Raducanu & Alcaraz: The ‘love match’ that reveals modern world of fandom

Even describing the evidence as circumstantial feels like a bit of a stretch. It may not, thinking about it, really qualify as evidence.

For all but the most ardent tennis fans, the week leading up to Wimbledon has been dominated by one story alone: the suggestion there might be some sort of – there’s no avoiding the term in this context, sorry – “love match” between Carlos Alcaraz and Emma Raducanu.

Written down, the basis for this theory is flimsy. At best. Alcaraz invited Raducanu to be his mixed doubles partner at the US Open in August. She said yes. They are sometimes pictured together and one or both of them is smiling. He likes her Instagram posts. She watched him play at Queen’s. And, most romantic of all, they are both ambassadors for the same bottled water company.

Needless to say, this should be one of those occasions where Occam’s razor applies.

As both of them have said more than once, Raducanu and Alcaraz have known each other for several years. They are friends. They broke through to the senior ranks of their respective tours at roughly the same time. “We go back a long way,” Raducanu said.

That has not, of course, made the slightest bit of difference. The story of two attractive, high-profile young people has obviously been too good for the tabloids to resist. (GB News and talkSPORT seem particularly enthused; maybe they just love love.)

But there is no place for snobbery: The Times and The Daily Telegraph have both had a go, too. And we at The Observer are no better than anybody else.

This week, Raducanu herself was asked by the BBC if she was aware of the meme that she and Alcaraz are “destined for each other”. “Not quite to that extent, but I’m glad the internet is having fun,” she said.

It would be easy to chalk this up to what used to be known as silly season, to attribute the story’s popularity to the fact Wimbledon has not started yet, nobody is quite sure what to make of the Club World Cup, and even a really good Test against India can only draw a certain number of clicks. Besides, it is not like there is no precedent for romantic entanglements between tennis players.

The genesis of the rumour, though, is worth considering. Tracing the ancestry of anything on the internet is largely an exercise in futility.

By November last year, though, the meme of a relationship between Alcaraz and Raducanu was sufficiently well-established that one user on X posted what appeared to be a quote from the former wishing the latter a happy birthday.

“I wish her the happiest of birthdays,” the post said. “She’s a very special girl. Hopefully we will have the chance to play mixed doubles next year, I really want that.”

All perfectly innocent. But also odd, because two years previously the same user had quoted Alcaraz on the same subject with the exact same words. The Spaniard had not said anything of the sort, on either occasion. That did not stop his words being picked up by mainstream media outlets, and the idea of a romantic relationship crossed from digital into material.

The precise motivation behind the original meme is a mystery, but it feels playful, more an in-joke than genuine prurience. Its significance lies, as much as anything, in its impact, in what the fascination it has unleashed says about the way many fans engage with tennis in particular and sport in general.

“In a lot of the academic literature, there’s always been a tendency to treat sports fans as separate to other types of fans,” said Cornel Sandvoss, Professor of Media and Communications at the University of Sussex.

“But in researching it I’ve been struck by how similar a lot of the practice, motivations and rewards are.”

It is perhaps, then, not a surprise that features familiar to fan cultures such as music or television or the Kardashians should be present in sport, too: fan fiction, interest in players’ private lives, attachment not so much to their forehand technique but to their personality or their values are all elements of what is known as “shipping” or “stanning”.

That terminology might be novel, but what it describes is probably not. Fans have always formed what are known as “parasocial” relationships with their favourite players, but it is only with the advent of social media that they have become “visible”, as Gayle Stever, Professor of Social and Behavioural Sciences at the Empire State University of New York, puts it.

That process has been encouraged as more sports have followed the Drive to Survive path, trying to attract not just those fans who are drawn to the action itself but those who engage on a more personal level with the protagonists.

As Alcaraz and Raducanu may attest, that might be particularly well-suited to tennis: it is not, after all, a tribal sport, although nationality can play a role in establishing which player a fan might admire.

“I’ve been curious about how it engenders such dedication among fans,” said Martha Newson, Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Greenwich.

“I feel like players take on symbolic value: accuracy, emotion, determination, coordination, aesthetics. Fans then come to bond with a player who embodies a value they align with.”

This may not be the traditional way of developing an interest in a sport, but it may, Sandvoss said, be becoming more common: “We’re seeing more forms of engagement from parts of pop culture that used to be regarded as feminine.”

That might mean the sort of fan fiction once reserved for TV shows, or it might mean speculating over a player’s relationship status.

“The term is paratextual,” said Sandvoss, citing literary theorist Gerard Genette.

“It’s all the things around the actual body of the text. It applies to content creators, who spend 10 percent of their time making content, and 90 percent doing stuff around that content. The same model works for sport.”

So what happens on the court is only part of the attraction; just as significant is everything off it.

Raducanu and Alcaraz seem to understand that: they have, mostly, laughed off the increasingly invasive questions over their relationship. They are in on the joke. Or is that just what they want us to think?

Photograph by Nathan Stirk/Getty Images for LTA