No More Line Judges: Tennis Chases Millimetres While Vietnam's Lower-Tier Events Keep Waiting

On the night of 6 September 2026, on Arthur Ashe Stadium, a ball left Novak Djokovic's racquet and struck a line judge in the throat. Djokovic was defaulted on the spot. One detail is rarely repeated: at that US Open, Hawk-Eye Live had already replaced line judges on almost every court, with only Arthur Ashe and Louis Armstrong still staffed by humans. Keeping people on the show courts produced an incident no algorithm could have anticipated.

Five years later, no show court keeps line judges. Wimbledon 2026 was the first Championships without them, following the AELTC announcement of 9 October 2026. Roland Garros 2026 also dropped them. All four Grand Slams now call the lines by machine. The ATP Tour has used Electronic Line Calling across its events since the 2026 season. A profession that lasted more than a century has ended, almost without a farewell.

The shift took nearly two decades. The 2026 US Open was the first Grand Slam to give players the right to challenge line calls with Hawk-Eye. For almost fifteen years tennis lived in a hybrid model: the line judge called first, the machine checked afterwards, and each player had three challenges per set plus a spare if correct.

The pandemic accelerated everything. The 2026 US Open installed Hawk-Eye Live to reduce the number of people on court. The 2026 Australian Open did the same and became the first Grand Slam played without line judges on any court. By 2026 the ATP Tour had made ELC mandatory across the system. ELC differs from early Hawk-Eye in one fundamental way: it calls instantly, nobody has to ask, and there are no challenges left to count.

For someone in my trade, ELC is tennis's version of VAR, but it goes much further. Football's VAR only intervenes for a "clear and obvious error". Tennis's ELC rules to the millimetre, and the word "clear" has no place in its vocabulary.

The economics are not trivial. An ELC court needs high-resolution cameras, servers tracking the ball's trajectory, calibration systems and on-site operators. A Grand Slam runs 17 or 18 match courts on a prize purse of tens of millions of dollars. A Challenger in Asia has a total purse smaller than the cost of renting the system for one week. That is why ITF and Challenger events staged in Vietnam still use line judges, and will for years yet.

I spend most of my working life rewatching frames nobody in the stands ever saw. ELC hands the authority over the lines to a machine, but what it takes away is the player's right to doubt. In the old model that right belonged to the person holding the racquet: they chose when to challenge, and that choice was part of the tactics. In the new model it is revoked. The machine calls, the umpire confirms, play continues.

The tactical detail most overlooked is the challenge as a rhythm-breaker. Between 2026 and 2026, a player being swept along by a fast-serving opponent could ask for a check on a ball in the far corner, spend thirty or forty seconds, and cool the momentum of both the crowd and the opponent. That was psychological power, not technical power. Once ELC covered the whole court, the tool disappeared. Based on my experience tracking matches, games with ELC are almost never interrupted by line-call disputes, while rallies stretching beyond seven shots appear more often.

A heavier consequence is that the chair umpire's role contracts. The umpire used to be the final authority on a line when a player appealed, the person who climbed down to inspect a mark on clay. At Roland Garros that ritual was one of the tournament's defining images. From 2026, along with the ruling, a ceremony of transparency is gone.

I have put myself in that position. In 2026, working as an assistant VAR at the AFC Cup, I spotted an offside 0.3 metres deep that nobody on the pitch saw. The referee did not see it. The stands did not see it. Only the frame saw it. The result of the match changed, and nobody knew I was the one who found it. There are offsides nobody sees, but the camera never blinks. I found that one at 2 a.m., after everybody had gone home.

With ELC, tennis has pushed that logic to its extreme: every line decided by a frame, no space left for a human. Seen from the trade, this is progress in consistency. Seen from the operations side, it concentrates authority in a single technology provider for nearly every major event. When that system is wrong, it is wrong on every court at once.

In Vietnam the technology gap creates a paradox. Vietnamese players train and compete at home without ELC, without challenges, without a VAR team; then they walk into a Grand Slam where every line is called by machine. International experience is therefore split across two different rule worlds. Ly Hoang Nam, Nguyen Thuy Linh, or any of our players, grow up in the first world and are judged in the second, in a way European rivals never have to endure.

The irony is that greater precision does not remove controversy, it relocates it. Once the machine calls every line, the question is no longer in or out, but whether the system was calibrated correctly, whether the ball deformed on contact with the surface, how many millimetres of error the trajectory model carries. A decision still requires belief; the belief has simply moved from a human eye to a technical parameter.

Football chose the opposite road. VAR in football is built to reverse only a "clear and obvious error", which means it admits error exists in advance and then sets a threshold to protect the referee. Tennis with ELC sets no threshold: a millimetre is a millimetre. Two sports share one word, fairness, and define it by two different numbers. A single millimetre changes a team's fate; I have learned to live with that.

What is lost most of all is the part spectators never saw: the officials' skill. A good line judge needs more than a decade to read the spin and the bounce of a ball travelling above 200 km/h, and that skill is now unused at the top of the game. The generation of Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner grew up with challenges and will finish their careers without them. Tennis has not lost fairness; it has lost a generation of professionals only it knew how to train.

The referee is the only person on court not allowed to pick a side, and I stand behind them. If technology now owns the line call, the logical next step is for the tours to subsidise ELC at Challenger and ITF level, so that a 19-year-old in Hai Phong does not learn the rules of his own sport for the first time in a Grand Slam qualifying draw. Fairness only means something when it arrives evenly, rather than stopping wherever the money runs out.