Frances Tiafoe Slams Garbage Schedule for 2025 Canadian Open

Frances Tiafoe isn’t happy about the changes coming to this year’s Canadian Open. He’s joining a growing list of players who think the tournament’s new format is pretty bad news.

The Canadian Open and Cincinnati Open are both getting stretched to 12 days long for the first time this year. That’s a huge jump from the usual seven days.

It used to give players an extra week to either rest up or get ready for Canada. Not anymore.

The ATP organizers might be second-guessing this whole expansion thing right about now. They’re dealing with a massive wave of withdrawals that’s pretty embarrassing.

Carlos Alcaraz, Jannik Sinner, and Novak Djokovic all pulled out. Those are some of the biggest names in tennis.

In total, 15 players withdrew from the men’s singles in Toronto. Matteo Berrettini and Grigor Dimitrov were also among the notable names who decided to skip it.

Taylor Fritz has been really vocal about how crazy long the tennis calendar is getting. At the Citi Open press conference, he called the whole situation "insane" and said there’s way too much tennis without any thought of shortening things.

Tiafoe was speaking at the same tournament and had some pretty strong words about the schedule changes.

“It is what it is. I like that it’s a bit shorter than Madrid, Rome. Weird because the final is on a Thursday. That’s garbage. But yeah, I mean, I guess I’m ready to get going and see how that goes. The 10-day events are tough, but I think it will be easier since I’m so close to the States. Something goes wrong, I’m a quick flight home.”

He’s particularly annoyed that the final is on Thursday instead of the usual Sunday. That’s definitely weird timing for such a big event.

But Tiafoe admits there’s one upside for him – being close to home makes it easier to deal with.

“It’s not like when I’m stuck in Europe and playing on red clay and people speaking different languages and s—. It’s better to kind of be in the States, so for sure, I’m really happy. Hopefully, put up some good results going into the Open. That’s kind of what matters.”

A Golden Opportunity

All these big-name withdrawals could actually create a really interesting situation in Toronto.

With so many top players missing, this could be the perfect chance for someone to win their first Masters 1000 title. Tiafoe is one of those players who’s still hunting for that breakthrough moment.

Alexei Popyrin pulled off exactly that kind of surprise last year. The Australian had an incredible run that nobody saw coming, beating Andrey Rublev in the final.

It was one of the most unexpected results of the entire 2024 season.

Alexander Zverev is now set to be the No. 1 seed in Toronto thanks to Sinner and Alcaraz dropping out. There’s been some interesting speculation about his coaching situation after he was spotted training at the Rafa Nadal Academy recently.

People are wondering if he might actually start working with Rafael Nadal and Toni Nadal.

Stefanos Tsitsipas will be another player to watch closely. He just split with Goran Ivanisevic a few days ago and made the surprising decision to bring his father back as coach.

That’s pretty interesting considering they had a very public falling out almost a year ago, where Tsitsipas actually criticized his dad in front of everyone.

The tournament starts soon, and it’ll be fascinating to see how this all plays out with such a different field than usual.