How has Italy become stronger at tennis?

With Lorenzo Sonego’s victory at the Winston-Salem tournament, Italy has seven players in the top 50 of the ATP rankings for the first time. Not only do we have seven top players, but we also have the number one, and five of the seven are under 24 years old. This newfound success begs the question: How has Italy elevated its game and become a stronger force in international tennis? The turnaround has been dramatic for a nation that has traditionally struggled to produce top-tier performers. Until Sinner won this year’s Australian Open, no Italian man had lifted a Grand Slam trophy since Adriano Panatta in Paris in 1976. In 2010, the country still had no men in the world’s top 50 and only three in the top 100. So what is Italy’s secret? As with rugby, there are different reasons for the Italian Renaissance in men’s tennis.

Angelo Binaghi, who has headed the Italian Tennis Federation (FITP) since 2001, pointed to reforms over the last 10-15 years to decentralise the coaching system and offer more financial, technical and psychological support to young talent. Historically, the Italian tennis system was a chaotic, centralized, one-size-fits-all operation, where the brightest young talents—many of them barely teenagers—were whisked away from their homes and thrust into the pressure cooker of two national training centres. The idea was that this intense, focused environment would mould them into champions, but reality had other plans, and the results were often less than stellar.

Fast forward to now, where that whole setup has been ditched, overhauled, and replaced by something that could only be described as revolutionary in the bureaucratic world of sports governance. Instead of pulling kids away from their roots, Italy’s tennis federation (FITP) decided to do something almost unthinkable: leave them where they are. Let them grow up with their coaches in their towns, surrounded by the familiar, but now with the support of a network of intermediate training centres scattered across the country. These centres are like outposts, extensions of the federation’s new approach, offering resources and guidance without ripping kids out of their comfort zones.

The ingenious part? The federation’s “super-coaches,” who roam the country like tennis missionaries, advise private coaches, keep them in the loop on the latest methods and training techniques, and ensure that everyone—from the most remote village to the biggest city—is on the same page. It’s a system that, as Angelo Binaghi, president of FITP is working even better and faster than anyone could have predicted. So much so that countries like France, long seen as the gold standard in tennis development, are now sending delegations to Italy to study what’s happening here, to understand how a nation once an afterthought in world tennis has suddenly become a powerhouse.

This new, more organic coaching system coincides with a boom in grassroots participation, a surge driven by success stories that make tennis feel possible and inevitable. Sinner’s triumph at the Australian Open, Italy’s Davis Cup victory in 2023, and Berrettini’s historic run to the Wimbledon final in 2021—all these moments have fueled a nationwide tennis fever. It’s the kind of fever that turns casual fans into die-hards and die-hards into players.

The numbers are staggering: registered club players have skyrocketed from around 129,000 in 2001 to 820,000 last year. That’s not just growth; it’s an explosion. Tennis has become the country’s second most popular participation sport, right behind soccer, which is as entrenched in Italian culture as pasta and vino. Italy now hosts more Challenger events than any other country. These are the proving grounds, the stepping stones where young players earn their stripes. And here’s where the federation has been particularly tricky: buying wildcards into these tournaments for the most promising talents, fast-tracking their development by giving them the kind of high-level match experience they’d otherwise have to wait years for.

It’s like someone flipped a switch five years ago, and suddenly Italy—historically a country better known for its flair on the football pitch than for producing a steady stream of tennis prodigies—is churning out top-tier talent at an unprecedented rate. Matteo Berrettini, the first Italian to reach a Wimbledon final, is practically an elder statesman at 28, and he’s still got plenty of treads left on the tyres. Lorenzo Sonego, part of that same Davis Cup-winning squad, is also knocking on the door of something bigger. It’s enough to make you wonder: Why now? Why Italy? And why has this surge been so skewed toward the men’s side, when for so long it was the women—Francesca Schiavone, Sara Errani, Roberta Vinci, Flavia Pennetta—who carried the nation’s tennis hopes?

These questions have been batted around in the usual venues—the sports pages, the think-pieces, the feature-length profiles. If there is one, the consensus points to a combination of factors. There’s the proliferation of challenger tournaments in Italy, which allow young players to earn their stripes without the financial strain of international travel, a model inspired by the success of the golden generation of Italian women’s tennis, the same one that culminated in that all-Italian final at the 2015 U.S. Open, where Pennetta triumphed over Vinci. It’s a sound theory, bolstered by evidence, but it doesn’t explain why the women’s side of the sport hasn’t kept pace, why Jasmine Paolini, ranked 31st, is currently the highest-ranked Italian woman.

Coaching is another variable in the equation. Sinner has Riccardo Piatti in his corner, a coach whose resume includes the likes of Djokovic and Raonic, while Musetti’s early teaching came from a coach with national experience. Good coaching helps, but it’s not the whole story. Coaches of Piatti’s calibre don’t just work with anyone—they’re discerning, and they choose players who already have that ineffable quality, the raw talent and the obsessive drive that separates the future stars from the perpetual almost-there.

So, what’s the missing piece? Why is tennis suddenly the thing in Italy, a country where football has been king for as long as anyone can remember? Maybe it’s precisely because football has stumbled. The fall of Italian football, both in the domestic Serie A league and on the international stage, is the elephant in the room here. Since their World Cup victory in 2006, it’s been a litany of disappointments—early exits, failure to qualify, and a humiliating loss to North Macedonia that kept them out of the 2022 World Cup altogether. This is in a country where football isn’t just a sport but a cultural institution, where childhood identities are forged on the pitch and in the stands, where a destructive result on Sunday can sour an entire week.

What happens when the national sport no longer delivers the emotional highs and tribal victories it once did? You get a generation that starts to look elsewhere for those thrills. With its solitary gladiators and dramatic, high-stakes battles, tennis steps into the void. And it’s not just the kids who are noticing; even CONI, the Italian National Olympic Committee, has shifted its focus. Since 2006, the highest honours have gone not to footballers but to tennis players, a tacit acknowledgement that the baton has been passed.

Maybe this is all just part of the natural ebb and flow of sporting success—the rise of one sport coinciding with the decline of another. Switzerland is still waiting for the next Federer; America, post-Serena, is searching for the next big thing in men’s tennis. But it’s hard to ignore the timing, the way Italian football’s fall from grace has dovetailed so neatly with this unprecedented rise in tennis talent. It feels almost inevitable that the future of Italian sports pride will rest on the shoulders of these young tennis stars, that the torch has been passed, and that football, for now, has ceded the spotlight. It may be premature to call this the dawn of a new era, but there’s no denying that the landscape has shifted.

The thing about tennis—or rather, the way tennis talent develops, the way it’s cultivated and nurtured and, to be honest, occasionally brutalized into a kind of world-class competence—is that no country can wave a magic wand and manufacture it. No committee of bureaucrats, whether well-intentioned, well-funded, or obsessed with national glory, can decree that a new generation of tennis savants will emerge from the tennis courts like some sort of Mediterranean Venus from a half-shell. Talent, in that sublime and deeply frustrating way talent has, isn’t something you can cook up in a lab or build out of some bureaucratic blueprint. But that doesn’t mean you’re powerless, far from it. You can’t create talent, ex nihilo, but you can undoubtedly foster it, nurse it along, and give it the right kinds of structures and systems and—maybe most importantly—the right kinds of surfaces on which to bloom.

And it turns out that the Italians, with all their opera, architecture, and espresso-fueled passion, have figured out how to do that. The Federazione Italiana Tennis e Padel—don’t sleep on Padel, it’s kind of like if you dropped tennis into a blender with squash and added a generous dash of Mediterranean sun—has, in the past few years, become a sort of talent incubator. In this tennis greenhouse, young, promising players can grow and thrive. As the U.S. Open kicks off, it’s impossible not to notice the rather startling fact that Italy, a country with a population about the size of Texas and roughly the same inclination towards extravagant hand gestures, currently has seven men in the ATP Top Fifty. That’s right, seven, if you’re counting, is a more significant number than the United States, a country with a population five times Italy’s size and a somewhat less robust tradition of pasta.

And here’s the kicker: these Italian players are strikingly young, even younger than their American counterparts. The crown jewel of this new wave of Italian talent is Jannik Sinner, who, at just twenty-three, has done what no Italian has ever done: ascend to the No. 1 spot in the world. And to twist the knife a bit, no American male player has managed that feat in over two decades.

Now, if you think that Italy’s tennis tradition is all about sun-drenched afternoons on clay courts, where junior players glide around in carefully choreographed rallies that might as well be ballet, you wouldn’t be wrong—at least, not historically. Italy’s red-clay courts, with their elegant slides and points that unspool in long, looping exchanges, were once the proving grounds for generations of Italian players. This was a style that worked beautifully for Italian women, who dominated the Federation Cup through the late 2000s and early 2010s and even produced a French Open champion in Francesca Schiavone, whose performance at Roland Garros in 2010 was the sort of thing that should have come with its own soundtrack and a bottle of Chianti.

But by the time Schiavone lifted that trophy, men’s tennis had become something else entirely. It had become a game of raw power, of punishing forehands and served that seemed to defy physics, of points won in blinding, brutal rallies on surfaces that might as well have been designed to favour athletes over artists. To their credit, the Italians saw the writing on the wall—or, more accurately, saw it on the hard courts of the U.S. and Australian Opens. And so, in 2009, the leadership of the Italian tennis federation—likely over countless espressos—came up with the “fast-court project.” The idea was simple enough: if Italy wanted to produce players who could compete at the highest levels of the men’s game, it would need more hard courts, a lot more hard courts, and fast.

At the time, Italy was a land of clay. Ninety per cent of the country’s courts were terra battuta, the red clay that had become synonymous with Italian tennis. But the fast-court project sparked a construction boom, a veritable orgy of hard-court building that has transformed the Italian tennis landscape. Today, there are over three thousand hard courts in Italy, nearly four times as many as fifteen years ago, scattered from the Alps to Sicily.

One of the epicentres of this hard-court revolution was the Italian federation’s high-performance centre in Tirrenia, near Pisa, where the best of the young talent is brought to sharpen their skills, a kind of crucible for the country’s tennis future. Filippo Volandri, once a clay-court specialist himself, has been running the show at Tirrenia since 2018, and under his guidance, the place has become a breeding ground for a new kind of Italian player, one who might look a little less Italian in style but who is entirely in tune with the demands of modern tennis. “We’re trying to change the identity of our players,” Volandri has said, and you can almost hear the echoes of a thousand Italian grandmothers sighing in the background. But the results are hard to argue with: these players are trained for speed, power, and the kind of tennis that wins Grand Slams on courts where clay would barely have a chance to settle.

Last year, Volandri captained Italy’s Davis Cup team, leading them to a historic victory on the hard courts of Málaga, Spain. This wasn’t just any win. This was a triumph over a Serbian team that featured Novak Djokovic, arguably the greatest hard-court player in history, whom Sinner beat not once but twice on the same day—first in singles, then in doubles. It was Italy’s first Davis Cup title in nearly fifty years, and it felt like a watershed moment, a sign that the new Italian tennis identity was here to stay.

And Sinner’s not done yet. He beat Djokovic again at this year’s Australian Open, becoming the first Italian man to win a major on something other than clay. He’s also racked up five titles this year, all on fast courts, because why stop at just one kind of success when you can dominate across the board?

Matteo Berrettini, sidelined by injury for that Davis Cup victory, was one of the first fruits of Italy’s fast-court project, a player with a serve so powerful and a forehand so lethal that they seem almost unfair. Berrettini’s run to the U.S. Open semifinals in 2019 and the Wimbledon final in 2021—where he lost to Djokovic because, of course—was a preview of what would come from this new generation. His coach, Vincenzo Santopadre, stuck with him from his teenage years in Rome to the big leagues, a testament to the Italian federation’s new decentralized training system, which supports young players where they are, with the coaches they trust while also providing cutting-edge guidance on everything from match stats to physiotherapy.

The young guns who have since overtaken Berrettini in the rankings—Lorenzo Musetti, Matteo Arnaldi, Flavio Cobolli, Luciano Darderi, and, of course, Sinner—have all been shaped by this new system, by this new way of thinking about Italian tennis. They’ve competed against one another since they were kids, pushing and pulling each other towards greatness, creating a cohort that’s not just talented but also deeply connected and intensely competitive.

Of course, there are things that no federation, no matter how savvy or well-funded, can account for. There’s luck, genetics, and those rare, once-in-a-generation talents who might have made it to the top no matter where they were born or what system they grew up in. Sinner might just be one of those talents; a player whose ability to rip groundstrokes with terrifying precision might have carried him to greatness even without all the help. But even the most natural talents need the right environment and support. And Italy, it seems, has managed to build exactly that. “We have good structures in Italy,” Sinner said earlier this year, on his way to winning yet another title. “So yeah, I think we can consider ourselves very lucky being Italian.”

Lucky, maybe. But also, very, very good.