The US Open has always been more than a tennis tournament. It has been one of New York’s great cultural occasions, a place where sport naturally meets fashion, celebrity and the city’s appetite for spectacle. Actors, musicians, designers and other public figures have long occupied the seats at Arthur Ashe Stadium, while the tournament itself has embraced the energy of New York as part of its identity. Watching tennis has therefore never been the only reason people attend.
What has changed is the role of social media in that experience.
At the 2026 US Open, the presence of influencers and content creators has become significant enough to create a debate about what the tournament is actually becoming. Influencers are no longer simply celebrities sitting in the crowd and enjoying a match. They arrive with cameras, phones, lighting equipment and an expectation that their presence at the tournament should produce content for an audience somewhere else. The tournament has encouraged this development because influencers can introduce tennis to people who might otherwise have little interest in the sport. Yet the same culture that can bring new audiences to tennis can also interfere with the reason the audience is there in the first place.
That tension became particularly visible during Naomi Osaka’s match, when influencer activity reportedly became disruptive enough to attract attention and intervention. The incident was not simply an argument about whether a few people were behaving badly in the stands. It was a glimpse into a much bigger change in the way major public events are being experienced.
The US Open is becoming a place where people do not only watch what is happening. Increasingly, they also want to make themselves part of what is happening.
The Transformation of the US Open Into a Lifestyle Event
There is nothing particularly new about the relationship between tennis and lifestyle culture. Tennis has always possessed an aesthetic that lends itself to fashion and celebrity. The clothes worn by players have become increasingly important to their public identities, while the tournament’s location in New York gives it a cultural relevance that extends far beyond the court.
What social media has done is accelerate that relationship.
The 2026 tournament has attracted a wide range of celebrities and internet personalities, and the US Open itself has increasingly presented those appearances as part of the event’s cultural appeal. MrBeast, Anna Wintour, Travis Scott, Martha Stewart, Common and Karl-Anthony Towns are among the recognizable names who have appeared around this year’s tournament. Their presence generates photographs, conversations and social media posts that extend the reach of the competition beyond traditional tennis audiences.
This makes perfect commercial sense. Sport has become an entertainment business in which attention is one of the most valuable commodities available. A tennis tournament does not only want people to watch the matches. It wants people talking about the tournament before the match, during the match and long after the players have left the court.
Influencers are particularly useful in this environment because they already possess their own audiences. The US Open does not have to convince millions of people to watch tennis if it can reach them indirectly through personalities they already follow.
The result, however, is that the spectator is beginning to occupy a different role.
When the Spectator Becomes the Content
The traditional spectator goes to a sporting event because something is happening on the field or court. The influencer goes with an additional objective: something must happen to their own audience because they were there.
That distinction may appear insignificant until it begins to affect the behaviour of people inside the venue.
An influencer is effectively working while attending the US Open. Their clothes may need to be photographed. Their arrival may need to be filmed. Their reactions may need to be recorded. They may need to produce material with a brand partner or capture enough footage to turn a few hours at the tournament into several pieces of social media content.
There is nothing inherently wrong with that. The modern entertainment industry depends heavily on people who can create and distribute their own material. The problem occurs when the requirements of content creation begin to compete with the requirements of the event itself.
Tennis is particularly sensitive to this because it is a sport built around concentration. Players need to serve, return and construct points while remaining intensely focused on their opponent. A bright light, unnecessary movement or loud conversation can become far more intrusive during a tennis match than it would be at a football game or a concert.
This is why the incident involving influencer activity during Osaka’s match attracted such a strong reaction. Reports described content creators using bright lighting and behaving in ways that distracted from the match, leading to intervention from officials. Once that happens, the conversation stops being about whether influencers are good or bad for tennis and becomes a question of where the boundaries should exist.
The US Open Cannot Completely Blame Influencers
It would be convenient to place the entire responsibility on influencers, but that would ignore the role the US Open itself has played in creating this environment.
The tournament understands exactly what social media personalities bring to an event. Influencers can expose tennis to younger audiences, generate enormous amounts of online content and make the tournament feel culturally relevant to people who may never sit down to watch an entire match.
According to reporting around this year’s tournament, the number of credentialed influencers has increased substantially, reaching roughly 100. That expansion demonstrates that influencer participation is not an accidental development happening around the edges of the tournament. It is part of a deliberate strategy to make the US Open more visible within the social media economy.
That strategy is understandable because sports audiences are changing. A young person may discover Coco Gauff through TikTok before ever seeing one of her matches on television. Someone may become interested in Naomi Osaka through fashion or celebrity culture before learning about her career. A person who has never followed tennis might encounter the US Open through a creator’s video from Arthur Ashe Stadium.
This is useful for the sport.
The danger is that the event eventually becomes more valuable as a backdrop than as an experience.
The Celebrity Crowd Has Always Been Part of the US Open
There is also an important distinction between the current influencer culture and the celebrity culture that has surrounded the tournament for decades.
Celebrities have traditionally attended sporting events as spectators. Their presence creates its own publicity, but they are generally not expected to manufacture an entire content operation while sitting in the audience. Their appearance is itself the story.
Influencers operate differently because their business depends on constant production. Their value is not simply that they are recognizable. Their value comes from their ability to turn their lives, experiences and surroundings into material for an audience.
This changes the meaning of being at the US Open.
For a traditional celebrity, being photographed at Arthur Ashe Stadium can be an extension of their public profile. For an influencer, being at Arthur Ashe Stadium can become the actual product. The match becomes the setting in which the influencer creates something that can be distributed elsewhere.
That difference matters because it changes what the audience around them is being asked to tolerate.
Tennis Is Not the Only Place This Is Happening
The larger cultural issue extends well beyond the US Open.
We now live in a period where almost every significant experience can become an opportunity for personal branding. Restaurants have become places to photograph meals and interiors. Hotels advertise their visual appeal as much as their service. Concerts are filled with people recording performances that they may barely watch with their own eyes. Fashion events increasingly exist simultaneously as physical gatherings and social media productions.
Travel has perhaps become the clearest example. People do not simply visit places anymore; they document themselves visiting those places, often with an awareness of how the photographs will contribute to their online identity.
The US Open fits neatly into this culture because it offers everything the modern lifestyle industry values: famous people, fashion, exclusivity, sport, food, New York and the possibility of being photographed in an environment that carries status.
The tournament therefore becomes more than something to attend. It becomes something that says something about the person attending.
That is an important change.
The Desire to Be Seen Is Becoming Part of the Experience
There is a particular kind of social status attached to appearing in the right places. Being photographed at the US Open communicates access to a world that many people experience only through screens. It can suggest wealth, influence, relevance or simply proximity to the culture of the moment.
Social media has intensified that desire because the audience is no longer limited to the people physically present at the event.
A person sitting in the stadium is now performing for people thousands of kilometres away.
That is why the phrase “being seen” has become so important to contemporary lifestyle culture. The experience is no longer complete when you experience it yourself. Increasingly, it feels complete only when other people know that you experienced it.
The US Open is therefore participating in a much larger cultural shift in which visibility itself has become a form of social currency.
The irony is that the more successful the tournament becomes at attracting people who generate attention, the more carefully it has to protect the actual sporting experience from that attention.
Coco Gauff’s Position Is More Important Than the Controversy
Coco Gauff’s response to the debate is revealing because she has recognised both sides of the issue. She has acknowledged the potential value of influencers in bringing new audiences to tennis while also recognising that there must be limits to their behaviour during matches.
That is probably the most sensible position.
The answer is not to remove influencers from tennis. That would be unrealistic and, frankly, counterproductive. Tennis needs new audiences, and social media is one of the most powerful ways of reaching them.
But there must also be an understanding that the athletes remain the central performers.
The influencer can help people discover the match. The influencer should not become the reason the match becomes difficult to watch.
That distinction should be obvious, but the growth of the creator economy has made many boundaries less obvious than they once were.
The US Open Has to Decide What It Wants to Be
The tournament now finds itself balancing two identities.
On one side is the traditional US Open: a prestigious tennis championship where the quality of the competition is the central attraction.
On the other is the modern US Open: a cultural event that brings together sport, fashion, celebrity, food, entertainment and social media.
There is no reason why those two identities cannot coexist. In fact, their combination is one of the reasons the US Open remains so culturally powerful.
But coexistence requires boundaries.
If the tournament wants influencers, it needs to establish clearly what they can and cannot do. If it wants celebrities, it needs to make sure celebrity culture does not overwhelm the players. If it wants fashion, it should allow fashion to complement the sporting experience rather than replace it.
Most importantly, the US Open needs to remember that its greatest asset is still the tennis.
Without the players, there is no event for the influencers to photograph. Without the competition, there is no celebrity audience to attract attention. Without the sport itself, the entire lifestyle machine surrounding the tournament loses its foundation.
Perhaps We Need Places Where We Are Allowed to Simply Be
The most interesting thing about the US Open controversy is that it raises a question that has very little to do with tennis.
What happens to an experience when everyone feels compelled to turn it into content?
There is something increasingly rare about being somewhere simply because you want to be there. There is value in watching a match without worrying about whether you captured the right angle. There is value in attending a concert without recording every song. There is value in travelling somewhere without immediately thinking about how the photographs will perform online.
Not every experience needs to become part of a personal brand.
The US Open does not need to reject celebrity culture or social media. Those things have become part of modern sport, and pretending otherwise would be unrealistic. What it does need is a clear understanding of the difference between promoting the experience and disrupting it.
The irony of the current controversy is that the US Open may have become so successful at turning itself into a lifestyle event that some people have forgotten why the lifestyle exists in the first place.
People came to watch tennis.
Everything else was supposed to make that experience more interesting.
It should never become the other way around.
