We are thrilled to announce that research from UCL School of Management Associate Professor Onesun Steve Yoo and Assistant Professor Yi-Chun Akchen has recently been cited in the first-ever sustainability report published by ATP Tour, the global governing body of men’s professional tennis.
Over the years, ATP Tour have made significant efforts to optimise the schedule of the Challenger level tennis tournaments to enable tennis players to reduce their travel. An international tournament, the Challenger Tour features more than 200 events in 47 countries in 2024 alone, with ATP recently taking steps to improve its environmental sustainability.
In addition to optimising game schedules, ATP have also made concerted efforts to avoid standalone events, with the report citing a recent trip to Rwanda that saw back-to-back events for the first time, as well as the creation of travel routes that allow players to fly between geographic locations more efficiently.
To support the inaugural ATP Tour’s sustainability report, Onesun and Yi-Chun analysed the impact of the schedule optimisation specifically, and conducted a study that involved examining players’ tournament entry data to impute the travel distances. Comparing data from 2018 and 2023, they found that the average distance travelled by tennis players decreased by 4.7%, which ultimately decreased the tournament’s overall carbon footprint by 4.1%.
Additionally, Onesun and Yi-Chun also found that better scheduling also enabled tennis players to participate in 4.5 more tournaments per year, which ultimately led to better player’s ranking mobility. In other words, up-and-coming young players are able to enter more tournaments and accrue more points to rise up in the rankings more quickly.
