Legendary tennis coach Patrick Mouratoglou is excited to bring back the UTS Grand Final event back to London - the city he loves.
This eight-man £1.39 million tennis event returns to Copper Box Arena, Stratford for the second year in succession after the inaugural 2023 event, which was won by London favourite Jack Draper, took place at ExCeL, Royal Victoria Dock.
The world number eight Sutton-based Draper co-headlines the Copper Box bill with current UTS Grand Final title holder Australia's Alex de Minaur who lives in Kingston.
It also includes all three winners from this year's UTS Tour events - Norway's Casper Ruud, Tomas Machac from Czechia and Argentina's Francisco Cerundolo who claimed the Hong Kong round two weeks ago. World number 15 from Russia Andrey Rublev, Belgium's David Goffin and Frenchman Adrain Mannarino completes the eight-man line up.
At last year’s final West London-based de Minaur thrashed Denmark’s Holger Rune in three-sets.
Mouratoglou, 55, from Neuilly-sur-Seine, near Paris, who co-invented this fast pace version of tennis that has some equivalents to cricket's 100-ball,with businessman Alex Popyrin - whose son is Australia’s world number 36 Alexei Popyrin, admits he admires everything about Copper Box Arena.
"The stadium is great. It’s a fantastic stadium, and the atmosphere every year in London - the crowd is amazing. They’re so lively and that’s so important to us.
"I’m always excited to go to London. I even go to London when there is no UTS event to spend some weekends there. I love the city, I’ve always loved the city.
"UTS is a live event in which we’ve always done everything we can to create a bond between the athletes and the crowd. That’s why we allow them to be as loud as they want and I think the British crowd responds extremely well to that so that puts my excitement to another level."
- UTS Grand Final takes place between December 5-7. For tickets go to: uts.live
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