"But what about the other guys who are huge servers?" - Patrick Mouratoglou argues against Roger Federer's wish for faster courts

A lot of discourse recently has surrounded the big two players on the ATP circuit, Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz. The pair have dominated the sport for the last two years, with many believing their supremacy has been due to slow courts, with Patrick Mouratoglou having his say.

Sinner and Alcaraz have been almost unbeatable for some time now, shown in the Grand Slam results. The last eight majors have gone to either of them, with the last three finals being competed between the duo. The Italian has only lost twice in 2025 to opponents not called Alcaraz, while the Spaniard has collected eight titles from 10 finals, losing to Sinner in Wimbledon and Holger Rune in Barcelona.

The conversations surrounding the pace of the courts was brought up by Roger Federer who recently went on Andy Roddick's podcast Served. On here, he said: "What we would want to see is Alcaraz or Sinner figure it out on lightning-fast courts and then have the same match on super slow ones. But that’s how the ranking points used to be, remember?"

"What Roger says makes sense, but it’s not new. When Roger was playing, it was already the case," Mouratoglou said when replying to the clip of Federer on Instagram. "In 2002, Wimbledon decided to really slow down the surface too. It was a decision made by all the governing bodies of tennis. Wimbledon was probably the fastest surface historically, and now it’s become a surface that is sometimes even slower than Roland Garros.

"What we regret is that it killed the serve-and-volley players. But at the same time, it was important, because you had guys serving too many aces — the game was getting boring on some surfaces. There are always two sides to the coin."

While faster courts would even out the playing field in terms of competing against the world number one and two, Mouratoglou believes that it will have a similar impact on the big servers, creating that scenario with different players.

"To say it would be interesting to see Alcaraz and Sinner on a faster surface — yes, it would have been interesting to see Carlos and Jannick on faster courts. But it also would have been interesting to see Rafa [Nadal], Roger, and Novak [Djokovic] on faster surfaces, which we didn’t really get to see either. So, it’s not a new thing. If we had kept the very fast surfaces, the serves of both Alcaraz and Sinner would be much more efficient. But what about the other guys who are huge servers? It would be a completely different game — and I think it would be really boring.

How do you return Reilly Opelka? How do you return [Alexander] Zverev? How do you return [Ben] Shelton? At some point, you wouldn’t be able to return those guys anymore, and then the game would become very boring. So, I personally don’t regret that change. Maybe there could have been other options — maybe making the service box shorter, or slowing down the balls, I don’t know. But that’s a decision that’s been taken, and we have to deal with it now."

The Frenchman hinted at wanting Sinner and Alcaraz to play at UTS, the event he created. The rules in this are slightly different from the normal game, with it gearing to a faster style of play. One of the features is that players can only have one serve, with second serves abolished. This intrigues Mouratoglou as he ponders how they will fair.

"The most interesting thing now would be to see Alcaraz and Sinner under the UTS rules and see how they deal with that — because there’s only one serve," he said. "That would be really interesting."