Alexander Zverev lashes out at 2-week Masters events: "Resting is when you're sleeping in your own bed, maybe with your family, dogs, kids"

Alexander Zverev recently had his say on the Madrid Open and the Italian Open transitioning into a two-week schedule. The German believes that even though top players get a day off between matches, it hardly does much to circumvent the wear that they go through.

Zverev will be playing at this fortnight's Italian Open, where he won his maiden ATP Masters 1000 title in 2017. A lot has changed since then, though, with the majority of the nine Masters-level events going from being one week long to two weeks long.

The Madrid Open and the Italian Open, two significant tune-up events to the French Open, are amongst the tournaments that expanded their schedules recently. Consequently, the likes of Daniil Medvedev, Elena Rybakina and Caroline Garcia have given their respective opinions on how the change in the format is a bane and a boon.

Alexander Zverev also entered the conversation during his pre-tournament press conference in Rome. The German asserted that rest days while a two-week event was running weren't very useful in his experience as players still have to travel to the venue and maintain a high-level rhythm before their matches.

"Yes, you do get told you have a day in between, you don't have to play every day. At the end of the day that's not resting," Alexander Zverev said during his pre-tournament press conference in Rome.

"Resting is when you're spending time at home, when you're sleeping in your own bed, maybe with your family, maybe with your dogs, maybe with your kids if you have kids, right? That's what resting is. A day between matches, if you're at a different place, that's not resting."

That said, the World No. 5 did concede that the two-week ATP Masters 1000 tournaments gave a platform to lower-ranked players as the draw would be of a bigger size.

"Yeah, I mean, look, I think the two-week Masters 1000 events is great for players that are ranked between 50 and 100 in the world because they get a chance to play a main-draw event at a Masters 1000 event," he added. "I think it's not great for top-10 players. It's as simple as that."

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Alexander Zverev on flaws of two-week Masters events: "If you're going deep like Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz, you have to work a lot more"

Jannik Sinner

Alexander Zverev used Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz, both of whom withdrew from the Italian Open due to injuries, to prove his point about top players struggling with the scheduling at two-week Masters-level events.

"If you're going deep in events, if you're trying to, like Jannik and Carlos, I guess that's who we're talking about here, if you're trying to make semifinals or finals of every event, you're just away a lot longer, and you have to work a lot more. It's as simple as that," Alexander Zverev said.

The ATP and the WTA Tours have both turned their big events' duration to two weeks over the last two years. On the men's side, the tournaments at Indian Wells, Miami, Madrid, Rome, and Shanghai are two weeks long, with the ones at Cincinnati and Montreal/Toronto also set to change their schedule by 2025.

The women's side has experienced a similar change; out of ten WTA 1000 events, only those at Doha, Dubai and a to-be-announced tournament (which will replace the Guadalajara Open) are one week long.