ATP and WTA comparison

Hello,

Welcome to this third tennis post. For better visibility, I advise you to look at my posts on a computer (for the size but also because the colors differ on a phone that has a dark theme like me. If the theme is light, only the size makes it difficult to read).

Today, comparison between players on the ATP and WTA circuits from 2010 to 2022 (using data from Jeff Sackmann, thank's to him !), on one aspect in particular. We are going to see if there is a difference in performance (between ATP and WTA players) when these play someone lower ranked than them.
This idea came to me recently in particular when seeing players returning from a long injury (or even retirement !) managing to beat very well ranked players (for example, Caroline Wozniacki who had been retired since 2020 who has just beaten at the US Open (in 2023), Petra Kvitova 11th player in the world (link)).

So that the graphs are not too large, I limited myself to the top 50. I also differentiated the results according to the surface of the court and we get:

It is often said that there are more surprises in results on the WTA Tour.
This seems to be confirmed (at least) for the top 10. Indeed, we can see that regardless of the surface, the players ranked in the top 10 lose at least 1/4 of their matches when they play a lower ranked player than them.
It's more than on the ATP Tour where these players seem more consistent against lower ranked players.

Outside of the top 10, the 2 circuits seem to have fairly similar results, but we can still observe other trends.
Notably the fact that there are more surprises on clay and grass than hard where one could almost draw a straight line with zero slope.

Regarding the reasons that could explain this increased irregularity on the WTA circuit, several camps clash....

You will find the code below by clicking the github link button.

Thanks for reading ! I hope it was clear and you liked it.

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See you soon for new content 👋