Why tennis greats can play back-to-back epics and footballers cannot

Imagine the outrage if Fifa announced that nations must play 15 matches in two weeks to win the World Cup.

Managers, players, and their representative bodies would condemn the physical and psychological risk amid the ever growing clamour for a reduced timetable.

For perspective, such unreasonable demands would absorb 21 hours of playing time in a stamina-sapping fortnight. Or, what Novak Djokovic might call, a “normal 14 days at the office” when pursuing another French Open title at Roland Garros.

At this year’s Australian Open, Djokovic was on court for four hours and nine minutes to defeat Jannik Sinner, finishing just shy of 2am. The following day he played more than three hours in the final against Carlos Alcaraz.

Such epics define Djokovic’s career.

In 2012, the Serbian’s Australian Open semi-final against Andy Murray lasted four hours and 50 minutes. Two days later he played the longest grand-slam final on record against Rafael Nadal – five hours and 53 minutes.

The ROAR at the end 🗣️ 🗣️ 🗣️ #EpicMomentspic.twitter.com/NVyE5z3dtg

— #AusOpen (@AustralianOpen) June 16, 2023

Now, even Djokovic’s superhuman efforts are being eclipsed.

Alcaraz holds the record for the longest time spent on court to win a major. In 2022, it took a whopping 23 hours 39 minutes over seven gruelling matches to win his first US Open. Two years later, Daniil Medvedev spent 24 hours 17 minutes on court finishing runner-up at the Australian Open.

A less strenuous run to a grand-slam title would still require an average of 17 hours on court for men and 10 for women.

Major tournaments are about survival of the fittest as much as skill, which is why concerns about the gruelling calendar carry such weight.

Footballers hit higher maximum speeds more often

If you have ever wondered why the tennis greats can demonstrate such Herculean endurance levels, while football managers moan about three fixtures in a week, sports science has the answer.

“It’s not really a fair comparison,” Dr Anna Fitzpatrick, lecturer in performance analysis at Loughborough University, says. “You’re comparing apples with pears, because the sports have fundamentally different physical, physiological, perceptual demands.

“A football pitch is roughly 7,000 square metres. A tennis court is a few hundred square metres, and a tennis player only ever covers half of that, because they’re on one side of the net all the time.

“Translated into total distance, a footballer will cover between eight to 13 kilometres per match, whereas a tennis player covers between two to five kilometres per match on a hard or clay court, and less on a grass court because the points and speed of the game are quicker.”

Applied to seven matches in a French Open fortnight, and it is closer to the distance covered by three 90-minute football matches.

“Football sprints are generally over longer distances. If you complete a 100-metre sprint, it takes 10-15 metres before you’re at your top speed,” Dr Fitzpatrick, a former tennis professional who competed in Wimbledon’s doubles in 2007 and 2008, says.

“Tennis players very rarely ever reach their top speed on a court, because the court is too small. They’ve reached the ball before they’ve had time to get up to their maximum speed. So footballers need longer accelerations and reach higher maximum speeds more often. That also means the game demands greater deceleration forces going through the body, as well as directional changes which cause further stresses. In football, the demands around changing direction are more instantaneous. You’re reacting to an opponent’s movement. In tennis, you know where the ball is going. You’re accelerating towards hitting the ball, but you tend to actually start decelerating before you hit the ball. So that the deceleration profile is very different.

“Basically, football has greater impact and higher forces going through the body, especially as it’s a contact sport. That demands more recovery time between matches.”

This summary is essentially the difference between most team and individual sports.

“The team dynamics in football, rugby or American football mean you need 360-degree awareness,” Dr Fitzpatrick explains. “A tennis player’s visual field is directly ahead of them; they do not need to worry about being hit from behind.

“Another factor is there are fewer breaks in football. Perceptually, you can never switch off.

“Tennis is more stop-start. Even strategically, you can take a breather. At 30-0 down on an opponent’s serve, a player might think the odds are they will lose the game and save some energy if the next game feels more important in the context of a set or match.”

Belief you can outlast opponent makes ‘huge difference’

The broader question for sports science is how to prepare tennis professionals for the endurance challenges posed, particularly when Djokovic has taken it to such an extreme for the last 20 years.

British hopefuls Emma Raducanu and Jack Draper’s talents to contest and win big tournaments – in Raducanu’s case a grand-slam title – cannot be denied, but the careers of both have stalled because of the physical demands. Recruiting the right conditioning specialists to backroom teams is fundamental.

“Preparation for a five-hour match demands many years of training,” Dr Fitzpatrick says.

“I worked with Jez Green [the strength and conditioning coach who worked with Murray and Raducanu] and his philosophy was always that we would train to be fitter, faster, stronger than we would ever need to be on a tennis court. If we played three hours of tennis in a day, we had to do the same amount of physical training the same day. It was a 50-50 split of on-court training and off-court training.

“He links it to psychology because his ambition is every time one of his players goes on the tennis court and truly believes they will never be beaten because they [do not think they] are not fit enough, not fast enough, and not strong enough; to outlast the opponent. That belief can make a huge difference to a player.

“He also encouraged players to never show signs of tiredness. We might do 12 400-metre sprints around a track, with a minute off in between each, and we were never allowed to put our hands on our knees and bend over fatigued.

“He would say: ‘Even if you’re shattered after a point, stand up tall, and look across at the opponent. If they’re knackered, they’re looking at you and wondering how is he or she standing up straight after that?’”

Broaden the discussion, and elite road cyclists might look at the demands on tennis players and say: “Hold my water bottle.”

Winning the Tour de France generally requires 85 hours of optimum physical exertion across three weeks, which is about the same amount of time a footballer will spend on the pitch across a season.

“The notion of fitness is different across elite sports. Someone at the top level will have undergone years of sports-specific training,” Dr Fitzpatrick says. “Even within football, the demands on different positions will be much different. A centre-half will not run as much as a central midfielder. The full-backs will need more stamina than a goalkeeper. They all require different types of training and conditioning.”

Still, the next time you hear a football coach describe a title race as a marathon, a leading tennis player can be forgiven for replying: “Try two weeks at Roland Garros.”

“At the very top level, every sport has its own unique profile,” Dr Fitzpatrick says.

“Ask a tennis player to play a Premier League football match and they will fatigue quicker. Ask a footballer to play tennis and they might be shattered after a few games.”

French Open: British injury woes deepen as Norrie retires mid-match

British tennis in 2026 has so far been defined as much by who is not playing as who is. The list of injured players makes for grim reading.

Jack Draper’s bone bruise on his left arm allowed him to play just one singles match between last season’s Wimbledon and the end of the year. This clay-court season, he has managed only one match, during which he had to retire with a knee injury. His ranking has plummeted from world No 4 to 75 over the past 12 months.

On the women’s side, Britain’s No 1 Emma Raducanu took more than two months off because of the after-effects of an illness she contracted in February, but has returned to the tour with a new coach.

Sonay Kartal reached the fourth round of Indian Wells before being ruled out for the entire clay-court season with a back injury. The list does not stop there: Francesca Jones has suffered with concussion and a hip issue while Jacob Fearnley has navigated a rib injury.

The problem is so acute that even Cameron Norrie, who has missed only one grand slam since 2017, arrived in Paris unable to train in the week before the tournament because of a rib problem.

Unlike the other Britons, Norrie’s injury has a direct cause: a best-of-five set practice match against world No 6 Ben Shelton on May 13 that lasted about five hours and left its mark.

“It was so good, but maybe in hindsight I overtrained, over-prepared, I’ve been loving my tennis too much,” Norrie said.

“Maybe I could have rested a few days and went to Geneva a bit early,” Norrie said on Saturday. By Tuesday, he had to retire mid-match against Adolfo Vallejo.

Only Katie Boulter has enjoyed a year that has not been affected by a significant setback. She does not use the facilities at the National Tennis Centre, where the Lawn Tennis Association has replaced all of their physios over the last year.

Telegraph Sport understands that the LTA has looked into the number of British tennis players retiring from matches compared with other nations and found little difference.