English
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sistema_de_puntuaci%C3%B3n_Elo
We review the history of the Rankings, explain some differences between the ATP and TennisRaceforHistory (TRH Ranking) Rankings and compare both in the Big 3 trajectories.
There have always been rankings in the history of tennis, both to classify tennis players and to participate in tournaments.
From they were created by a group of specialized journalists using their own subjective criteria, through those that only considered the amount of the prizes, until today, the ranking system has evolved greatly over time.
It’s not easy to find the criteria used by those journalists at their time, but it is assumed that they would have had a certain degree of objectivity. Although it must also be said that politics was involved a lot, especially the economic policy of the circuit organizers. I'll leave this for next posts.
And it must be regarded that before the creation of the ATP circuit in 1990, there were other circuits with owners independent of the professional tennis players' association itself.
A kind of ELO system was also scored according to the category of the rivals, although not as sophisticated as we can find today.
It has recently been 50 years since the creation of the ATP Rankings. I recommend you read “The Rankings that changed tennis”.
The reality is that the ATP ranking has been a great success and with today's format it is quite consolidated, which is why its current scoring system is the one we have adopted for our WEBSITE.
As expected, if we see the final ATP Ranking of each year (the Race for the entire year) and the same of the Tennis Race for History (TRH), the differences are not very important. That's why we initially tried it when starting this Race through History adventure.
The new about TRH is that it doesn’t stop in the annual rankings but rather provides a cumulative summary of the entire career of all tennis players throughout their sporting career, homogenizing the tournaments and thus allowing tennis players from different eras to be compared.
We remind you of 5 differences between the two:
1. The ATP Ranking does not include all the tournaments of each year, but only the 18 or 19 scoring tournaments.
2. It awards points in weeks without playing due to injury (protected ranking).
3. During the pandemic (2020-2021) it established a points maintenance system that distorted the year-end classification.
4. The ATP did not score Wimbledon 2022 for political reasons.
5. It has not always maintained the same scoring system.
We understand that some of these criteria make sense for selecting participants in tournaments, for the short term, but they are not valid for our objective of seeing a general overview of the history of tennis.
Finally, here you have a comparison of the Big 3 in the period 2009-2022 (team matches included), where you can see the differences that we have mentioned. There hasn´t been important changes in ATP Ranking score.
Differences in Protected Ranking , due to injuries or COVID can be observed.
TRH with team tournament scores for better comparison.
See you next post.