Billie Jean King calls for change to ‘love’ scoring system in tennis

Former world No 1 wants simplified points format for younger viewers and suggests player names on backs of shirts

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Billie Jean King wants tennis to change its traditional scoring system to attract the next generation of fans.
The use of the word “love” to mean zero and points going in a 15-30-40 sequence have been used in tennis for centuries, but the multiple grand slam winner believes it is confusing for younger supporters.
“I want to make it easy for fans. I think it should be 1-2-3-4 not 15-love, 30-love,” King told BBC Sport. “If you are a kid – I didn’t come from tennis – what the heck does that mean? If we want to get eight, nine, 10, 11, 12-year-old children involved in our sport we have to make it accessible to them – not to a 60-year-old fan.”
King also wants to see more made of the personalities in tennis, with players’ names put on the back of their shirts or tops as in football and, more recently, rugby.
Tennis is the latest sport to consider its long-term future and how it can appeal to the coveted younger generation. Cricket introduced the Hundred, Formula One enticed a younger audience into the sport through Netflix’s Drive to Survive, and now King has put forward similar measures for her sport.
Novak Djokovic warned in July that club tennis has become “endangered” by the rising popularity of padel, a hybrid between squash and tennis.
It has become one of the world’s fastest-growing sports, with an estimated 30 million players globally, and the former world No 1 explained his fears that tennis was at risk of being displaced. But padel uses the same scoring system as the traditional game, and it has not harmed its increasing popularity.
Tennis has already taken steps to attract a new generation. Break Point, which ran for two series on Netflix, has followed some of the world’s top players, including self-proclaimed “bad boy” Nick Kyrgios, through their calendar year, focusing on a selected tournaments. However, unlike Drive to Survive, it was not a huge success and was not renewed for a third series.
Tennis participation, at least in the UK, is not under an immediate threat of collapse, nor is the sport alienating its fans.
Wimbledon has remained a quintessential part of the British summer since its inception almost 150 years ago, inspiring children to pick up tennis rackets and head to their local clubs each year.
Over the past five years, adult annual participation has grown by 48 per cent to around 5.5 million people, with just over 10 per cent of the adult population playing at least once a year.
Padel is exponentially growing across the world, with an estimated 30 million taking part, and uses the same scoring system, so the argument that tennis needs fundamentally changing to attract new fans is flawed.
Removing words that have become intrinsic with the sport like “love” or “deuce” would ultimately diminish some of the sport’s uniqueness. Plus, to suggest younger people are incapable of learning just a handful of terms is a slight to their intelligence.
Badminton and table tennis use a numbered scoring system, with matches played up to a certain figure. It is simpler, but they do not attract the same following or participation that tennis does.
A game in tennis, like the one in the final between Carlos Alcaraz and Novak Djokovic in 2023 that lasted 26 minutes and felt like a microcosm of the match itself, is something worth cherishing rather than simplifying.
Netflix was Formula One’s tool to attract the next generation, so perhaps documentaries or social media should be where tennis shifts its focus, rather than trying to alter what has made it so successful: the game itself.
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