Is tennis unfair?
Under current rules, the winner of a match is the player who wins the greater number of sets and, in the majority of cases, that is the player who wins the most games too…but not always.
Ahead of the Australian Open, new research from a group of academics highlights a rare but striking fairness problem: a player can win a match on sets while winning fewer games overall than their opponent, leaving both players with a credible claim to being the 'rightful' winner.
In a forthcoming paper, academics Steven Brams (New York University), Marc Kilgour (Wilfrid Laurier University), and Mehmet Mars Seven (King's College London) analyse more than 50,000 Grand Slam singles matches played between 1968 and 2024, showing that such discrepancies do occur, even on the sport's biggest stages.
The most famous example is the 2019 Wimbledon men's final, where Novak Djokovic beat Roger Federer in five sets, yet Federer won more games overall (36-32). Under current rules, the set winner is champion. But the researchers argue that when the set winner and the game winner differ, both players have a legitimate claim to victory and the sport should have a clear, familiar way to resolve it.
With the Australian Open approaching, the academics believe tennis has an opportunity to consider a change that would make outcomes fairer and reduce the risk of future discrepancies at the highest level. They have dubbed it the 'Grand Tiebreak'.
Under the proposed rule:
- Matches would still be played under standard Grand Slam rules (best-of-five sets for men, best-of-three for women).
- Only if the match winner by sets has won fewer total games than the opponent would the players play a Grand Tiebreak to determine the winner.
- The Grand Tiebreak would be played using standard set tiebreak rules, making it familiar to players, officials, and fans.
How often does this happen? Using mathematical modelling, the academics estimate mismatches between the set winner and game winner occur in about five per cent of men's best-of-five matches and about three per cent of women's best-of-three matches. In practice, the overall rate across Grand Slams is lower, largely because early rounds include many uneven match-ups.
Even so, the historical record is not trivial. Across Grand Slam singles matches in the Open Era, the study identifies hundreds of cases in which the match winner won fewer games overall.
The authors find that this amounts to around a dozen matches per Slam (Australian Open, French Open, Wimbledon, US Open) in which a Grand Tiebreak scenario arises over the course of a two-week tournament. The research also suggests that the issue becomes more relevant as tournaments progress and opponents become closer in ability.
The academics said: "Tennis has a long and venerable history, so why are we suggesting a rule change now? First, tennis has not been immune to rule changes; over the last 50 years, one of the most significant was the tiebreak after a set ties at 6-6.
"This solved a serious problem of extraordinarily long matches, sometimes lasting more than a day. We think that the 2019 Wimbledon final highlights the problem that the strengths of two players may well be gauged by different and equally valid performance measures.
"A Grand Tiebreak will force players to try to succeed according to both measures, so its existence is likely to greatly diminish the need for it even to be invoked."
