Why don't women play 5 sets? Does anyone know?
In most tennis tournaments, ATP, WTA, men and women play the best of three sets, but in the Grand Slams of Wimbledon, the Australian Open, the French Open, and the US Open, only the men are challenged to play best of five.
Tradition - The first and most relevant reason is tradition. For the most part, the women have always played best of three sets. This is probably rooted in the outdated and sexist notion that the additional exertion is too much for women to handle.
The sport’s governing bodies and the television networks want shorter matches - The leadership of the ATP and WTA tours are very concerned with the marketability of the sport (and rightly so). Being able to provide an attractive package to television sponsors and fans is critical to their goals, and obviously those of the networks, too. Best of five set matches greatly increase the length and variability of match times, making the product far more difficult to televise and far harder to sell the rights to.
Fans actually don’t want to watch the women play five sets - Although many vocal fans claim to want to see the women play five set matches, the data suggests otherwise. The WTA tour actually experimented with a best of 5 format in the 80's and 90's. From 1984 to 1998, the tour's year end championships were best of 5 sets, although only three of those matches went the distance. The format was discontinued in 1998 due to poor ratings and difficulty in scheduling and generating interest from television. It had also been argued that in most of the matches, the quality of play dropped considerably later in the matches.
The players don’t really want to play five setters - The tour is a brutal grind. Players are being taxed physically more and more each year, as the level of play and physicality rises. And there is precious little off season in which to recover. The last thing most players want is to have to play even more tennis, and increase their chance of injury while reducing their recovery time. The men tolerate it because of tradition, and because it would be a bad look to suggest shortening their matches. But many of the men don’t want to play best of five tennis. And very few of the women really want to start now.
Its been tried but the matches just got boring, as the women were just too tired to compete at a high level over 5 sets.
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