Roland-Garros 2025: The FFT and Host Broadcaster Whisper Target a Younger Audience with Data and Graphics

Roland-Garros 2025: The FFT and host broadcaster Whisper target a younger audience with data and graphics By Heather McLean

Wednesday, May 28, 2025 - 14:15

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New host broadcaster for the French Grand Slam, Whisper, is helping advance the F d ration Fran aise de Tennis' (FFT) goals of increasing the number of younger viewers watching Roland-Garros.

One of the aims for the new team over the next five years is to bring a more youthful demographic to screens to watch the tournament, and this involves broadening coverage out further into digital media.

Content creators

Since the tournament began on 19 May through to its epic conclusion on 8 June, Whisper has been working closely with the FFT's squad of content creators from its digital team, who are roving around Roland-Garros to capture this new digital content.

Says Amandine Tyl, head of production and broadcast services at the FFT: We have a team of content creators that are capturing content around the grounds everywhere in order to be able to deliver this content to our rights holders, because now we consider that digital is part of what the broadcasters are needing; it's not only about linear channels, but also digital.

We want to make sure that broadcasters can get access to wide range of content in terms of Roland-Garros production, and not only what we all expect, like live coverage of matches, but on top of that, digital coverage.

Graphic focus

Another step towards that younger audience is a new focus on data and graphics. Says Tyl: In order to get a new audience of not only tennis experts around the table, and this is new for this year, we have now an agreement with TennisViz.

Read more Roland-Garros 2025: Bringing the passion and drama with new cameras for storytelling at the French Grand Slam

TennisViz's automated artificial intelligence (AI) software processes ball and player tracking data in real time to calculate shot type, shot quality, situation, phase of play and tactic for every shot. This data is presented as a collection of performance metrics known as TennisViz Insights.

Tyl continues: [TennisViz] are in charge of data. This is something new at FFT for this year because we are capturing players and ball tracking data around all courts. I think we were the only Slam not to cover this, because we don't have the official line calling, so this year for the first time we are capturing all this data on all courts, and based on this data we will use TennisViz in order to deliver some insights which should help to reach a younger audience, and a different audience from the one we currently have for tennis.

Deltatre is running the graphics for the FFT. Tyl says: We will have some specific insight graphics, which are used also on the ATP tool. These kind of graphics give more easy to understand data for generic viewers not tennis experts because tennis is very complicated to understand for a mainstream audience.

Roland-Garros' Court Simonne Mathieu

Top Trumps

This is all about serving the rights holders to this prestigious Grand Slam. Tyl says: At Roland-Garros we have many different kinds of broadcaster, from very mainstream broadcasters like France T l visions, to very specific sports or tennis broadcasters, continues Tyl. We wanted, through TennisViz, to give easier access to the data for the viewers. So for example, they are providing on a scale from zero to 10 the quality of shot of the players, so player serve, player backhand, player forehand, etc.

Read more Roland-Garros 2025: Whisper on getting into the psyche of the FFT as the new host broadcaster for the French Grand Slam

Sebastian Tiffert, account director at Whisper, likens the new comparison graphics cards' to the game, Top Trumps. Tyl continues: Basically you can get some kind of player's cards', where when you have a head to head between two players, instead of having the traditional head to head [graphic] we have all been used to seeing over the last decade with how many times they have been fighting against each other and that sort of thing, we get data comparisons between the strengths and weaknesses of the two players.

This is typically the kind of data we think will make it easier for a wider audience to understand tennis better, and get a little more storytelling [into the production], because I think storytelling around tennis is really key and this is what we are trying to achieve through these kind of new services, she says.

The French Open takes place in Paris from 19 May to 8 June 2025

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