Shorter or longer tennis matches: what's the right balance?

The first week of the 2017 tennis season saw the much-anticipated returns of several of the sport’s biggest names, such as Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Serena Williams.

Another debut that received less attention was the introduction of the Fast4 match format at this year’s Hopman Cup, where it was used for the mixed doubles events. This was the format’s first appearance at an International Tennis Federation (ITF)-sanctioned event.

Fast4 is specifically designed to make matches quicker and more exciting. The format gets its name from the four rules that distinguish it most from the way a standard tennis set is played:

• no lets;

• no advantage points;

• the first to four points wins the game; and

• the first to four games wins the set, with a first-to-five-point tiebreak played if the score reaches three-games-all in a set.

Tennis Australia introduced the format and trialled it at club level throughout Australia in 2014. Could the broader adoption of Fast4 at the professional level prevent the rising trends in match durations?

How could it shorten match length?

Fast4’s official debut comes at a time when tennis’ governing bodies are expressing a growing interest in shorter match formats in the professional game.

In addition to Fast4’s emergence, Women’s Tennis Association CEO Steve Simon has hinted at the possibility of “progressive” change in match formats on the women’s tour in the near future.

For a sport that hasn’t had a significant change in singles format since the ITF adopted the tiebreaker in 1971, tennis’ governing bodies are under growing pressure to innovate matchplay and curb the trends in match lengths that have added an average of 44 hours to the length of singles play at Grand Slam matches in the past decade.

In the recent era, tennis has seen a major shift in the style of play. It has transitioned from the fast-paced serve-and-volley play of the 1980s and 1990s to baseline play, where rallies are longer and fewer points are played at the net. This change, combined with the growing depth of the tour, has led to increased match lengths.

The 11-hour John Isner-Nicolas Mahut marathon at Wimbledon in 2010 was an outlier in any era, but much less so today than 20 years ago.

Of the 13 mixed doubles matches played at this year’s Hopman Cup, the average match length was 45 minutes. The longest match was still a speedy 74 minutes. But this is too small and select a group of matches to infer how Fast4 would alter the tour if used more broadly in singles and doubles events.

My colleagues and I in Tennis Australia’s Game Insight Group have developed statistical models to understand precisely how alternative match formats, like Fast4, would impact the sport.

Our estimates show the average best-of-three-set Fast4 singles match would last less than 60 minutes. This would make it 30 minutes shorter than the average for a standard best-of-three match and 100 minutes shorter than the average best-of-five match. The best-of-three Fast4 format would also make the chance of a match duration of more than 90 minutes statistically improbable.