Italy’s Matteo Berrettini called on tennis organizers Monday to better protect players against online abuse from gamblers after revealing that his family received death threats during his run at the French Open.
Asked about the U.S. Open and the U.S. Tennis Association’s recently announced partnership with the online prediction market Kalshi, Berrettini told journalist Ben Rothenberg that his brother received threatening texts at Roland-Garros before 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 told the media after his first-round win at 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 found that gamblers are responsible for much of the online abuse hurled at players. In March, Italian women’s tennis star Lucrezia Stefanini revealed that she and her family were met with death threats from an apparent gambler before a qualifying match at the Indian Wells Open.
He went on to emphasize that the tennis community needs to have “stronger” safeguards to protect players.
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In 2023, the USTA — the governing body of tennis in the States and organizer of the U.S. Open — partnered with World Tennis and other top organizations in the sport for an initiative that uses an AI-powered system, Threat Matrix, to flag abuse and threats aimed at players.
The following year, the organizations announced that some 12,000 posts were reported to social media platforms and nearly three dozen accounts were flagged to law enforcement.
In July, a separate report from World Tennis and the Women’s Tennis Association found that a majority of accounts responsible for abuse and flagged by the system in 2024 did not reappear in 2025.
“While today’s findings illustrate the effectiveness of that action to date, further significant progress requires collective action from social media companies, law enforcement, governing bodies and the gambling industry, and we will continue to proactively advocate for that,” the WTA and World Tennis said in a statement at the time.