Italy’s Matteo Berrettini referred to as on tennis organizers Monday to raised shield gamers in opposition to on-line abuse from gamblers after revealing that his household acquired demise threats throughout his run on the French Open.
Asked concerning the U.S. Open and the U.S. Tennis Association’s recently announced partnership with the net prediction market Kalshi, Berrettini informed journalist Ben Rothenberg that his brother acquired threatening texts at Roland-Garros earlier than reporting them to the Association of Tennis Professionals.
“I won a match and they were writing things like, ‘Matteo is so rubbish that, if you don’t tell him to lose,’ or something like that, ‘we’ll kill your family,’ or, ‘we’ll do this,’” Berrettini informed the media after his first-round win on the U.S. Open, per a report by UbiTennis.
He added later, “We’re 30 years old, we’re adults; but when I think of the girls and the younger players, receiving this sort of message can be frightening. We’re tennis players, so it’s important to protect ourselves.”
Multiple studies have discovered that gamblers are chargeable for a lot of the net abuse hurled at gamers. In March, Italian girls’s tennis star Lucrezia Stefanini revealed that she and her household have been met with death threats from an obvious gambler earlier than a qualifying match on the Indian Wells Open.
He went on to emphasise that the tennis neighborhood must have “stronger” safeguards to guard gamers.
Rhea Nall/USTA through Getty Images
In 2023, the USTA — the governing physique of tennis within the States and organizer of the U.S. Open — partnered with World Tennis and different prime organizations within the sport for an initiative that makes use of an AI-powered system, ThreatMatrix, to flag abuse and threats aimed toward gamers.
The following yr, the organizations introduced that some 12,000 posts have been reported to social media platforms and practically three dozen accounts have been flagged to legislation enforcement.
In July, a separate report from World Tennis and the Women’s Tennis Association discovered {that a} majority of accounts chargeable for abuse and flagged by the system in 2024 didn’t reappear in 2025.
In a press release to HuffPost, U.S. Open spokesperson Brendan McIntyre stated the match is continuous to make use of ThreatMatrix and that representatives behind the system (the London-based Signify Group) are on website to make it simpler for gamers to work with them.
He added that the match is ready to determine potential threats by means of the system and, if vital, work with legislation enforcement.
McIntyre, when requested if the Open plans to work with Kalshi in its efforts to fight threats, stated that though the partnership isn’t “directly tied to online abuse mitigation,” the USTA is collaborating with the corporate to outline sure commerce classes whereas concurrently banning commerce that would “conflict with public interest or undermine the integrity of the sport.”