Bravo: Behind the rise of Sinner and an Italian tennis empire | ATP tour

Italians are not just rising in the PIF ATP rankings, they are absolutely stacking them. With Sinner currently crowned the best player in the world and Musetti emerging at number 17, Italy's supply chain of players is well balanced and thriving. Like the national high-speed train, La Frecciarosa, Italy has steamrolled perennial powerhouse Spain with the most players in the Top 100 of the PIF ATP Rankings by a non-grand slam country.

“As I always said, we are lucky because we have junior tournaments, we have Future events and in addition we have many Challenger events in Italy,” says Jannik Sinner, who this year became the first Italian man to reach the No. the world rankings. 1. “Which could potentially be an opportunity for the young players, having some wildcards, trying to understand what the level is up to a certain point and talking about the rankings. Then we also have big events. In Turin we have the [Nitto] ATP final.”

If all roads lead to Rome, then they are certainly paved with ATP Challengers. This year, Italy will host 19 ATP Challengers. The return on investment for the Federation of Italian Tennis and Padel (FITP) is a reliable production pipeline of players ranked in the Top 500. In addition to keeping both players and coaches on their toes, Italy's focus on hosting more challengers has better prepared its activities. players to succeed on the ATP Tour. Currently, eight Italians are in the Top 75 of the PIF ATP rankings.

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_{^{The Sardegna Open is one of 19 Challenger Tour events hosted by Italy. (Photo Credit: Mike Lawrence/ATP tour)}}

Every nation needs a leader, someone who will show the way for the younger generation to follow. Argentina had Guillermo Vilas, Czechoslovakia had Jan Kodes and Sweden had Bjorn Borg. For Italy, that man was Adriano Panatta. In 1976, Panatta won both the Italian Open and the French Open.

Claudio Pistolesi was only nine years old when Panatta won the French Open. 'To look at him [Panatta] playing was both pleasure and pain,” Pistolesi recalls. “Some players play textbook tennis. That wasn't the case with Panatta, he performed magic.'

That's true. Watch the videos and count all the Houdini-esque escapes. Panatta played high-stakes tennis, saving match points with a Bond-like attitude and escapes. Panatta often used the most dramatic tactics possible, giving Italy its first taste of cardio tennis.

“Yannick Noah may have inspired France,” Pistolesi claims, “but Adriano Panatta united Italy. And with that he has taken tennis from a top sport to a popular sport.”

With the barrier broken, a steady stream of Italians began to break the walls of the Top 100: Pistolesi, Andrea Gaudenzi, Renzo Furlan, Gianluca Pozzi, Davide Sanguinetti, Cristiano Caratti, Filippo Volandri, Potito Starace, Simone Bolelli, Andreas Seppi and Paolo Lorenzi.

And then Fabio came.

In Italy, Fabio Fognini is affectionately known as 'The Pope'. This means that Fognini can do whatever he wants and people will always love him. Whether he plays with divine inspiration like his third round match at the US Open in 2015 comes from the five-set victory over Rafael Nadal. Or swatting balls with apparent indifference while saving five match points and making twelve foot fouls against Albert Montanes at the 2010 French Open. Fabio Fognini is the proverbial box of chocolates that Italians can't get enough of.

_{^{Fognini has won nine titles on the ATP Tour and reached number 9 in the PIF ATP rankings. (Photo Credit: Mike Lawrence/ATP tour)}}

“As juniors, both Matteo (Berrettini) and Lorenzo (Sonego) had the advantage of no expectations and unnecessary pressure,” Pistolesi said. “Same as Sinner. Moreover, they were lucky that they got just the right coach on the magical era where children can believe in dreams. And perhaps even more importantly: these two special coaches believed in it.”

“I've been asked what made Matteo (Berrettini) special,” said former coach Vincenzo Santopadre. “And my answer is this. Almost every day he showed me how good a listener he is. Not only hear, but also listen deeply within himself and store these lessons in his memory. He was able to absorb everything he was taught and what was important to get better at tennis. And another reason is that unless you were with him every day, through good times and bad, you couldn't see this incredible desire to be great.

The dream became reality in the summer of 2021 at the Wimbledon Championships. At that moment, Matteo Berrettini marched to Center Court for the championship match against Novak Djokovic, where he became the first Italian men's singles finalist in tournament history and the first Italian Grand Slam men's singles finalist since Panatta at Roland Garros in 1976.

It has long been an open secret that the best way to develop a country's tennis is through the three C's: coaches, competition and courts. Why aren't more countries doing better? It can be a little tricky. For starters, national associations often turn to business and adopt a top-down management style that can cause more harm than development.

In 2011, Donato Campagnoli, currently advisor to the Tactical-Technical Department of the FITP, was the only Italian coach at the ITF Worldwide Coaches Conference in Port Ghalib, Egypt. That would change soon. Thanks to an OKR action plan from the FITP, Italian coaches today have the highest number of participants in coaching training. Then there is Alberto Castellani, who has been a father figure to so many Italian coaches and players over the decades. Castellani is the president of the GPTCA and regularly conducts more than 40 coaching workshops per year from Rome to Rio.

According to Campagnoli, the FITP created the Sistema Italia. “A project to create a territorial ecosystem based on the cultural upliftment of all stakeholders involved in racket sports,” says Campagnoli.

In simpler words, the FITP needed to repair relationships. Step one, they (FITP) decided, was to stop separating the players from their coaches and pick the best players from the local clubs.

8 Italians in the Top 75 in the PIF ATP rankings

“We collectively decided at FITP that the best place for players to develop was at home with their families,” Campagnoli said. “That they should continue with the coaches who trained them and stay with the clubs who supported them from the first ball.”

With everyone working together, the FITP started spending money in the right places. The FITP began an ambitious campaign to financially support all clubs wishing to organize professional tournaments. Now that there were courts and competitions, the FITP decided to befriend the coaches.

“Today it is a new culture and approach of the Federation,” says Vincenzo Santopadre. “The FITP helps all coaches with many forms of support, from coaching education materials and workshops, access to analytics, physiotherapists and fitness coaches.”

The FITP accepted that if they wanted to lead a tennis revival, they had to stop bossing around and start listening to their best talent. With that done, the FITP was not content to sit back now that they had made friends and influenced others. FITP's masterstroke came with SuperTennis, a TV tennis channel. SuperTennis not only attracted many sponsors, but just as importantly, it broadcast tennis to an audience hungry for all things tennis.

“SuperTennis has been huge for us,” said Francesco De Laurentiis, tennis director at Sporting Club Sassuolo. “SuperTennis not only shows the major tournaments, but also the Challengers, WTA, ITF Tours and even some juniors! This is how people get to know players [ranked] from 500 to the Top 10. That's why they become known and popular, so that parents and junior players get closer to the tennis competition system and their interest in being part of it grows.”

Massimo Giomba believes there is another reason for success.

“Another factor is some kind of emulation game,” Giomba begins. “Sinner, Musetti, Luciano Darderi, Matteo Arnaldi and Flavio Cobolli were born between 2001 and 2003. They have been playing against each other since Juniors. When one of them started winning in his professional matches, the other guys thought: “He won, why not me?”. So now all these guys are in the top 100. Others like Francesco Passaro, Mattia Bellucci, Matteo Gigante and Giulio Zeppieri are not that far behind.”

Alfred Hitchcock said that good drama should “always make the audience suffer as much as possible.” Hitchcock might have been talking about tennis in Italy. Watch a tennis match in Italy and you will be treated to the very best and worst expressions in the Italian language. A mixture of blessings, curses and hand gestures that need no translation. For Italians, a good tennis match is not just a game, but a theater piece that requires more than just a ball going over a net. Italians want to be entertained, and the more drama, the better.

Nowadays, Italian tennis fans get to see more than just dramatic tennis matches. Thanks to better cooperation between the FITP and local clubs, players and coaches are free to achieve results that everyone can celebrate.