The impact of the changes made to the men's professional tennis tour system: A case study of Japanese players

Abstract

In 2019, the International Tennis Federation implemented major changes to the men's professional tennis tour system in order to (1) reduce the number of professional players who cannot make a living, and (2) create a system that allows talented junior players to quickly transition to the professional level. These changes in the tour system are considered to have had a significant impact on the players' environment and psychological aspects. The purpose of this study was to exploratively examine the impact of the tour system changes on Japanese male tennis players. The subjects of the study were four Japanese male tennis players who participated in the ITF World Tennis Tour held in Japan. They were interviewed one-on-one for approximately 40 minutes using a semi-structured interview method. The interview was centered on the question “How did the change in the tour system affect you?” and the interviewees were asked to give specific reasons for their answers. Following a qualitative inductive analysis of the verbatim transcripts of the interviews, five areas of impact were identified: feeling, game plan, status, environment, and requests.