The US Open rebuilt mixed doubles to attract stars. It has just landed Serena Williams.

Serena Williams will play the US Open next week. Not the singles — she and Carlos Alcaraz have been given a wildcard into the mixed doubles, a competition the USTA rebuilt last year for precisely this purpose. It is her first appearance at Flushing Meadows since 2022.

The rebuild is the story. Mixed doubles used to be a draw that ran quietly alongside the tournament and was contested largely by doubles specialists. The USTA compressed it into a two-day, 16-team event with $1m to the winning pair, and moved it forward — the mixed draw starts on Tuesday, five days before the singles begins on 30 August. It was designed to pull singles stars into a competition they had no reason to enter.

The field is chosen, not qualified

Look at how this year's line-up was assembled. Williams and Alcaraz are wildcards. So are Emma Navarro and Tommy Paul, and Karolina Muchova and Jakub Mensik. Jessica Pegula and Taylor Fritz were put together after both of their original partners withdrew injured. Alcaraz himself is coming back from four months out, and will defend his singles title afterwards.

That is not a draw in the ordinary sense. It is a bill, curated by the organiser, in which entry is an invitation rather than something earned by ranking. Whether that is a fair trade is a real argument — the players who built careers in doubles are the ones displaced by it. But as event design it is doing exactly what it was built to do.

What it is really monetising

The less obvious move is the calendar one. The days before a major opens are its weakest commercial ground: the site is open, the staff are paid, the broadcast infrastructure is standing idle, and there is nothing to sell but practice courts. Dropping a short, high-stakes, star-led competition into that window turns dead inventory into programming.

Measured that way, a $1m prize pool is not generous. It is the price of persuading the biggest name the sport has to appear on days that would otherwise generate very little — and of giving the reigning champion a competitive hit-out that the tournament itself gets to televise.

The transferable point for anyone running a multi-day event is that the quiet days are an asset rather than an overhead, and that filling them costs less than it looks. The harder question, which the US Open has answered one way and others may not, is how much sporting integrity you are willing to spend to do it.