Patrick Mouratoglou outlines plans to fit Ultimate Tennis Showdown into tennis calendar

The inaugural UTS was played over five weekends at the Mouratoglou Tennis Academy, with several of the world’s top players competing.

It featured a new scoring format, power-up cards, mid-match interviews, and other innovations that set it apart from a traditional tennis tournament.

Mouratoglou, who organised the event and has coached Serena Williams for a number of years, thinks there is a place for UTS when the tennis calendar resumes after the coronavirus pandemic.

"I think it is much more interesting to have two different products in tennis,” he told Tennis365. “Some of the core tennis fans will watch UTS, but we are attracting a new audience.

"If you look through the figures of the fans we have reached over the last few weeks, the average age of our fans is 30 and 50 per cent of our fans are not always watching tennis regularly. That is our goal.

"We don’t know what the calendar is going to look like in 2021 with the Covid-19 crisis and all the consequences of it, so there are a lot of weeks that are available and a lot of weeks to do things and that is great.

"This is totally what I hoped it would look like and that is good news because you never quite know whether that is what the product is going to look like when you imagine it. The reality is quite often different, but this time it is very close. Not that this is the perfect product, I don’t think it is, we can still improve a lot, but for a start this is a good start."

Matteo Berrettini won Ultimate Tennis Showdown after beating Stefanos Tsitsipas in a dramatic final.

Mouratoglou admits the format could be tweaked in the future, but is excited by the potential of the event.

"Imagine this event with a crowd… wow, I can’t wait," he said. "There was a lot of tension out there. This is real tennis and they want to win, but they can have fun at the same time. You could see the players relaxing at the changeover and having some fun, but then they want to win really badly when the points are played. That is great.

"The goal of UTS is to offer an immersive format. Tennis is a format where we are far from the players and we see them from the outside. UTS, you are close to the action physically as the camera is there, the sound gets you into their effort and we get into the players’ mind thanks to the commentators and their conversations. We get close to the coaching as we can hear their discussion with the players at the changeover, so this is a very immersive experience and very different."