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Off Court News
Bravo: Behind the rise of Sinner & an Italian tennis empire
Italy’s emergence as a tennis super power – and two-time reigning Davis Cup champion – has been built on very solid foundations laid over many years
November 24, 2024
Corinne Dubreuil/ATP Tour
Jannik Sinner is leading the charge of Italians on the ATP Tour. (File photo)
By Robert Davis
Editor’s note: This story was first published 5 November, 2024
It is summertime in Italy, and on this Sunday afternoon members at the Harbor Club Milano are divided on which tennis matches to watch. The one on the big screen features Italians Simone Bolelli and Andrea Vavassori playing in the Terra Wortmann Open final. Or walk outside the clubhouse, and watch the qualifying matches of the ATP Challenger event.
These are the glory days for Italian tennis. On any given Sunday, you will likely see an Italian player in the hunt for a trophy on the ATP Tour and Challenger Tour.
“[Jannik] Sinner is the most popular sportsman in Italy,” says Massimo Giomba, a veteran journalist for Italy’s tennis news website Ubitennis. “All companies want to have his face to make advertising. And many people are interested about tennis now. It even happens on the metro you can hear normal people discussing the chances of Sinner or [Lorenzo] Musetti to win the tournament or to climb the rankings.”
Lorenzo Musetti” style=”width:100%;” src=”https://www.atptour.com/-/media/images/news/2024/11/04/16/29/musetti-sardegnach-2024.jpg”>Lorenzo Musetti in action at the 2024 Sardegna Open. (Photo Credit: Mike Lawrence/ATP Tour)
Italians are not only climbing the PIF ATP Rankings, they are absolutely stacking it. With Sinner currently crowned the best player in the world, and Musetti on the rise at No. 17, Italy’s supply chain of players is well-balanced and flourishing. Like the national high-speed train, La Frecciarosa, Italy has steamrolled perennial powerhouse Spain off the tracks with the most players in the Top 100 of the PIF ATP Rankings by a non-grand slam nation.
“As I always said, we are lucky because we have junior tournaments, we have Future events, and then we have a lot of Challenger events in Italy,” says Jannik Sinner, who this year became the first Italian man to rise to World No. 1. “Which potentially could give a chance for the young players, having some wild cards, trying to understand what the level is until a certain point and talking about ranking-wise. Then after we have also big events. In Turin, we have the [Nitto] ATP Finals.”
If all roads lead to Rome, then they are most certainly paved with ATP Challengers. This year Italy will host 19 ATP Challengers. The return on investment for the Federation of Italian Tennis and Padel (FITP) has been a dependable production pipeline of players ranked inside the Top 500. In addition to keeping both players and coaches on task, Italy’s focus on staging more Challengers has better prepared its players to succeed on the ATP Tour. Right now, eight Italians are in the Top 75 of the PIF ATP Rankings.
Lorenzo Musetti and Mariano Navone“>
The Sardegna Open is one of 19 Challenger Tour events hosted by Italy. (Photo Credit: Mike Lawrence/ATP Tour)
Every nation needs a leader, someone to light the way for the younger generation to follow. Argentina had Guillermo Vilas, Czechoslovakia had Jan Kodes, and Sweden had Bjorn Borg. For Italy, that man was Adriano Panatta. In 1976, Panatta won both the Italian Open and French Open.
Claudio Pistolesi was just nine years old when Panatta won the French Open. “To watch him [Panatta] play was both pleasure and pain,” recalls Pistolesi. “Some players play tennis from the textbook. Not so with Panatta, he performed magic.”
True that. Watch the videos and count all the Houdini-like escapes. Panatta played high-stakes tennis, saving match points with a Bond-like demeanour and derring-do escapes. Panatta would often employ the most dramatic tactics possible and in doing so gave Italy their first taste of cardio tennis.
Adriano Panatta”>
Adriano Panatta defeated Harold Salomon in the 1976 French Open final. Photo: AFP/Getty Images)
“Yannick Noah may have inspired France,” claims Pistolesi, “but Adriano Panatta united Italy. And in doing so, he took tennis from an elite sport to a popular sport.”
With the barrier broken, a steady stream of Italians began to breach the walls of the Top 100: Pistolesi, Andrea Gaudenzi, Renzo Furlan, Gianluca Pozzi, Davide Sanguinetti, Cristiano Caratti, Filippo Volandri, Potito Starace, Simone Bolelli, Andreas Seppi, and Paolo Lorenzi.
And then came Fabio.
In Italy, Fabio Fognini is affectionately called ‘The Pope’. Meaning that Fognini can do whatever he wants and that people will always love him. Whether he plays with divine inspiration like his 2015 US Open third-round, come from behind five-set win over Rafael Nadal. Or swats balls with apparent indifference while saving five match points, and committing 12 foot faults against Albert Montanes at the 2010 French Open. Fabio Fognini is the proverbial box of chocolates that Italians just cannot get enough of.
Fabio Fognini”>
Fognini has won nine titles on the ATP Tour and reached No. 9 in the PIF ATP Rankings. (Photo Credit: Mike Lawrence/ATP Tour)
Another pleasant surprise for Italian tennis was the shock ascent of Matteo Berrettini and Lorenzo Sonego. The fact that neither player was on anyone’s junior watchlist might have been a blessing in disguise. As well as a credit to the depth of developmental coaching in Italy.
“As juniors, both Matteo (Berrettini) and Lorenzo (Sonego) had the benefit of no expectations and unnecessary pressures,” believes Pistolesi. “Same like Sinner. Plus, they had some good fortunes to have been joined with exactly the right coach at the age of magic where kids can believe in dreams. And maybe even more important, these two special coaches believed in them.”
“I have been asked what made Matteo (Berrettini) special,” says former coach Vincenzo Santopadre. “And my answer is this. Almost every day he was showing me how he has this quality of listening. Not only hearing but listening deep inside of himself and committing these lessons to his memory. He could record everything that was taught to him that was important to getting better in tennis. And another reason is, unless you were with him every day, in good times and bad, you could not see this incredible desire to be great.”
Matteo Berrettini ” style=”width:100%;” src=”https://www.atptour.com/-/media/images/news/2024/11/04/15/49/berrettini-wimbledon-2021-sunday.jpg”>
Matteo Berrettini reached the Wimbledon final in 2021. (Photo Credit: Corinne Dubreuil/ATP Tour)
The dream came true in the summer of 2021 at the Wimbledon Championships. That is when Matteo Berrettini marched onto Centre Court for the championship match against Novak Djokovic, becoming the first Italian men’s singles finalist in tournament history and first Italian Grand Slam men’s singles finalist since Panatta at 1976 Roland Garros.
It has long been an open secret that the best way to develop a nation’s tennis is through the three Cs: Coaches, Competition, and Courts. So, why don’t more countries do better? It can be a bit tricky. For starters, national associations often go corporate and employ a top-down management style that can damage more than develop.
In 2011, Donato Campagnoli, currently the consultant for the Department of Tactical-Technical of the FITP, was the only Italian coach at the ITF Worldwide Coaches Conference in Port Ghalib, Egypt. That would soon change. Thanks to an O.K.R action plan by the FITP, today Italian coaches boast the highest number of attendees in coaching education courses. Then there is Alberto Castellani, who has been a father figure to so many Italian coaches and players over the decades. Castellani is the president of the GPTCA, and regularly conducts over 40 coaching workshops a year from Rome to Rio.
According to Campagnoli the FITP created the Sistema Italia. “A project for the creation of a territorial ecosystem based on the cultural elevation of all the stakeholders involved in racquet sports,” states Campagnoli.
In more simple words, the FITP had to repair relationships. Step one, they (FITP) decided, was to stop separating the players from their coaches and cherry-picking the best players out of the local clubs.
8 Italians in Top 75 in the PIF ATP Rankings
“We made a collective decision at the FITP that the best place for the players to develop was at home with their families,” says Campagnoli. “That they should continue with the coaches who trained them, and remain at the clubs who have supported them from the first bounce of the ball.”
Now that everyone was working together, the FITP started spending money in all the right places. The FITP began an ambitious campaign of financially supporting all clubs that wanted to host professional tournaments. With courts and competitions in place, the FITP decided to befriend the coaches.
“Today, it is a new culture and approach by the Federation,” says Vincenzo Santopadre. “The FITP helps all the coaches with many forms of support from coaching education materials and workshops, access to analytics, physiotherapists, and fitness coaches.”
The FITP accepted that if they were going to lead a tennis revival, they would need to stop the bossing and start listening to their best talents. That done, the FITP was not content to sit back now that they had made friends and influenced others. The FITP’s masterstroke came with SuperTennis, a TV tennis channel. SuperTennis not only attracted lots of sponsors, but equally important, it broadcasted tennis to an audience hungry for all things tennis.
“SuperTennis has been huge for us,” claims Francesco De Laurentiis, Director of Tennis at the Sporting Club Sassuolo. “SuperTennis shows not only the big tournaments but also the Challengers, WTA, ITF Tours, and even some juniors! So people get to know players [ranked] from 500 to the Top 10. Therefore, they become known and popular so parents and junior players get closer to the tennis competition system and their interest in being part of it grows.”
Massimo Giomba believes that there is one more reason for success.
“Another factor is a sort of emulation game,” begins Giomba. “Sinner, Musetti, Luciano Darderi, Matteo Arnaldi, and Flavio Cobolli were born between 2001 and 2003. They have been playing against each other since Juniors. When one of them began to win in his professional matches, the other boys were thinking: “He won, why not me too?”. So now all these boys are in top 100. Others as Francesco Passaro, Mattia Bellucci, Matteo Gigante and Giulio Zeppieri are not so far behind.”
Flavio Cobolli” style=”width:100%;” src=”https://www.atptour.com/-/media/images/news/2024/11/04/22/15/cobolli-training-2024″>Flavio Cobolli, 22, began the year outside the Top 100 but cracked the Top 30 during a year in which he won 35 tour-level matches. Photo: Corinne Dubreuil/ATP Tour
Alfred Hitchcock said that good drama should, ‘always make the audience suffer as much as possible.’ Hitchcock might have been talking about tennis in Italy. Watch a tennis match in Italy, and you will be treated to the very best and the worst expressions in the Italian language. A mash-up of blessings, curses, and hand gestures that need no translation. For Italians, a good tennis match is not just a game but a theatre that demands more than just a ball passing over a net. Italians want to be entertained, and the more drama the better.
These days Italian tennis fans are getting more than just dramatic tennis matches to watch. Thanks to greater cooperation between the FITP and local clubs, players and coaches are free to deliver results that allow everybody to celebrate.