For years, tennis balls have been the sport’s fuzzy yellow scapegoat, blamed for poor play and even injuries. Now, the men’s tour finally has a plan to ensure consistency.
There’s plenty to look at during a tennis spectacle like the U.S. Open, where a night match in Arthur Ashe Stadium might hold 23,000 fans, hundreds of sponsor activations, dozens of celebrities and who knows how many Honey Deuces. But everyone watching, whether in-person or on TV at home, looks at one thing more than any other during a match: the tennis ball.
Given that exposure and the makeup of a crowd at a typical ATP Tour event—where 60% to 75% of spectators identify as tennis players themselves, according to tour data—manufacturers have long paid for the privilege of serving as the official provider of tournaments’ tennis balls, hoping to increase their market share in a global marketplace that sells $1.5 billion worth of balls annually. With each tournament free to negotiate with any brand it chooses, Forbes estimates the biggest events on the calendar can fetch $200,000 to $500,000 annually, in addition to a supply of the 70,000 or so balls used during play.
This sponsorship free-for-all has become a hot-button issue for professional players since different brands make balls with slightly different weights, densities and felt—all of which affect how it feels to hit for hours each day. Balls have become a scapegoat for players’ inconsistent performance and, increasingly, for shoulder, elbow and wrist injuries.
“A lot of players are adamant about the effects that changing balls week in and week out have had on their body,” says Chris Eubanks, a former Wimbledon semifinalist and the ATP’s 160th-ranked singles player, who will serve as an analyst for ESPN at the U.S. Open next week. “At least give us time to adjust to the different balls so that we can make whatever modifications we need to. Then our bodies will naturally adjust.”
Illustration by Alice Lagarde for Forbes; Photos by Daniel Kopatsch/Getty Images; Daniel Kopatsch/Getty Images; Minas Panagiotakis/Stringer/Getty Images; Shi Tang/Getty Images; Dan Istitene/Getty Images
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Andy Roddick, an American tennis legend who won the 2003 U.S. Open, put it another way on his Served podcast earlier this year. “Imagine if pitchers, what would happen to their elbows if the baseballs they were throwing [had] different weights?” he said. “Tell me that if you had to do that professionally, over and over again, in an extreme way, that those wouldn’t affect your body differently.”
The ATP, which organizes the men’s tour, had been hearing these complaints for years but felt powerless to address them until 2023, when it passed a moratorium on tournaments signing new contracts with ball manufacturers and secured the rights to negotiate future deals on behalf of all of its tournaments. After another quiet two years, the tour unveiled its grand plan in June, finally taking action to create some tour-wide consistency.
The catalyst, as it so often is, was money—or in this case, a lack of it.
While the ATP broadly oversees the events on the men’s tour, each tournament is owned and operated by a different entity, each of which is naturally trying to maximize its revenue. Historically, tennis balls were too important a sponsorship category to disrupt. As recently as the 1990s, ball manufacturers were the title sponsors of some ATP Tour stops.
During the pandemic, however, differences between ball brands became more of a focus as worker shortages at rubber and felt companies and strained supply chains led to inconsistent quality. At certain tournaments, players reported low ball pressure and overly fluffy balls that were leading to more stress on the arm.
“Four weeks—four different balls. When are tournaments going to listen to players?” three-time Grand Slam champion Stan Wawrinka wrote on social media in 2023. Nick Kyrgios, a player never afraid to wade into controversy, later posted, “The people who think balls aren’t a big enough factor to result in an athlete being hurt are potatoes.”
By that point, the relative weight of tennis balls as a sponsorship category had decreased dramatically. At big events like Masters 1000s and Grand Slams, airline, banking and car brands today might pay ten times as much as ball manufacturers for their partnerships, and the tour also distributes more money from media rights and data collection deals, making ball sponsorships a less significant slice of the revenue pie. That new financial reality allowed the ATP to step in.
“Clearly it wouldn’t have happened even 10 years ago,” says Geoffroy Bourbon, the ATP’s executive vice president for Europe. “Now, it’s become much easier to go to tournament directors and say, ‘Relinquish your grip on the category, and let’s do what’s right from a sporting standpoint.’”
The ATP now plans to divide the calendar into a handful of “swings,” such as the Australian hardcourt circuit in January or the European clay-court events in May, with the same brand of ball being used at each tournament within that stretch. Any existing sponsorships will be honored until the end of their current term, the last of which run through 2028, and as the tour negotiates short-term deals timed to expire simultaneously that same year, the ATP has guaranteed tournaments that any new deals will match or increase the revenue they currently generate.
“By creating swings, we’ve created a scarcity of opportunities to be present on tour, so that’s the commercial leverage we have over manufacturers,” Bourbon says. “And they had the threat of what was going to happen in 2029 if they don’t play along.”
About 25% of tour events were forced to change their ball sponsor, but “as long as the money stayed the same, we’re happy,” one tournament organizer told Forbes. “Plus, now players can’t complain to us—they have to complain to the tour.”
On The Ball: Chris Eubanks, a former Wimbledon semifinalist, says that if players have time to adjust to a different tennis ball, “we can make whatever modifications we need to.”
Al Bello/Getty Images
The manufacturers have been less receptive to the plan now that they will no longer be able to pick and choose which tournaments to sponsor. Instead of partnering with an individual marquee event or one that arrives at a strategic point on the calendar—for instance, one Masters 1000 tournament in the spring and one in the fall, for a six-figure combined sum—a brand might need to make a seven-figure offer to sponsor a swing of Masters 1000-, 500- and 250-level events.
“It wasn’t ideal for them from a marketing standpoint, for sure, but at the same time they recognize what we’re trying to do,” Bourbon says.
The ultimate goal, Bourbon says, is to provide manufacturers with objective, data-based player feedback they can use to improve the quality of balls, which in turn should raise the quality of play and limit injuries. But Bourbon is quick to shut down the suggestion that the ATP is going through all this effort out of the goodness of its heart.
“That’s clearly a business decision,” he says. “When you end up not having your best talent show up at your most important tournaments because they’ve switched balls three times in three weeks and they’ve got a wrist ache, that is more important to us than $5,000 more here or there.”
In the short term, ball centralization remains an imperfect system. The four Grand Slams, for example, are not controlled by the ATP and still negotiate their ball deals individually, which could lead to a situation where players use a Dunlop ball through the clay-court swing and then a Wilson ball at the French Open. Meanwhile, tournaments with existing sponsorships will continue to disrupt the schedule for the next handful of years. And while the ATP worked with the WTA Tour for sponsorships at men’s and women’s combined events, the WTA continues to operate on a tournament-by-tournament basis for the time being.
For players like Eubanks, continuity can’t come soon enough.
“When we’re having two weeks on, three weeks off, back to Ball A for another week and then using Ball C for this week, it just continues to drive us crazy,” he says. “And we’re already crazy enough.”
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Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattcraig/2025/08/22/why-the-atp-tour-is-taking-a-sponsorship-away-from-tennis-tournaments/