The ‘Big Four’ in men’s tennis currently has a high-profiled rivalry that drives the audience to their television screens, whilst women’s tennis could do with some extra spice to increase the competitiveness between the players.
Arguably, men’s tennis seems a lot more appealing because of the rivalry between the Top 4 names in the game: Djokovic, Nadal, Federer and Murray are the players that attract the crowd and make headlines whenever they face each other on court.
The great news for the fans is that players like Tsonga, Ferrer, Del Potro and Berdych are alway able to mix up the cards and make things more interesting.
Even though women’s tennis can be equally as entertaining, it does not have a rivalry that makes viewers sit on the edge of their seats biting their nails in excitement.
There doesn’t seem to be any sort of teeth-gritting competitiveness between world no.1 and 2 Azarenka and Sharapova – nor is there any between anybody else.
The Williams sisters used to have tense encounters when they met in Grand Slams: but perhaps it was more of a family rivalry. There was only hard to imagine spectators dividing into two groups when they played.
Female tennis players work hard to get to the top, as do men, and it is fantastic to watch Agnieszka Radwanska, Petra Kvitova, Li Na or Caroline Wozniacki smash forehands, backhands and serves at each other.
But my opinion is that the sport would benefit from a more competitive nature between the players: it’s something that isn’t quite around at the moment, although I believe that a few young and talented female tennis players could appear on the horizon in the very near future, bringing a lot to the table.
Then it would be very easy to see more people filling up the center courts whenever there is a highly entertaining women’s match on, therefore creating a nail-biting atmosphere similar to the one between the ‘Big Four’.
To see all our predictions for upcoming matches, based on our machine learning model analysing results since 1960, see our tennis predictions page here.