The Lesser Indoors

As Paris-Bercy bids "adieu," the tennis tours are shuttering their indoor heritage.

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Sunday marked the end of an era in men’s tennis, as the Paris Masters held its final match at the Palais Omnisports de Paris-Bercy—recently known by the corporate moniker Accor Arena. Paris-Bercy had hosted top-level men’s tennis since 1986; when the ATP Tour created the Masters 1000 Series of events in 1990, Paris-Bercy had a spot in the elite nonet of events, and held onto it ever since.

The Paris Masters 1000 event is staying in the Paris metropolitan area but moving far from Bercy in the southeastern corner of Paris. Bercy is still a world-class arena—the likes of Simone Biles and LeBron James just won Olympic gold medals there a few months ago—but there was a chance to make more money elsewhere. The new home of the tournament will be the much larger and newer Paris La Défense Arena in Nanterre, a suburb northwest of Paris, which puts it a bit further out from the city center than Roland Garros is.

Paris-Bercy was one of my favorite venues on the tour. Springtime at Roland-Garros is pretty but feels cliched; I loved seeing tennis and spending time in Bercy in a more urban, less touristy milieu on the east side of the city. The atmosphere inside the arena was as close as tennis probably ever gets to an NBA game, complete with an avant-garde light show before each match. Tennis at Paris-Bercy felt genuinely cool in a way that I don’t think tennis often achieves.

Here’s a video I took of the pre-show and walk-on for a match there in 2014:

Closing Off the Indoors

But rather than reminiscing about this specific shuttering stadium, I thought I’d use the lights going out at Paris-Bercy as a way into discussing the current landscape of indoor tennis, which has been doing less relocating and more disappearing in recent years.

The move from one side of Paris to the other perhaps should be understood as protecting the habitat of an endangered species: Bercy had been the only one of the nine Masters 1000 events played indoors since 2009, when Madrid switched from being an indoor hard court event to an outdoor clay event.

A court at Paris-Bercy being dissembled in 2014. (Photo by Ben Rothenberg)

In 2014, I wrote an article for The New York Times about the tours trending away from indoor tournaments; those trajectories have only continued in the decade since.

In 1994, 25 ATP events and 16 WTA events were held indoors; this year, those numbers were 13 for the ATP and just five for the WTA.

The prevalence of indoor tournaments has steeply declined on both tours in past decades. (Chart by Bounces)

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