Tennis in Africa expands: Côte d'Ivoire welcomes ATP Challenger Tour

The city of Abidjan bustles with more than six million people. Energy can be felt through its streets and the city’s size is impossible to ignore. Now that same vibrancy is intersecting with tennis as the Côte d'Ivoire becomes the 95th country to host an ATP Challenger Tour event.

Dubbed by some as the ‘Paris of West Africa’, Abidjan is in the middle of hosting back-to-back weeks of Challenger 50 tournaments, concluding this Sunday. It marks another step forward for tennis in Africa, following Rwanda’s debut last season and its second edition earlier this year. Brazzaville, Republic of Congo has also hosted this year and in 2024.

Now, the Ivorian locals are excited to welcome professional tennis to their homeland.

“The spectators are crazy around the court, very enthusiastic with the competition, so that’s great. It doesn’t look like a tennis match, more so football because tennis is not very popular in Côte d'Ivoire,” said tournament director Arzel Mevellec. “People like to attend something new, so that’s good. We are the beginning of something.”

Abidjan, one of West Africa's key economic capitals, is located along the Gulf of Guinea on the Atlantic coast. It is also home to 22-year-old Eliakim Coulibaly, the country’s brightest talent nearing the Top 300 of the PIF ATP Rankings, making Abidjan a logical location for the latest African Challenger destination.

The ATP Challenger Tour’s expansion into the Côte d'Ivoire's former capital city is part of a larger effort to develop tennis across Africa. The Frenchman Mevellec is playing a key part, directing not only the Abidjan event, but also in Kigali, Rwanda and Brazzaville, as well as spearheading the Quimper Challenger in his home country.

“In France, tennis is popular. We have one million players. In Africa, they have one million players for the continent. That’s a huge difference,” said Mevellec. “When you organise such tournaments, you need to especially think about the development for sure. In France, you cannot organise a tournament with no connections to clubs, for example. Here, you have to think about that.”

While Abidjan is taking a step forward as the next African city to host, it is part of the staircase leading to what could come next.

“The idea is to develop a tour in Africa, so that means we hope to have four or five weeks in a row on the west coast of the continent,” Mevellec said. “That is the aim of my action, to develop tennis in those parts of the world because it’s not logical to have Africa outside the economy of tennis.”

^{A near capacity crowd at the Le Central Tennis Club. Credit: Côte d'Ivoire Open}