Right present, at the conclusion of the season, 19 of the top 200 tennis players in the world are Italian. It is a rather surprising reality given the history of tennis in Italy, a nation that has never produced a tennis player number 1 in the world and that at the male level has not won a Slam – the category that comprises the four most significant and famous events – for 46 years. There are few nations that can now claim a comparable number of tennis players in the top two hundred: they are the United States, France and Argentina, but none of them has an average quality as high as the Italian one, and above all such a low average age. Of the 19 Italians in the top 200, in fact, eleven are no more than 21 years old. Italy was the only nation to have more than one participant in the NextGen ATP Finals, which concluded a few days ago in Milan and included the eight best young players of the season. Those players were Lorenzo Musetti, Francesco Passaro, and Matteo Arnaldi. During Roland Garros (one of the four Grand Slams) in 2021, Matthew Futterman commented in the New York Times about the successes of Matteo Berrettini, Jannik Sinner, and Musetti: "This tournament, and maybe even the future of men's tennis, suddenly appear very Italian." Futterman pondered the causes of this out-of-the-ordinary occurrence and concluded that it was more likely a lucky chance. Perhaps the success is partly attributable to sustained financial commitments to tennis programs for young people and a rise in tennis-related media coverage. At the highest levels, tennis is now the only sport in Italy that can be seen online for free and in high definition.
|