After 32 jittery, vibrating points, Flavio Cobolli ripped open his shirt in front of more than 10,000 screaming fans in Bologna, Italy. With a 17-15 third-set tiebreak win over Belgium’s Zizou Bergs, the Italian sent his country into its third consecutive Davis Cup final, and the home crowd into raptures.
Cobolli, the world No. 22, and Bergs, the world No. 43, were at the center of their sport’s universe in that moment, at its men’s equivalent of the soccer World Cup. A captivating match, full of drama to the last, suffused with national pride: everything international sports wants to be.
In tennis, this happens less than players and fans would like. Ahead of this year’s Davis Cup Finals, the top three men in the world made the same criticism in different ways. The format of the tournament, one of the oldest team competitions in sports, gets in the way of its own ambition — starting with its yearly presence on the tennis circuit.
“I think playing every year is not as good as it might be if you’re playing every two or three years,” world No. 1 Carlos Alcaraz said in a news conference at the ATP Tour Finals in Turin. “The commitment of the players, it’s going to be even more because it’s unique, it’s different. You’re not able to play every year.”
Alcaraz was selected for Spain, but had to withdraw with a hamstring injury from his ATP Tour Finals final defeat to Jannik Sinner, the world No. 2. Sinner, who led Italy to victory in 2023 and 2024, declined to play this year to give himself a longer off-season. He and Alexander Zverev, the world No. 3, who is representing Germany, echoed Alcaraz’s belief that scarcity would help the tournament, and then went further.
“I never played the real Davis Cup,” Sinner said in a news conference, while Zverev described the current finals format, which brings eight teams to one venue, as an “exhibition.” Until 2019, one of the two finalists would host the other in home vs. away ties. Italy’s tennis federation has capitalized on its ascendancy in the men’s game by hosting the finals from 2025 to 2027, but the volcanic support for Cobolli was not baked into the format as it used to be.
The “World Cup of Tennis” still produces moments befitting that status. But Alcaraz, Zverev and Sinner — and other top stars — believe that it is run too frequently to make those moments special enough, as happens at events held every four years, such as soccer’s World Cups and the Olympic Games. And while Alcaraz’s absence was unplanned, Zverev is the only top-10 player at this year’s edition.
“What I could see potentially in the future is having Davis Cup throughout two years, so you can also set up the semifinals in the beginning of the year and the final at the end of the year somewhere,” Sinner said.
The man at the head of it is open to discussion.
“I want the Davis Cup to be the biggest team competition across our sport and potentially across sport in general,” International Tennis Federation (ITF) chief executive Ross Hutchins said during a video interview this week.
“I want it to be one of the top priorities (for the players). So I am very open to listening to them. I’m very keen to try to do what’s necessary to make this a priority. If that means more adjustments, then I’m the guy that’s going to listen and be open to that conversation.”
Italy and Spain will fight for the trophy Sunday, with their two biggest stars absent.
Seven years ago, the ITF — which will be known as World Tennis from January 2026 — thought it had secured the Davis Cup’s future. It entered into a 25-year contract with Kosmos, a sports and media company run by former Barcelona and Spain defender Gerard Piqué. Kosmos said it would invest $3 billion over that period, and the investment saw the inauguration of the week-long finals. After dead rubbers and 4 a.m. finishes bedeviled the 2019 and 2021 editions, which featured 18 teams, it was cut down to an eight-team event for 2022.
By January 2023, the partnership with Kosmos was over. Piqué filed a lawsuit at the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) for “unjustified termination of the contract between both parties… and for damages to the company,” but it was dismissed in March 2025. But as early as 2019, Roger Federer, Novak Djokovic and others had expressed misgivings over the format change, with Great Britain and Australia’s tennis federations voting against it before it passed.
The belief that scarcity would suit the competition goes back even further.
Pete Sampras wrote in his 2008 autobiography, A Champion’s Mind, that: “The comparison between Davis Cup, which struggles to get adequate exposure and public respect, and golf’s hugely successful Ryder Cup is interesting: Ryder Cup is a one-week event played every two years. Davis Cup is an annual event, played in four rounds on a rolling basis in unpredictable places. I wish they would adopt a different Davis Cup model —play it in one place, over a specific period (two weeks would be ideal), and see what happens.”
The turbulence of recent years has extended into other parts of the competition. The qualifying matches were also held in neutral venues between 2022 and 2024, which led to diluted crowds and extended travel for players mid-season, with the U.S. playing Germany in China last September.
The ITF sees home-and-away qualifiers and fixed venues for the finals — which also permits more advance planning in terms of tickets and sponsorships — as a good balance. The new finals format has seen some high-quality matches and moments, with Rafael Nadal starring for Spain in 2019 and this week’s ties between Spain and Czechia and Germany and Argentina producing thrillers. But Nadal’s efforts in 2019, like Cobolli’s this week, benefited from home advantage.
Hutchins, 40, appointed as chief executive in August, said that there are “850 players that are part of this competition, including the guys here (in Bologna), and they’re like, ‘We love it here.’”
882 players from 158 nations have competed across the event this year, and Italy’s growing tennis fever has brought a fine atmosphere all week long at the Finals. Germany’s doubles pair, Kevin Krawietz and Tim Pütz, described it as “great”, even as Zverev asked whether it was a “bit sad” that his win over Francisco Cerúndolo and the doubles tie only had around 1,000 people in a 10,000-capacity arena.
“I value the players’ opinion enormously,” Hutchins said.
“It’s what I’ve been doing for the last 11 years. And I’m very close with a lot of those guys anyway. So I would never stop people from having an opinion. But we also want to understand the reasons why those people have those thoughts and the wider context.”
Hutchins retired as a player at 29 after being diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 2012, and spent 11 years at the ATP Tour as chief player officer and latterly chief sporting officer. He understands “the player perspective better than anyone at the ITF,” one tennis executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, said.
He is at the center of that perspective at a time when the sport’s schedule — and the Davis Cup’s part in it — is under particular scrutiny. The extended ATP Masters 1000 and WTA 1000 tournaments have added days to players’ calendars and proved unpopular with them and with fans, while the ATP and WTA point to prize-money increases and ticket sales as benefits.
Similarly, the annual Davis Cup format provides smaller federations with much-needed revenues, while any biennial version of the Davis Cup would have to work around odd years to avoid the Olympic Games, whose tennis competition the ITF also runs. And while Alcaraz, Sinner and Zverev’s view that “the real Davis Cup is the atmosphere,” as the German said, is a prominent one, backed up by both the home-and-away ties and the biggest moments of drama involving countries who happen to be hosting the finals, the security of a rotating, fixed venue is a consideration for the ITF.
“I’m very keen to try and do what’s necessary to make this a priority,” Hutchins said. “If that means more adjustments, then I’m the guy who’s going to listen and be open to that conversation.
“But we’re happy with the changes to home-and-away from September this year, we’re very happy with Bologna this year — so far it’s been electric — and with how things were in Malaga.” Hutchins is open to more discussion, too, about the home and away element of the finals, which could change from 2028 onwards.
Participating nations like Austria have brought strong contingents to Bologna, Italy. (Tullia Puglia / Getty Images)
Everyone in tennis has an opinion on the Davis Cup. The place in the calendar for the finals is another point of discussion, with some feeling that the November slot, at the end of a long, hard season, does it no favors. One suggestion is for it to move to April, right after the Sunshine Double of the BNP Paribas Open at Indian Wells, Calif. and the Miami Open, before the clay-court season has begun in earnest, but that would have the same interruptive quality as some of the qualifying events.
Ending the WTA and ATP seasons in September and devoting October to team events before a proper off-season would appear to solve many issues, but at this point remains a pipe dream.
The Billie Jean King Cup, the women’s counterpart, this year moved from November to September with mixed results. Part of the challenge was the fact that it took place in China, at the same time as the annual Laver Cup was taking place in San Francisco. America’s centrality to the tennis world meant that the California time zone was far more convenient to most than watching an event 15 hours ahead in Shenzhen.
One of the captains in Shenzhen was Anne Keothavong, who has led the British Billie Jean King Cup team for almost a decade. A former world No. 48, she also competed in the competition as a player. Keothavong said in a phone interview this week that making the Davis Cup and Billie Jean King Cup non-annual would be “in the interests of the competition and for the wider good of tennis. It would certainly make sense on the calendar in terms of availability of players.”
She is also an advocate for home-and-away ties and would like to see the Davis Cup and Billie Jean King Cup finals be a joint event. That was partially the case last year, but in typical tennis style, the Billie Jean King Cup finals were played in an adjacent, smaller venue to the Davis Cup. Its finals are scheduled to be in Shenzhen for the next two editions, but there is no clarity yet on the likelihood of a joint finals in 2028.
With Italy once again going for glory, Sunday’s finale will be full of the fervor and drama that makes the Davis Cup feel like the World Cup of tennis. But at the center of this reminder of the potency of international team competition in tennis, will be the question of whether or not less might prove to be more.