Every August, the US Open rolls into Queens with its ever-expanding rituals of consumption. Fans don’t just buy in, they perform it: the $23 Honey Deuce held aloft for Instagram, the $40 lobster roll posted before the first serve, the $100 caviar-topped chicken nuggets bought as much for the flex as the flavor. The tennis has never been the cheapest day out, but lately the sticker shock feel less like a barrier than the point. The price tags are festival markers, proof that what was once a tournament with posh accents has morphed into a cultural happening. In what seems like a remarkably short time, New York’s major has become less sporting event than aspirational brand.
The final grand slam tournament of the season, which concludes Sunday with a mouth-watering men’s final between Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz, has never completely shied from its tony roots as part of the New York “social season”, but its latest evolution has taken it past a major sporting event into a festival economy. The sport is still there – highlight-reel shots, lung-busting rallies, after-midnight thrillers – but the real main draw are cocktails priced like small bond issues, influencer blocs in branded bucket hats and a dating show filmed courtside. The spectacle isn’t Sinner’s thunderbolt serve or Aryna Sabalenka’s power-baseline game but whether Chloe Malle is Anna Wintour’s plus-one or Kareem Rahma of Subway Takes posts his courtside selfie before or after the Honey Deuce runs dry. That libation, once just a cute themed lemonade and vodka in a souvenir cup, has mutated into an inflation-defying fetish object with its own merch line. Entire kiosks now sell Honey Deuce shirts and trucker hats in pastel colorways, so you can broadcast your melon-ball allegiance long after the hard-won hangover fades. It’s less a drink than a franchise, an alcoholic Funko Pop, proof that you didn’t just attend the Open: you consumed it, posted it, stacked it, wore it and recycled it into personal branding.
The Honey Deuce, once just a cute themed cocktail in a souvenir cup, has mutated into a fetish object with its own merch line. A record-breaking 556,782 of them were sold at last year’s US Open, according to the USTA. Photograph: Ishika Samant/Getty Images
The Open, known as the US national championships until 1968, has been staged every year since 1881, but it’s defining feature over the past decade or so has been sprawl: temporal, spatial, financial and, increasingly, attention-economical. Starting this year, the tournament expanded its footprint by starting on a Sunday rather than Monday, stretching the long-familiar 14-day format into 15, or effectively 20 if you count the controversial, purist-rankling mixed doubles event the week before. It is no longer just two weeks in late August and September straddling Labor Day, but a near-month-long residency in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, calibrated to command not just your time and money but your feed. The prize fund for this year’s event climbed to an eye-watering $90m (£66.6m), the highest single-event purse in tennis history and a 20% jump from 2024. On the ground the United States Tennis Associaton has gone maximalist, rubber-stamping an $800m renovation of Arthur Ashe Stadium (separate from the recent three-year transformation that expanded the square-footage of the property). A $250m Player Performance Center is going up alongside it, kitted out to house 2,800 athletes and entourages, all part of the global arms race in sporting infrastructure. Meeting the luxe standard of Wimbledon is no longer enough; the pressure now is keeping up with Indian Wells and Madrid too.
And in today’s climate the most significant currency is attention. Once upon a time the US Open existed in the collective imagination for two weeks; now it seeps across August and September, propped up by the USTA’s celebrity program, influencer activations and, yes, its new in-house dating show. Game, Set, Matchmaker – eight couples on first dates filmed around the grounds – is an explicit attempt to hijack the Love Island economy and make tennis trend on YouTube. It may scandalize traditionalists, but it’s entirely of a piece with a tournament that now produces as much reality TV as it does actual reality.
Amanda Wight, the USTA’s director of international strategy, marketing and celebrity management, has become the impresario of this circuit. A soft-focus New York Times profile on Thursday detailed how she grew up in a tiny fishing village in South Australia, yet now knows exactly when Gigi Hadid’s SUV pulls up to the President’s Gate, slips a colored band on her wrist and escorts her past the phalanx of photogs on the blue carpet. In another life she might be curating a DJ lineup in the desert; now she’s booking Olivia Munn and John Mulaney into Ashe and ensuring Coco Gauff’s selfie with Simone Biles makes its way to Instagram. Celebrities don’t simply “drop by” anymore. They are recruited, logged and tracked like assets in a derivatives portfolio. The USTA enlists consultants to measure the engagement value of each famous face: how many posts, how many tags, how many millions of impressions. Those numbers determine whether you get another invite. The Open has built its own influencer exchange, trading futures contracts on Queen Latifah’s Instagram story. If you’ve been wondering why your feeds have become lousy with selfies snapped inside Ashe, often with an obligatory postscript like “thanks @americanexpress” or JPMorgan Chase or Emirates or some random make-up brand, it’s not an accident. From F1 paddocks to NBA front rows, modern sports all court star power. But in New York, the Open has turned it into something close to an art form. At times it feels less like a stop on the tennis tour than an aperitif to Fashion Week. The stands double as a runway, the sponsor suites as showrooms.
The US Open surpassed one million attendees for the first time in 2024. Photograph: Al Bello/Getty Images
Brands have always hovered around tennis, but now they’ve colonized every space across of the grounds. Rolex maintains its discreet, air-conditioned sanctuary where you can hear Novak Djokovic muttering to himself while politely slicing carrot cake topped with chocolate tennis balls. It feels like a Geneva watch fair disguised as a tennis match, a cool temple of precision where the $300,000 Daytona on a collector’s wrist matters as much as the scoreline. Just a few sections away, Graza Olive Oil commandeers a matrix of lower box seats packed with digital creators, influencers and fashion TikTokers. If Rolex is haute couture, Graza is streetwear – and both are equally stitched into the US Open’s cultural fabric. The levels of service for the VIP and VVIP sets inside Ashe have always caught my attention since my first year covering the Open in 2008 – there have always been different restaurants and hospitality experiences available exclusively to the various tiers of premium ticket holders – but the present-day setup has scaled it to entirely new late-capitalist levels.
From a labor-studies perspective the irony is stark: ball kids sweating through 10-hour shifts, concession workers hustling food priced like fine dining, facilities staff removing garbage and re-stocking bathrooms, security guards scanning QR codes to keep the economy moving – all so celebrities can glide through a velvet-roped experience and post their carefully staged candids. The festival economy, whether in Coachella’s desert or Flushing Meadows’ heat, runs on the underpaid many serving the overexposed few. Yet sociologically, it’s more complicated. The Open has long prided and marketed itself as the “people’s slam”: No 7 subway rides, raucous night sessions going past 2am, the roar from Ashe echoing down Roosevelt Avenue when a match tips into a fifth set. That energy is still real and palpable, but it is increasingly filtered through fan performance and the ceaseless din of conversation during matches, especially inside the main two stadiums. Attending is no longer just about watching; it is about being seen watching. For a growing subset of fans, that means turning the Open into content. Taylor Fritz’s girlfriend Morgan Riddle, dubbed by the Times as “the most famous woman in men’s tennis”, has argued that “fangirls” drive the memes and the merch. Tommy Paul’s fiancée, the Dairy Boy founder Paige Lorenze, folds the action into her lifestyle vlogs. They’re not just spectators but producers, treating Ashe as both stadium and studio.
What was once a grand slam with posh accents has morphed into a cultural happening. Photograph: Timothy A Clary/AFP/Getty Images
Media theory would call this the triumph of the attention economy. What the USTA and its sponsors have achieved is a transformation of a two-week tournament into an endlessly scrollable feed. The result is a hybrid of competition and content, where the cutaways to Kevin Hart mugging from a suite or the Kylie Jenner-Timothée Chalamet hard launch are as important as the next break point. Anything popular becomes corporatized, as Chris Black, the podcaster and vibe consultant, puts it. The Open is no different.
And yet the fans seem to love it. Attendance topped a million for the first time last year. Every person you follow on Instagram or TikTok seems to be there. For all the complaints about how grounds passes used to cost $60 (not that long ago), or how tickets are directly siphoned to the resale market and never hit the box office at face value (unconfirmed but probably true), and broader carping about how the regular fan is getting priced out, the uncomfortable truth is that admission could probably be even more expensive and the place would still sell out. We normies complain about the influencer zoo, then double-tap its highlights. It’s the same contradiction that keeps Coachella oversold and Art Basel hashtagged within an inch of its life. In that sense the Open is both groundbreaker and windsock: it’s setting the tone for how sport can be repackaged as culture while also reflecting the social economy we already live in.
So is it bad? From one angle, yes: the commodification of everything, from caviar-flecked poultry to celebrity cameos, can be seen as crass or even obscene. But from another, it is simply the way we live now. Tennis is not immune to the elemental logics of virality, and if the price of cultural relevance is a $23 cocktail, a marked-up hoodie, a dating show on YouTube and a 20-day schedule, that may be the collateral of a deal we’ve already entered long ago. The ball is still in play, but somewhere between Queens and Indio, the US Open has become a festival of its own: less about forehands and backhands than about selfies, sponsorships and sprawl.
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