seem to have thrust the sport into the spotlight, but it’s becoming more popular in the past few years that it’s hard to escape.
The sport is surging on a global scale, with its biggest names fronting luxe fashion campaigns from Louis Vuitton to Loewe and stars gracing the cover of Vogue. Of course, there’s a TikTok angle, with the rise of #tenniscore videos garnering tens of millions of views, and yes, even that buzzy film, which was number one at the box office in its debut weekend.
In a world of megawatt sports stars, ESPN went with tennis and chose 23-time grand slam winner Serena Williams to host this year’s ESPY Awards, airing on ABC in July, perhaps as a testament that the sport is actually a draw again.
Tennis had its heydey in the 1970s and 80s but a resurgence began at the height of Covid-19 when it was one of the few activities people could play safely while socially distanced. Its popularity has only grown since, as there’s a changing of the guard among the top-ranked players that it’s attracting new eyes and corporate interests, like fashion and Hollywood, fueling a boon.
Not only are people just watching it, they’re actually hitting the courts: The United States Tennis Association (USTA) said that nearly 24 million people are currently playing tennis, marking four consecutive years of growth.
Brands are serving
The money is following: In the past year, the number of sponsorships jumped 41% and the number of brands advertising in tennis soared 40%, according to SponsorUnited, a sports and entertainment research platform, growing faster than many other sports including MLB, MLS and the NBA.
That’s the result of a “convergence of a few important factors,” according to Bob Lynch, CEO of SponsorUnited, including rising TV ratings for the Tennis Channel and major tournaments, the docuseries “Break Point” that had a two-season run on Netflix plus the growth of tennis players’ social media accounts.
Tennis is one the rare sports that plays nearly year-round with weekly tournaments across the world, so it “attracts a diverse, global and localized fan base, which gives brands the ability to target very specific audiences for specific reasons,” Lynch told CNN.
Want to promote Swiss tourism around the world? The country tapped its greatest tennis export Roger Federer to star in a campaign for just that, with one viral ad starring Anne Hathaway that garnered more than 100 million views on YouTube. Or want to advertise to an affluent audience? That explains all the banking logos surrounding the courts at Roland Garros in Paris.