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‘Craziest flics’, ‘best drip’ and ‘best kicks’. This is French Open coverage — TikTok style. These social media posts (covering pictures, style and shoes at the Grand Slam tennis tournament) produced by media group Overtime are part of an attempt to chase the holy grail of modern sports — an active and engaged Gen Z fan base.
The so-called TikTok generation have shorter attention spans and less money, but they are the future of viewership.
Tennis, with its traditionally older crowds and outgoing generation of icons including Rafael Nadal and Serena Williams, faces a particularly steep challenge: finding the stars of the future and making them resonate with a new generation of viewers.
The answer lies with the current crop of Gen Z players. Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner are already big names based on their burgeoning rivalry and Grand Slam titles, while Ben Shelton and Jack Draper are also making waves.
On the women’s tour, Aryna Sabalenka, Coco Gauff, Iga Świątek and Emma Raducanu are all Grand Slam champions and have big online followings, but success does not always translate into household name status. For that, the sport is looking to social media.
In February, the ATP (men’s tour) partnered with Overtime, whose backers include Serena Williams’s husband, Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian. Overtime creates original sports content for its 100mn followers on social media, of whom more than 80 per cent are under 35 years old.
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The format is simple: Overtime’s presenter is given access to top players, filming videos asking them questions like: “I’m breaking up with my girlfriend, what should my message to her say? What’s the best pizza topping? Which cartoon is your favourite?” It is not deep or meaningful, but they are clips meant to generate engagement with younger audiences.
“The way we all grew up consuming content was in this very linear fashion: sit on the couch, turn on TV. I think young people are consuming sports in a very different way, right?” Overtime president Farzeen Ghorashy says. “They’re picking up their iPhone, using Instagram, YouTube and TikTok. We’ve just taken a very arms up approach to distributing content that lives on all those platforms.”
Overtime launched its tennis pages in February and gained 28,000 followers across Instagram, TikTok and YouTube in the first three months. They are not huge numbers but, according to Overtime, 42 per cent are under the age of 25.
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Ghorashy hopes Overtime will gain similar access to the women’s tour. WTA chief brand officer Sarah Swanson says it is open to such partnerships.
First though, she has spent 18 months bolstering the WTA’s in-house operation, launching a rebrand and doubling the size of the content team. As recently as March 2024, the WTA’s TikTok page was inactive, but it has gained more than 750,000 followers since it started actively using it again.
“That’s the future of fandom,” Swanson says. “You can’t market to your existing fans. You have to market to different fans in the places that they consume with the things they’re going to care about.” It seems to be working, as last year the WTA reported reaching a 1.1bn global audience across broadcasting and streaming. Two-thirds of that audience are under 45.
But there have been signs of tennis failing to cut through too. Netflix docu-series Break Point (which ran in 2023 and 2024) failed to have the impact of the Formula 1 and golf equivalents.
Ghorashy says the series lacked behind the scenes moments, while tennis content creator Eliza Wastcoat calls it a “missed opportunity”, saying the series did not delve deep enough, particularly beyond the top 10 players.
Wastcoat’s Instagram page, @itselizasworld, has built up nearly 50,000 followers through tennis fashion reviews and news round-ups. She thinks tennis has been slow to develop organic online content. The WTA and ATP have improved recently, Wastcoat says, but they have been playing catch-up and tennis remains “at least five or six years behind other sports in terms of their organisation, how the sport is structured, and how easy it is to follow and the investment in social media”.
Tennis organisations also have to deal with a fragmented structure, with tournaments broadcast across multiple channels. That can make it expensive and confusing for fans. “I actually think that it’s not the sport of tennis, the length of it, that’s the problem,” Wastcoat says. “It’s [viewers] not knowing who these people are and being able to connect with them as individuals.”
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And yet, there is cause for optimism. The younger generation are becoming more well-known — Alcaraz released his own Netflix series in May, and brands are flocking to collaborate with the likes of Swiatek and Gauff.
“I think there was a transition post-Serena and post-Venus, but . . . we’ve got stars again,” Swanson says. “Coco is a superstar. Aryna is a superstar. They are so social forward, it’s really authentic and natural for both of them.”
Ghorashy says players are ready to show more of who they are: “Over the last couple of decades, players [were] praised for not showing their personalities as much on the court.
“I think that there might be a new wave of younger players that thrive off being authentic, showing personality. It’s . . . about what is everyone in the ecosystem doing to promote them and make them shine.”