Racket sports tournaments should start thinking more like music festivals

It's music festival season in the UK...

Or, more accurately this year, it would normally be music festival season in the UK. Glastonbury is taking one of its periodic fallow years in 2026, but the broader summer festival calendar is in full swing, which means hundreds of thousands of people are once again spending their weekends standing in fields, moving between stages, eating expensive food, discovering artists they had never heard of and, depending on the British weather, either applying factor 50 or attempting to prevent their shoes disappearing into the mud.

Watching the festival industry from the perspective of somebody who spends most of their working life thinking about racket sports, there is a fairly obvious question worth asking: what could tennis, padel and pickleball tournaments learn from music festivals?

Quite a lot, I think.

The interesting comparison isn't really about putting DJs next to tennis courts or turning every changeover into a concert. It is about how the festival industry thinks about the product it is selling. The best festivals don't simply sell admission to see a particular performer; they create an environment in which the performances sit at the centre of a much broader day — or several days — of entertainment, food, retail, socialising, discovery and brand experiences. In doing so, they have become very good at encouraging people to arrive earlier, explore more of the site, spend more money while they are there and attach themselves emotionally to the event itself rather than exclusively to one person on the bill.

For racket sports, where tournament economics increasingly depend on hospitality, food and beverage, merchandise, sponsorship, premium experiences and the ability to attract spectators beyond the most committed fans, that feels like a model worth studying.

The festival is the product, not just the headline act

Glastonbury is probably the most extreme British example of this. In 2023, more than 140,000 ticket holders attended the festival across five days, with entertainment spread across more than 100 stages. The event's own economic-impact research found that it generated around £168 million of income for UK businesses, including £32 million for businesses in Somerset, while the festival itself spent approximately £62 million with 922 organisations to put the event on.

Those numbers are interesting, but what is more interesting for tournament operators is what Glastonbury actually considers itself to be. Its own economic-impact report describes it as more than an arts festival: it is also a food festival, a market and a craft and wellbeing centre. In 2023 there were 918 trading stalls, staffed by around 9,500 people, while the festival currently talks about having more than 400 food traders on site.

In other words, the Pyramid Stage might be the thing on the poster, but it isn't the whole product.

That distinction matters because sport has traditionally been inclined to think in the opposite direction. We build the event around the match and then add things around it because spectators need feeding, sponsors need somewhere to activate and people require something to do between sessions. Festivals start from a different premise: all of those things are part of the experience people have paid to attend.

There is no reason a racket sports tournament couldn't think in exactly the same way.

A tennis tournament already has a festival line-up

In fact, tennis has something that should make the festival model particularly natural: multiple things are already happening simultaneously.

Look at the schedule at a large tennis tournament and it isn't difficult to see the comparison. Centre Court is the Pyramid Stage. Court One is the Other Stage. The outside courts are the smaller tents where somebody wanders over because there is a gap in their schedule and discovers a player they had never previously watched.

Yet tournaments don't always encourage spectators to behave that way. The implicit message can still be that the show court is where the real event is taking place, while everything else is supplementary.

Festivals have spent decades encouraging precisely the opposite behaviour. They want people to wander, discover and stumble across things because the more there is to explore, the more valuable the overall event feels.

There is already evidence from within tennis that this broader definition of an event works.

US Open Fan Week is perhaps the clearest example. What was once essentially the qualifying tournament has gradually been turned into what the USTA itself describes as a "festival of fun", combining free tennis with player practices, exhibition events, food, music, family activities and entertainment. In 2024, 216,029 people attended Fan Week, up 37% on the previous year, before the main draw had even started. Arthur Ashe Kids' Day alone attracted a record 47,875 people.

Sports Business Journal reported that the USTA was investing an eight-figure sum annually in Fan Week, which is perhaps the strongest indication that this isn't simply some peripheral marketing exercise. The US Open has recognised that the wider event can itself be an audience-development product.

That same year, the US Open passed one million attendees across the full three-week event for the first time, reaching 1,048,669 and increasing attendance by 8% year-on-year.

It would obviously be simplistic to attribute that growth entirely to entertainment around the tennis, but it is difficult to ignore the direction of travel: one of the world's biggest tennis tournaments is increasingly behaving like an entertainment destination rather than simply a collection of matches.

The commercial opportunity is in the hours between the matches

For tournament operators, there is a very practical reason this matters: dwell time.

If somebody arrives 30 minutes before the match they want to see and leaves shortly after it finishes, the opportunities to generate additional revenue or deliver value to sponsors are limited. If that same spectator arrives at midday, watches some tennis, has lunch, tries a sponsor activation, watches another match, buys something from a retailer, meets friends for a drink and leaves at nine o'clock, they are an entirely different commercial proposition.

Festival operators understand this almost instinctively because there isn't really such a thing as "between the music". What happens between two artists is simply another part of the festival.

That mindset could be useful for racket sports. Rather than asking what spectators should do while they are waiting for the next match, perhaps the question should be what would make them actively want a two-hour gap in their schedule.

Food is an obvious starting point. Glastonbury's approach is instructive because food isn't treated simply as a logistical requirement to feed a temporary population. The festival explicitly says it wants its markets to be "memorable, creative and vibrant", and curates hundreds of food businesses offering everything from Vietnamese and Caribbean food to local and vegetarian options.

Compare that philosophy with the food offer at many sporting events, where catering still feels like a utility that happens to be necessary because spectators eventually become hungry.

For tournament organisers, there is an opportunity to think much more deliberately about food, drink and retail as programming. Why couldn't a tennis event invite notable local restaurants to operate pop-ups? Why couldn't a padel tournament have a food market that local people would genuinely want to visit? Why couldn't a pickleball event combine its finals weekend with independent retailers, music and local businesses?

The objective isn't simply to extract another £15 from somebody for lunch. It is to create another reason for them to stay.

Sponsorship can become part of the entertainment

There is a similar lesson for sponsorship.

Sports sponsorship has historically offered brands an enormous amount of visibility, but visibility alone is becoming a fairly unimaginative definition of value when a live audience can actually interact with the sponsor.

Music festivals have become particularly good laboratories for experiential marketing because brands have had to answer a simple question: what are we adding to someone's day?

That can mean a viewing platform, lounge, charging area, game, sampling experience, shop, photo opportunity or piece of entertainment. The best activations don't feel like interruptions to the festival; they become part of it.

Racket sports should arguably be even better positioned to do this because such a high proportion of spectators are also participants.

British tennis, for example, had around 5.6 million adult annual players in 2023, a 44% increase over the five years from 2019, while the ITF's global participation study put worldwide tennis participation at 106 million people. Britain had the highest percentage of its population playing tennis among the 199 countries included in that study.

That creates an unusually attractive environment for brands because the person sitting in the stand is quite likely to be a potential customer for a racket, shoe, coaching session, court booking, wearable, holiday or club membership.

So give them something to do.

Let them test rackets. Measure their serve speed. Give them a ten-minute coaching session. Build a mini court. Let them challenge a former player. Allow equipment companies to launch products and offer demos. Create areas where clubs, coaches, travel companies and technology businesses can meet players.

There are already examples of tennis sponsorship moving in this direction. The LTA's partnership with BRITA, for instance, installed refill stations at its major British events and was designed to eliminate approximately 100,000 single-use bottles in its first year — a piece of sponsorship that provides both brand exposure and a practical service to spectators and participants.

The broader point is that sponsorship inventory doesn't have to consist primarily of rectangles containing logos.

Build a tournament brand that can survive the draw

There is another lesson from festivals that is particularly relevant to tournament owners: successful festivals eventually become brands that are bigger than their line-ups.

People will buy tickets to certain festivals before knowing every artist who is playing because they have confidence in what the overall weekend will deliver. The line-up is enormously important, but the event itself has accumulated brand equity.

Racket sports tournaments have a more difficult version of the same challenge because their headline acts are inherently unreliable.

Players withdraw. Seeds lose early. Schedules change. Injuries happen. Rain happens. The player somebody bought a ticket to see on Saturday may have lost on Wednesday.

If the entire proposition is effectively "come and watch this famous tennis player", that creates a fairly uncomfortable dependency for the tournament operator.

A broader event proposition provides some protection against that. The tennis, padel or pickleball should unquestionably remain the reason the event exists, but the ambition should be that a customer who doesn't see exactly the players they expected still goes home feeling that they had a brilliant day.

The US Open example is again interesting here because Fan Week has created programming that isn't dependent on the tournament draw at all. Its 2024 programme included exhibition matches, a food event featuring celebrity chefs, a block party, children's activities and a concert, alongside qualifying and practice sessions.

The result is effectively another product sitting around the core tournament.

Padel may have the biggest opportunity of all

This idea becomes particularly interesting when you apply it to padel and pickleball because neither sport has inherited a century of conventions about what a professional tournament is supposed to look like.

Padel in Britain is currently moving at extraordinary speed. According to LTA figures reported this month, 860,000 people played padel at least once during 2025, more than double the 400,000 recorded in 2024, while 683 new courts opened during the year. Novuna Finance has estimated that spending on bookings, coaching and court construction could already make the emerging British padel economy worth more than £200 million annually.

As Novuna Finance chief marketing officer Theresa Lindsay put it, padel's growth demonstrates how quickly a niche sport can become "a major part of Britain's leisure economy", with spending spreading across clubs, coaching, equipment and facilities.

The word leisure is important.

Padel doesn't necessarily need to copy the traditional tennis tournament model. Its social nature, compact courts, relatively young audience and high level of participant crossover make it almost perfectly suited to a festival-style professional event.

You could have professional matches on a show court while amateur competitions take place elsewhere, alongside coaching sessions, racket testing, DJs, food, fitness, retail and industry exhibitions. A spectator could watch professionals, play a match themselves, demo a new racket, eat dinner and stay for the evening session without leaving the venue.

That begins to look less like a conventional tournament and more like a racket sports festival — and that may ultimately be a much more interesting product.

This doesn't mean sticking a DJ next to Centre Court

There is a danger whenever sport talks about "fan experience" that the conversation immediately becomes superficial: louder music, flashing lights, a DJ, a bigger screen and somebody firing T-shirts into the crowd.

That's not really the lesson from festivals.

The more useful lesson is that every part of the customer journey can be deliberately designed.

What happens when somebody enters the venue? What do they encounter first? Where do they go when there isn't a match they want to watch? Is there somewhere genuinely pleasant to meet somebody for a drink? Is the food memorable? Can they play? Can they learn something? Can they try products? Do sponsors provide useful or entertaining experiences? Are there parts of the site worth exploring even when you don't know what is there?

Most importantly, what would make somebody arrive two hours earlier than they need to and leave two hours later than they planned?

Those questions are commercially important because tournaments are not only competing with other tournaments.

A family considering spending £150 on tickets to a tennis event isn't necessarily comparing that expenditure with another tennis tournament. They may be comparing it with a concert, a theme park, a football match, a restaurant, a weekend away or, indeed, a music festival.

That means the relevant competitive set is the wider leisure and entertainment economy.

The music festival industry understood this a long time ago. It stopped thinking of itself simply as a mechanism for putting artists on stages and started creating temporary destinations in which there was always something else to see, eat, buy, try or discover.

Racket sports have all the ingredients to do something similar: elite athletes, multiple courts, highly engaged participant audiences, attractive summer venues, equipment brands desperate to interact with players and sports that are inherently social.

The opportunity isn't to make tournaments less about the sport. It is to make much more of everything that surrounds it.

For tournament directors, perhaps one of the more useful KPIs in future won't simply be how many tickets were sold or whether the show court was full. It will be how long people stayed, how much of the venue they explored, how many different experiences they interacted with and whether they would have enjoyed the day even if their favourite player had lost before they arrived.

Because the best festivals don't just give people a performance to watch. They give them somewhere they want to be.

Racket sports tournaments could do a lot worse than aim for the same thing.