Tennis News: How the ATP will completely change in 2025

The ATP tour you have seen in recent years and will see for most of 2024 will be very different in 2025. And, no. I am not talking about any possibility that Rafael Nadal is no longer playing in 2025 or Novak Djokovic has decided to retire. None of the changes that will be coming have anything to do with any specific players, but for every ATP player.

Most tennis fans already knew the ATP would be going electronic with line calls by 2025. Some tournaments will be using the electronic line calls in 2024, too. The Grand Slam events – Australian Open, French Open, Wimbledon, and the US Open – are not ATP-controlled tournaments and are not required to use the technology that replaces line judges, but all of the majors have already started using the technology except the French Open.

The organizers of the French Open have resisted using modern technology because the event is on clay, of course, and the people who run the French Open argue you can see marks in the dirt where the ball landed. That still isn’t 100 percent accurate, however.

Electronic Line Calling Live, or ECL Live, is what will be used in place of line judges. The players appear to trust the technology, and matches could be sped up as there won’t be disputes on whether a ball is in or out. So, yeah…that’s good.

Lots of changes coming to the ATP tour in 2025

But the ATP schedule will change a great deal in 2025, too. An announcement was made last week that the Dallas Open, Qatar ExxonMobil Open in Doha, and the BMW Open in Munich, will become 500 events, upgraded from 250 tournaments. This means the ATP tour will then have 16 500 tournaments.

The three tournaments that were upgraded should draw higher-level players as well because there will be more points awarded at those events, of course, and the money will increase to total winnings of $2.8 million at each tournament.

Another change to the 2025 schedule is that seven of the nine Masters 1000 tournaments will increase from seven days to 12. This should ease the stress on players some as many times they will have a day off between matches at the Masters 1000s.

To make room for longer Masters 1000 events, though, the ATP announced that three 250 tournaments – Atlanta Open, Lyon Open, and Newport Hall of Fame Open – will cease to exist in 2025. That is sad for fans of those tournaments. Overall, however, the schedule should be easier for ATP players, and line calls should be quicker and more correct.