ATP Finals ends 12-year London residency with move to Turin in 2021

The Association of Tennis Professionals has announced Turin, Italy, as the new host city for the ATP Finals from 2021 to 2025.

The five-year agreement will see the world’s greatest players in men’s tennis compete for the tour’s biggest indoor title at Turin’s Pala Alpitour stadium, Italy’s largest indoor sporting arena.

The move to Turin brings the prestigious end-of-season tournament to Italy for the first time in its 50-year history and makes Turin the 15th city to host the event since its inception in 1970.

London’s O2 will have hosted the ATP Finals for 12 years, second only to New York’s Madison Square Garden, where the tournament resided for 13 years, 1977 to 1989. Germany enjoyed a two-city stretch of 10 years in Frankfurt and Hanover in the 1990s, and the tournament spent its last three years before London as the Masters Cup in Shanghai.

During its decade at London’s O2, the ATP Finals has been regarded as a great success, packing out day and night sessions to the arena’s 16,000+ capacity—that makes around 250,000 spectators each November drawn to watch the eight highest-ranked singles and doubles teams at one of London’s most iconic venues.

Turin, however, won the competitive bid against the likes of Manchester, Tokyo, and Singapore—home to the women’s equivalent, the WTA Finals, for a number of years—and has upped the stakes in prize money to a record purse of £11.2 million in 2021.

The Italian coup comes on the back of its success in winning for Milan the #NextGen Finals, a new tournament introduced in 2017 that features the top eight 21-and-under players on the men’s tour. Its residency runs at least until 2021, so the ATP’s two end-of-year showpiece events will run in back-to-back weeks in the two historic northern Italian cities in 2021.

And while London has been a great success, much loved by tennis fans and always complimented by the players, there has been debate in the last couple of years about whether the ATP should be taking its elite event to a wider audience, and whether a nation that already boasts a Grand Slam tournament should continue to benefit from hosting another of the jewels in the tennis crown.

However, there have also been wider issues to consider, such as the logistics for players and their entourages of moving through time-zones or seasons at the conclusion of an already gruelling year on the road. The ATP Finals concludes the indoor hard-court swing that is focused on the cool autumn of northern Europe and, in addition, is the only tournament to rank close to the four Majors in status that is played indoors. The choice of Milan, then, ticks a lot of boxes.

One of the key advocates of moving from London has been Novak Djokovic, World No1 and President of the ATP Player Council, and he said of the decision:

“The ATP Finals is the biggest and most prestigious event that we have at the ATP. It’s a tournament that has historically moved around and so I’m very excited to see it move to Turin from 2021. It’s still a few years away but I know that the players will be very excited to compete there, and I also hope to be part of what will be a very special event.”

Chris Kermode, ATP Chairman and President, added:

“Italy provides us with one of the strongest and most established tennis markets in Europe and has a proven track record for hosting world class tennis events with the Internazionali BNL d’Italia in Rome [a combined Masters and WTA Premier tournament in May], as well as the #NextGen Finals in Milan.”

In the 10 years since the ATP Finals moved to London, the title has been won by six different men from different countries: Djokovic, Roger Federer, Andy Murray, Nikolay Davydenko, Grigor Dimitrov and Alexander Zverev.

Murray is the tournament’s only British champion since it was launched in 1970, and his victory over Djokovic in London 2016 resolved the end-of-year No1 race to affirm Murray’s first time at the top of the ranks. However, he has not played at the event since, due to chronic hip injury and subsequent surgery.

More ATP Finals/Masters Cup/Masters Grand Prix facts and figures

· The tournament moved to a new venue every year until 1978, when its record residency in New York began.

· Murray’s victory over Djokovic for the title in 2016 was the only time that the last match of the season decided the year-end No1.

· On his way to the title, Murray twice extended the tournament record for longest best-of-three matches. In the round-robins, he beat Kei Nishikori in 3hrs20mins, and his semi-final win over Milos Raonic took 3hrs38mins.

· Federer has won a record six year-end titles, has qualified most often (16 times), reached most finals (10), and has won the most matches (57). He is also the oldest champion (he was 30 when he last won in 2011), and the oldest to qualify, age 37.

· John McEnroe first won both the singles and doubles titles in 1978. He would win the singles twice more and the doubles (with Peter Fleming) six times more, sharing the record for most doubles titles. He was also the youngest ever singles champion, age 19 and 11 months,

· The youngest player to qualify was Aaron Krickstein in 1984, age 17 years five months.

· Djokovic won the tournament a record four consecutive years from 2012 to 2015.

· The first singles was Stan Smith, Tokyo 1970: He beat Rod Laver.

· Ilie Nastase would reach the next five finals in a row, winning four of them.

· The first afternoon session of London’s O2 residency, in 2009, set a new record for a tennis crowd in the UK, 17,500 spectators. The singles match featured Murray against Juan Martin del Potro.