The State Of The U.S. Open Is The State Of Us
It’s being shouted from all corners: The U.S. Open has become an overcrowded, overpriced circus awash in influencers, aspirational influencers, corporate stooges, drunken buffoons, brand activations, inane stunt food, weed smoke, and bettors. It is newly hostile to children, people who value personal space, and genuine fans of tennis. These louts and narcissists, armed with their ring lights and stacked empty Honey Deuce cups, are ransacking this once-dignified event.
I’ve been attending this tournament for over two decades—I used to go to qualifiers with a brown-bag lunch—so I’ve been hearing some version of this complaint for years, but never at such a pitch as right now. Sometimes I don’t buy that the writer has been paying close enough attention to the tournament over time, but sometimes it’s all articulated succinctly by a diehard. I agree with the overall spirit that animates these complaints: The U.S. Open is no longer what we remember it to be, and it’s getting pretty weird as it tries to figure out what it will be next.
Lest we romanticize the past, many aspects of the current circus have held steady throughout the tournament’s 21st-century existence. It is not scandalizing to learn that America’s biggest tennis tournament is a shrine to conspicuous consumption. And the good parts of the U.S. Open are still life-affirmingly good. My eyelid, like yours, might twitch when I read that Craig Tiley, the recently installed CEO of the United States Tennis Association, wants to make the tournament more like “tennis Disneyland,” but I don’t know if the organizers are necessarily at fault for the present malaise. The Open appears to be drawing in more fan interest than ever before, which falls in line with the USTA’s mission statement of growing tennis participation in this country. If there’s a problem here, it might merely lie in mankind. At the intersection of broader disconcerting trends—everything is phone, everything is gambling, and nobody knows how to be around each other in public—lies the 2026 U.S. Open.
The last normal Open, where “normal” means a tournament that is still easily navigable and a crowd that is rambunctious but still abiding by the norms of the sport, might have been 2022. At least that’s where I’ve placed it, after consulting some other longtime attendees and revisiting my own notes. In 2023, as the middling Netflix series Break Point debuted and tennis TikTok surged, I felt the tournament heating up. In 2024, the summer of Challengers, it was boiling over, and I had to register my skepticism in a blog that now serves as a useful measuring stick for what has changed since.
In 2025, it felt necessary to describe the nonstop purgatorial murmur one hears in Arthur Ashe Stadium, which has been celebrated for its atmospheric night sessions but now, especially when the roof is closed, feels a lot more like a bustling hotel conference room, with the court sounds completely masked by the din. This year, I understood the new reality well enough to mostly avoid Ashe altogether. This decision was easier now that the courtside media section is being sold off as the extremely valuable seats they in fact are, banishing the media to the upper deck, part of a broader pattern of traditional media receding into the past.
But this overall pattern has been true for as long as I can remember: The farther you get from Ashe, the closer you sit to the court, and the greater the concentration of ball-knowers in the crowd, the better your viewing experience. My outer-court viewing has held stable from year to year, but the same might not be true for the uncredentialed masses waiting in long lines just to get into, say, Court 12, where they might have slipped freely in and out of in years past. Still, in the early rounds, when the runoff of the day session is going strong under the lights, you can get some of the best ambiances in tennis. All this is not to say you won’t still stumble into an occasional Ashe classic: Iva Jovic’s third-round win over Alexandra Eala has been the apex of the tournament, a clash of young rivals hurtling towards greatness of some kind, whose immature serves enabled transcendent baseline rallies. I didn’t have to squint to see the parallels to the Sincaraz quarterfinal four years ago. Jovic and Eala offered the best possible advertisement for tennis, and for the Open in general; this match, unlike its predecessor, was played at a decent enough hour for fans to watch its conclusion. Staging absolute epics at hours when most conscious people are delving into the fridge for more olive remains a long-standing problem for the Open to solve.
In addition to that spectacular tennis, this 2026 tournament has produced some novel moments of frustration. I’ve stood stationary within a would-be crowd crush at Louis Armstrong Stadium as the day session trades places with the night session, one pack of lemmings being herded inefficiently past the other. I’ve sat courtside and tried to focus on a match as a band of dunces in the row behind me brags about whether they’ve consumed five or six Honey Deuces (it was not yet 4:00 p.m.) and asked their phone to tell them Greek slurs to yell at Stefanos Tsitsipas, while an actual Greek guy tries to get them to relax while also correcting their pronunciation. I’ve walked up to people standing mutely in lines of more than 50 people, in pounding sun or pouring rain, and asked them what they’re waiting for, and gotten clipped replies like “Chase” or “AmEx,” not even the name of the specific freebie they’re queued up to receive, behavior worthy of the “NPC” label that gets thrown around too liberally these days. I’ve seen bizarre and out-of-pocket fan behavior, like people standing up mid-rally and turning their back to the court to record themselves, totally indifferent to the tennis being played, behavior which may or may not have been perpetrated by “influencers.” I’ve watched the crowd police itself: Norm-abiding fans shouted at and successfully ejected a neighboring fan who was yelling “You suck, Tristan” in the silence before Tristan Schoolkate served. I have dealt with all these frustrations and still feel that the actual centerpiece, the tennis itself, is as engrossing as it ever has been.
Zoom out, and it’s almost incidental that all this is happening at a tennis tournament. I suppose there are some factors that make the U.S. Open an especially apt canvas for annoying behavior: the sport’s newish cultural capital and its longtime function as status marker, the tournament’s abundance of high-end sponsors and its location in New York City. I remain baffled by the decision, apparently made by thousands of people, to travel out to the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center only to purchase food and drink at a ludicrous markup and take photos of themselves to post on social media, with tennis as an incidental scenery rather than the actual draw. But this is just how people behave in a variety of public spaces now.
Phone dictates how they make decisions about how to spend their money and move through the world. Phone compels them to travel to Flushing, Queens, site of a sporting event they do not really care about, and post the evidence on social media. Trillions of dollars have been expended by the most powerful companies in the world to make people act this way, so resolving this behavior may be outside the jurisdiction of a tennis tournament. Should you have to pass some kind of driver’s permit-style quiz on fan decorum to buy tickets? Should you have to identify Jasmine Paolini in a lineup to pass through the gates? (Maybe!) After speaking to the USTA earlier this week to understand how organizers perceive the various criticisms hurled at the tournament this year, I left feeling like most but not all of the issues are massive in scope.
A USTA spokesperson agreed that the resale market is out of hand, and told me that the tournament is trying to figure out how to remain with Ticketmaster but get tickets in the hands of fans who will actually use them, the rationale being that it’s easier to resolve issues on that platform rather than letting the tickets get sold in murkier markets. He acknowledged that the USTA does receive a fee from sales on Ticketmaster, but argued that if they truly wanted to maximize their profits, they would simply sell the tickets at a higher cost in the first place, since the demand is clearly out there.
The tournament is also exploring other avenues to dispense tickets directly to actual fans. Could something like the Wimbledon queue, which sells tickets at reasonable prices to fans who are willing to wait in line, work with the American mind? The other Slams don’t have these issues, though the USTA argued this has more to do with their local regulations around ticket resale than with those tournaments’ own policies.
As for crowd behavior, that’s another area of avid self-examination for the USTA. An influx of new interest in the Open inevitably means an influx of people unfamiliar with how fans are supposed to behave at a tennis match, like staying quiet during the actual rallies and saving their noise for the gaps in between them. The USTA is considering a range of interventions: updating the text in the “Know Before You Go” emails sent to ticketholders, having umpires issue more frequent mid-match reminders about conversation volume and flash photography, displaying more information on video screens on site, adding to the list of banned items (what if ring lights make the list?), and having ushers enforce the rules more stringently.
The tournament has enlisted consultants who analyze crowd movement and make prescriptions as specific as, say, moving the stanchions around the espresso stand to open up a new thoroughfare, which has inspired experimentation throughout the tournament. In the scheduling, the USTA tries to space out the day and night sessions so as to minimize the crosshatching of those two crowds flowing out and in, which didn’t save me from my personal traffic jam Sunday evening. They’re hoping to understand the acoustics in Ashe that cause that perpetual murmur. During Labor Day weekend, when they historically expect the highest traffic and most chaotic grounds, the tournament reduced the ticket count; that Sunday was the most pleasant day of all. But it was still the day I took the photo atop this post.
As for the oft-cited plague of “influencers,” the USTA said that 50 content creators were credentialed in 2025 in a pilot program, and twice that number were credentialed for the 2026 tournament, citing the need to find potential fans where they actually spend time, which of course is increasingly outside the confines of traditional media. The USTA acknowledged isolated incidents like the band of rogue influencers who disrupted play in Naomi Osaka’s second-round match, requiring an umpire intervention. For the record, Osaka and Coco Gauff, both savvy phone-users themselves, expressed some gratitude for the people who might be expanding their sport’s audience, but emphasized the need to follow basic etiquette. “Definitely not mouthing TikToks and stuff in the middle of a point,” Gauff said diplomatically.
I suspect the issue of fan behavior is broader than credentialed content creators. As reluctant as I am to defend the integrity of the “influencer,” I do think the term is being used as shorthand for a suite of antisocial behaviors common among people who are not actually influencers. If this behavior were confined only to “influencers” per se, it would be much easier to resolve. Besides, some of the “influencers” on site, or at least the people being categorized as such, were not extended an invite by the tournament itself. Some of the attendees acting up were invited into suites belonging to corporate sponsors, which is a separate pipeline for people who don’t know what the hell is going on and compose contractually mandatory social media posts.
Then there’s the gambling, where it’s hard to see any ambiguity at all. I overheard and spoke to lots of casual bettors on the grounds, stewing or delighting in the stands; though none of them disrupted the matches I watched, I know that has happened in the past, to the ire of the players involved. The spokesperson told me that they take seriously any bettors who interfere with the matches. As for the more hardcore practitioners, the USTA assured me that it cooperates with the International Tennis Integrity Agency to root out “courtsiders,” who attend matches to report real-time match outcomes, in an attempt to capitalize on the latency between the event occurring and the sportsbooks updating their odds.
But amid all the superficial discourse around caviar chicken nuggets and content creators, there is real existential rot here at the U.S. Open. There’s no nice way to spin the mid-tournament embrace of an unsavory new sponsor: the prediction market Kalshi, which struck a “multi-year agreement” to slather its branding on the Open’s digital platforms and on-court signage. At the newsletter Bounces, journalist Ben Rothenberg has documented the enormous betting volume on matches, and gotten comments from players who are used to dealing firsthand with the abuse from unhappy gamblers. He also observed that push notifications from the U.S. Open’s popular app direct users straight to pre-match analysis that carries a Kalshi banner at the top.
When asked about the rationale in this partnership, the USTA echoed its CEO’s statement on the matter: “Partnering with Kalshi gives us an opportunity to pioneer that next generation of fan engagement while ensuring the integrity of our sport.” A crucial part of the Kalshi deal, the USTA said, was being able to set limits on the types of predictions on offer: only bets on match results, as opposed to bets around umpire decisions, code violations, and player injuries. But when the tournament itself embraces gambling platforms, it feels as though we’ve entered a realm well past shame. The 2024 U.S. Open raked in $559.6 million in revenues, against $282.2 million in expenses. I’m sure the Kalshi sponsorship number for the tournament was ungodly—a keen tennis analyst told me he was offered thousands of dollars for a series of tweets with a Kalshi tag—but if any public event is doing well enough to be able to say no to some things, it’s this staggeringly, perhaps unsustainably popular three-week sporting event. The other effect of a tennis tournament partnering with Kalshi is that it will attract people who use Kalshi—might be worth investigating this connection further. Prosocial norms might be eroding, but the tournament itself doesn’t need to speed that process along.
I hope some order can be restored to the U.S. Open. For all my misgivings, there’s still nowhere better to watch a tennis star vomit, wardrobe-malfunction, bid farewell, or break out. It’s not gatekeeping to plainly observe how the experience has been degraded, and it’s not a good argument against that degradation to simply point out that lots of people still want to attend anyway. The USTA should find a way to expand the audience for the sport—and think about how meaningfully that new audience is engaging with the sport—without forsaking those who have been there all along.
