Maria Sharapova is one of the most prominent voices when it comes to talking about tennis. She is currently focused on preparing for her pickleball tournament, along with John McEnroe. But she continues to strongly advocate her views on different topics about tennis, and women’s sports in general. Recently, in an interview with Bloomberg Television, she talked about the pay disparity between men and women in various tournaments except grand slams.

Other than that, she also talked about how Coco Gauff did not get the publicity she should have after her historic triumph at the US Open.

Maria Sharapova talks about the gender gap in tennis marketing citing Coco Gauff’s example

The official Twitter page of The Tennis Letter posted a statement from Maria Sharapova about how tennis does not have proper marketing done for their players. And to explain that, she gave Coco Gauff’s example.

The Russian tennis legend said, “You had Coco Gauff winning her 1st Major at the US Open in New York City. 3 weeks later… how many people know she’s playing a tournament in Beijing? She got to the semifinals & lost but I’m sure 99 percent of the audience at the US Open had no idea where she was playing next. Right away, that’s a problem off the bat.”

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After her statement was posted on Twitter, a lot of fans reacted to it. But not in her favor.

One of the first comments on the post was, “With all due respect, Tennis has no marketing problem; it’s literally one of few sports which has huge coverage. Hence, regarding the US Open crowd (mostly Americans ofc) they r ignorant & they don’t care. They “suddenly” do when the spots are on them. That’s all.”

According to this, the fan wants to indicate, that it is not the media that is the problem but the people who lose interest now and then in sports.

The next comment was, “I worked in tennis for years. The problem lies with the ATP & WTA which are antiquated, “jobs for boys” organizations rife with politics, greed & zero care for the players or the game itself. They never showed any vision.”

As a person who has worked in the industry, it shows that people may also be losing interest in the tournament in a while.

One of the sharpest comments on the post was directed towards Sharapova, it was clearly meant to show that the problem the 5-time Grand Slam champion is highlighting is not a problem at all. The comment was, “If the Tennis Community has no interest in where Coco is playing next, why is this a problem, it’s really not!”

There were also some comments that highlighted the reason for the low audience for Beijing tournaments to be the time zone.

The first one was, “Well for starters it’s on from midnight to 5 a.m. in the States.”

Another comment was, “Time difference not best for a US audience. I watched all of her matches from Beijing.”

And the last one was, “To be somewhat fair Americans aren’t going to be up at 4:30 am to watch a tennis match.”

It is true because the time zone difference does play an important role here. People in a different time zone may not be able to get up early in the morning to watch a match.

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The series of comments continued even more.

Sharapova’s allegation about lack of marketing doesn’t strike a chord among fans

Some other tennis fans also made comments about how, if people were interested, they could easily get hold of the information about these players.

The comment was, “Anyone can easily access their calendars online.”

One of the fans also reacted to the post commenting, “If the marketing strategy is to not advertise who is playing what tournament to somehow have us watch all of them it is not working. We just will not watch any of the tournaments. Really do you expect us to watch tennis all day, every day.”

After her win, Coco actually got a lot of attention. The viewership in Beijing was low probably due to the time zone or the tournament not being a grand slam, but people knew about Coco Gauff for sure.

And one of the last comments was directed towards Coco. The fan sharply referred to Coco as not having much market value. The comment said, “Sorry to say Coco has no market value like zero.”

We are sure that’s not true! Even though people do not agree with what Sharapova has to say, we surely think that the difference in viewership is a concern to be addressed. What do you think?

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