Burgers, beer and Beyonce’s designer: Inside the Australian Open’s transformation
It’s the Australian Open 2026, and every day, the records keep tumbling. And not always on the court.
While on the court Novak Djokovic has equalled Roger Federer’s record of 21 Open appearances, off it Tennis Australia (TA), with chief executive Craig Tiley leading the charge, has transformed an event that used to be the poor cousin in the four grand slams – the pinnacle of the sport – into an innovative juggernaut that offers as much off the court as on it.
The Open continues to smash attendance records as near-on 100,000 people (and sometimes more) walk through Melbourne Park’s gates daily, while organisers try to manage record queues and delays. Saturday drew 51,048 spectators to the day session despite the scorching heat. And more than 2 million viewers are tuning in every day on host broadcaster Nine, owner of this masthead.
Last week, Tiley had to organise a new access gate near Richmond station as demand outstripped even his lofty expectations.
It is a far cry from when players thought so lowly of the Australian Open that they would not even bother coming. Tennis legend Andre Agassi is a four-time champion here, but was 24 years old before he chose to compete at Melbourne Park (previously Flinders Park), where the tournament was shifted to in 1988 from Kooyong.
Tiley, who became the Open’s tournament director in 2006, figured out long ago that the tennis alone would drag only so many people in, and so has leaned increasingly into the off-court offering. This year, TA has stepped up three key trends driving the future of the event.
The first is the “festivalisation” of tennis (let’s welcome back Roger Federer for an opening ceremony, and charge $199 a seat, and bring in Rafael Nadal for a night of champions on the same night as the men’s final).
The second is commercialisation (let’s build a three-storey make-up temple for beauty sponsor Mecca and take on spring racing in the fashion stakes).
Finally, we have globalisation (viewing areas are such a hit, let’s build one in Singapore where people can watch the tennis alongside a giant koala).
And it’s working: in 2023, when the Open rebranded qualifying week as “Opening Week”, 63,120 turned up. This year 217,999 showed, an 87 per cent increase on 2025, according to tennis website The First Serve.
But there are questions and complaints, and many of them centre on the queues winding around the venue.
There were fans who waited for four hours outside Kia Arena on Thursday night in a futile attempt to watch Nick Kyrgios and Thanasi Kokkinakis’ doubles match. Some say the modern Australian Open is too crowded, too commercial, and it is too difficult to get into courts to watch an actual match.
However, Serbian superstar Djokovic, the record-setting 10-time champion, is not among them.
“Having too much crowd on this or any other tennis tournament is a very good problem to have,” he said. “Every tournament wants record-breaking attendance and ticket sales … it’s a good sign. Obviously, we want more attention, and more people coming and wanting to watch the tennis live.”
Innovations in Opening Week
The opening ceremony and One Point Slam – which lets everyday “amateurs” face off with professionals on a do-or-die point – went some way to ameliorating a big criticism that Eddie McGuire, the broadcaster, live sport producer and chair of the SportNXT summit, had of tennis as a sporting spectacle.
“The big knock on tennis was that you never saw the players,” McGuire told The Age.
“Now, they have charity matches and the One Point Slam. Carlos Alcaraz has his smile, and even Sinner is trying. The players are now conditioned by social media to give of themselves a bit more. It’s great.
“In the past, they came and went. Now watching them play in the one-point tournament was brilliant. They got into it and stayed on.”
On Thursday, Alcaraz told a packed Rod Laver Arena during a post-match interview how much he enjoyed the new event after his lighthearted, mock protest when he was bundled out.
The festivalisation happens in other sports, too, McGuire says, including how the AFL is turning everything into an event, from Round Zero to Gather Round – and now a wildcard round for finals berths is entering the picture.
Record prize purse
There is record prizemoney this year of $111.5 million, although it hasn’t stopped players agitating for a great share of revenues, while the extraordinary attendances follow superstars such as Federer, Serena Williams and Nadal having retired in recent years.
But Tiley knew that focusing on tennis alone would always have an attendance cap, which is why he has gone so big off the court.
Many people who attend the Open don’t watch a single groundstroke, instead indulging in everything else the event has to offer.
That includes Sydney’s Quay chief Peter Gilmore cooking a barbeque for premium guests atop Rod Laver Arena; cook and author Alice Zaslavksy holding family cooking demonstrations; chomping on an $18 Shake Shack burger direct from the US; and concerts featuring headliners such as The Kid Laroi and Spacey Jane.
“I guess it’s a cultural festival. It’s anchored in tennis, but I think there are so many different segments,” says Tennis Australia’s director of partnerships and international business, Roddy Campbell, who once dubbed the Australian Open the “Super Bowl” of the Asia Pacific.
The tournament even includes Es Devlin, production designer for Beyoncé and Lady Gaga, bathing Rod Laver Arena in images of Australian sun and sea before players dramatically walk onto court.
Indeed, the sea theme perfectly suited Naomi Osaka’s internet-breaking, ethereal jellyfish dress the world No.17 wore as she strode out, umbrella in hand, for her first-round match against Croatian Antonia Ruzic.
It was a viral moment that Osaka had worked on for six months with her team of designer Robert Wun, collaborator Marty Harper, sponsor Nike, and Tiley, who ensured it got a primetime slot here and maximum exposure for the event’s potential cumulative global TV audience of 1.91 billion people.
Singapore expansion
While the long queues around Kia Arena, as Djokovic points out, are a nice problem to have, Campbell is more concerned with the crowds around Clarke Quay in Singapore. It is there on Thursday night that TA, along with Visit Victoria and regional broadcaster beIN, will set up the AO by the Quay live-viewing site with food and drink, shopping, a giant koala and replicas of the Open’s blue tennis courts.
One fan at the opening will be flown to the men’s and women’s finals at Melbourne Park. “It’s showing how within reach the ‘Happy Slam’ is for fans from the region,” Campbell says.
Also within reach for overseas fans: regionalisation of advertising. In Melbourne, the official AO beers are Asahi or Balter, Mick Fanning’s brand. But in China, it is Tsingtao.
“Viewers watching TV in China see the official brand on their television [in the form of] on-court advertising, which is Tsingtao beer, which runs amateur tournaments in China,” Campbell says.
“We have recently added Stella Artois as a regional partner in Brazil, a market with significant tennis interest inspired by new stars like Joao Fonseca.”
Brand consultant Ricardo Fort, an ex-Coca-Cola marketing executive who now runs his own consultancy, describes, as a marketer, that going to the AO felt like going to Disneyland. What he saw inside beauty retailer Mecca Cosmetica was particularly impressive.
“I was shocked at the number of teenagers in the store,” Fort says.
“And what I loved about it is that these are fans that are not necessarily your traditional tennis fans. They are here for the fun, for the party, and they are learning about tennis, and eventually, they may become a tennis fan. It doesn’t happen by accident – it happens by design.”
What’s all the money for
The Open claims to be the biggest economic generator in Australian sport, with $533.2 million in benefits delivered to the Australian economy, according to the TA annual report. The event’s strategy is simple – commercial partnerships help it grow the game, and it can reinvest the funds.
Meanwhile, cashed-up Saudi Arabia is hovering, with plans to introduce a new event the Open worried could disrupt the calendar at the start of the year.
There is a player-led push for a greater share of revenue from the competition, which recently drew this repost from Tiley in The Australian Financial Review: “I’d remind the players ... they also have the opportunity to go and generate their own income as an independent contractor and as their own brand.”
While the dispute rumbles, Rowen D’Souza, founder of Glam Slam and ex-president and chief executive of Pride Tennis Worldwide, says the critical over-commercialisation narrative is unfair and that the not-for-profit Tennis Australia helps him stage events such as the Glam Slam competition, in which nearly 300 LGBTQI players will compete over the finals weekend.
“At Melbourne, they are breaking records every day. It’s because more and more people see that they belong at the Australian Open, that there’s something for them,” D’Souza said.
Wimbledon and Roland-Garros are different, he says. “You only really see middle, upper-class people attending. It’s just not for everyone.”
But the Australian Open is far more egalitarian.
“You go here, and you actually have people coming in. They sit around the grounds and enjoy.”
Read more of our Australian Open coverage
Stephen Brook is a special correspondent for The Age and CBD columnist for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. He was previously deputy editor of The Sunday Age. He is a former media editor of The Australian and spent six years in London working for The Guardian.Connect via X or email.