The Problem With Patrick
Why the most (in)famous coach in tennis is probably misunderstood.
Patrick Mouratoglou is arguably the most famous tennis coach in the world and as I’ll explain, that in its own right is damning praise.
Mr. Mouratoglou is from the Nick Bolletieri school of… tennis schools. He has a namesake academy, an impressive roster of past and present pupils, and whenever possible, he’s on TV—sometimes to offer spot-on commentary, sometimes to appear in a player’s box with whom you had no idea he had an affiliation.
Of course, Mouratoglou’s most fruitful and long-lasting partnership was with Serena Williams. She won 10 of her 23 slams during his tenure. By Serena’s math, if not for a current Mouratoglou client, they should have snagged an 11th, but we’ll get to that in a sec.
I Googled the number of slams Serena won with Mouratoglou just to double-check, and what I found was positively Mouratoglouian:
He doesn’t just take credit, see. He amplifies it with the right content marketing tactic (in this case the Featured Snippet on the SERP).
Next client:
Holger Rune is a top 5 talent and probable future slam winner. He worked with Mouratoglou for nine months before ending the partnership following a string of subpar results. His summer of discontent culminated in a dismal US Open, which saw him complain his way into a first-round exit before the match had even started.
Mouratoglou said all the things you’re supposed to say when a top player fires you and you don’t need to publicly burn bridges—just with a little extra positioning, a little extra spin if you like, for prospective clients.
Nothing wrong with Mouratoglou celebrating their shared success. You might even call it gracious he listed very concrete examples of their results. It just never plays that way with him because he’s always selling. Or at least that’s the perception.
No sooner had Rune fired him, Mr. Mouratoglou was on CNN, seemingly taking outsized credit for Coco Gauff’s phenomenal US Open title run.
I say seemingly because at no point in the segment does Mouratoglou claim any influence on Coco’s 2023 summer breakthrough. For the most part, he’s regaling the anchor with tales of a 10 year-old Coco who had come to his academy for evaluation and impressed with all the characteristics on display during her US Open run—her grit, smarts, tenacity, athleticism and desire. He didn’t write the “X” post or design the chryon suggesting Coco was his star. But he didn’t exactly disabuse the anchor of this notion, either, and in that sense, it was another Mouratoglouian flourish.
It wasn’t always like this. When he was winning slams with Serena, few could complain about his brash brand of self-promotion without sounding like sore losers. Even if you subscribe to the notion Serena didn’t need him to win 10 more slams (we’ll never know), the fact she kept him on for a decade was the ultimate testimonial (though her precise reasons for doing so proved messy to untangle).
Unfortunately for Mouratoglou, the enduring image many have of him involves his hands moving in a tight circular motion at the 2018 US Open final, an innocent case of “coaching” (now legal, of course) that triggered Serena’s epic meltdown.
So began a streak of public perception that Mouratoglou was something less than a tennis mastermind. In some of the sillier corners of the Internet, Serena won those 10 slams despite him. Perhaps he was a snake oil salesman who was always in the right place at the right time. More recently, his knack for association with up-and-coming phenoms—Tsitsipas, Rune, Auger-Aliassime—hasn’t held its weight in grand slam gold.
Then there was the fact that his name was all over the ITIA’s 128-page rationale for handing Simona Halep a four-year doping ban, the most severe punishment the sport’s ever seen for such a violation. Halep had turned to Mouratoglou for help in 2021 after some injury woes and less-than-stellar results. At the time, Mouratoglou still had one foot in Serena’s camp but the writing was on the wall: the end was near for Serena, a 24th Slam seemed remoted, if not totally out of the question, and Mouratoglou needed fresh pursuits.
Mouratoglou had firsthand knowledge of Halep’s greatness. He’d been her opposition at the 2019 Wimbledon final, where Halep beat Serena 6-2, 6-2 for her second slam. It would’ve been Serena’s eighth Wimbledon title, which Serena took pains to point out following the Halep doping news 💀.
According to the ITIA report, Mouratoglou and his academy personnel were responsible for recommending and tailoring Halep’s supplement program. Halep claims one of these supplements had to be responsible for the extraneous Roxadustat that ended up in her system. The report didn’t contain anything close to a smoking gun, but still, it’s a bad look for Mouratoglou. Publicly, he’s doubled down on his support for Halep’s claim to innocence, and really, what choice does he have?
Halep has already stated her intention to appeal the verdict, no doubt a lengthy process that may yet yield more info on Mouratoglou’s involvement—or lack thereof.
Will Mouratoglou miss out on clients due to his association with Halep’s case? I suspect not.
What I do know: He needs to find a new act either way.