Even the last bastion of tradition sometimes has to capitulate when the pressure for change comes with a promise for substantial benefits (and a lot of money).
The All England Club has officially announced that the 2025 edition of The Championships will not feature line judges as they will all be replaced by Live Electronic Line Calling (ELC). The technology has been tested at many events around the world, including at the Slams in Australia and in the U.S. and will become mandatory at ATP Tour events as of January 2025.
From a player’s perspective, the difference between a match with line judges and the ability to challenge calls via Hawk Eye and a match with ELC is substantial: mentally it is a lot easier to have the machine make all the calls, even if there is a margin for error, because the machine’s decision would still be the unchallengeable “supreme court”, therefore it is much easier to hear the verdict immediately without having to pay attention to when a call might be wrong and deserve to be challenged.
After 147 years of services, Wimbledon will not have line judges any longer, although a smaller group of them will still remain on stand-by in case of malfunctions preventing ELC from working properly.
This decision comes with a piece of mind for players and quite possibly a monetary saving for the tournament (no per diem will have to be provided to the lines people), but it could come at the price of a sponsorship. Ralph Lauren is the partner providing the uniforms for all officials, and most certainly they very much enjoyed the significant proportion of prime TV real estate the lines people occupied standing right behind the players while looking at lines. This decision would probably diminish the value of the sponsorship contract for them, and this is one of the reasons why the ATP allowed all their tournaments over a year to move to ELC: they had to make sure contracts in place could be honored.
On the other hand, what we are quite sure comes following a hefty handout from some of the broadcasters (especially those from the opposite side of the Pond) is the unprecedented decision to move the starting times of the singles men’s and women’s finals from 2 pm to 4 pm.
On final Saturday of the tournament, Centre Court will see the men’s doubles final at 1pm, followed by the ladies’ final not before 4pm. Similarly on Sunday, the ladies’ doubles final will start at 1pm and the men’s final will we played not before 4pm.
It’s not difficult to see how a move like that could have been proposed by ESPN, the exclusive broadcaster of Wimbledon for the USA, to transform the traditional program “Breakfast at Wimbledon” into something more of a “Brunch at Wimbledon”. The traditional start at 2 pm London time meant that the live broadcast for the Wimbledon finals would start at 9 am on the East Coast of the United States and at 6am on the West Coast. The two-hour postponement will have the two finals at 11 am in New York, Boston or Miami and at more sociable 8 am for viewers in Los Angeles or San Francisco.
Most likely the shift will see the Walt Disney Company, majority owner of ESPN, broadcast the Finals weekend free-to-air in the United States on their flagship network channel ABC, the same channel that broadcast the last US Open final between Sinner and Fritz with disappointing results.
