Tennis revolution: What will Orreco's merger with DDSA mean for tennis?

AI is set to enter tennis analysis in 2026 - in a big way. But how? The merger between Data Driven Sports Analytics and Orreco gives us an insight.

The data team behind some of the world's leading tennis players, including Aryna Sabalenka and Ons Jabeur, has announced it is to merge with the Irish sports science and biomarkers specialists Orreco.

In recent years, Data Driven Sports Analytics (DDSA) has been analysing patterns of play and providing some of the world's best tennis players with the data to help them decide which shot to hit, and when.

While her serve issues were well documented in 2021 and 2022, it was a defeat to Jabeur at the French Open in 2020 that led Sabalenka to join forces with the Performance Data Scientist that helped bring about her demise — DDSA founder Shane Liyanage.

Liyanage was able to provide her with the dossier that led to her downfall, and Sabalenka was quick to take on DDSA, reaping the benefits ever since, winning four major titles in the last three seasons.

But Liyanage felt this was just the beginning. Not just for Sabalenka, but for DDSA too.

"I still felt DDSA had a little bit to do on their journey," Liyanage told Talking Tennis in relation to the merger with Orecco. "I knew that the model of manually tagging, the labor costs, they were not justified going forward, so I needed an AI ball player and ball tracking solution developed."

"The modern game was changing a little bit," Liyanage continued. "So all the traditional ways of presenting data just didn't seem to be what was relevant to modern tennis or the way that modern coaches were consuming the data."

More to be done to help female athletes in tennis

Firstly, there has been a focus on helping female athletes regarding a topic that is often neglected.

"We work with a number of female athletes."

"The challenges that a female athlete faces during the menstrual cycle, how to train during that period, how to compete, how to fuel — Orreco had a fantastic app where you can track the cycle," Liyanage said.

Meanwhile, "our team brings together experts in data, video analysis, tennis research, and high performance coaching. I felt there was nothing that i was offering during that period. We didn't really change our analysis, but we suddenly we started using that and then combining it with our insights."

Who will win the women's singles title at the Australian Open?

Change Image

• Aryna Sabalenka
• Iga Swiatek
• Coco Gauff
• Other

Predicting injuries

One of the biggest steps forward we might see in tennis, not just in 2026, but in recent years, will be the ability to anticipate injuries before they occur.

Random injuries witnessed in football or rugby, where clashes are frequent, can be impossible to foresee. However, in tennis, with introduction of artificial intelligence, the ability to predict an injury might be a revelation.

Could Rune's achilles injury have been prevented?

Think Holger Rune's ruptured achilles that occurred in Stockholm towards the end of the 2025 season. If the Dane knew he was vulnerable to such an injury, either pre-match or in the minutes prior to it occurring, might he have withdrawn, retired or at least tried to manage the situation differently?

"We've got stroke speed, movement speed, know the accelerations, decelerations," said Liyanage. "So we started to see some patterns."

Aligned with biomarker analysis — the laboratory measurement of biological substances (genes, proteins, molecules) in blood, tissue, or fluids to objectively evaluate health, disease progression, or treatment response — Orreco are confident of seeing an uptick in anticipating injuries before they occur.

Tennis needs to start taking advantage of biomarker analysis, says data expert

Biomarker analysis is something that tennis is not exploiting enough, according to Liyanage.

"To know how an athlete is feeling before going into a big block of training or a training session," could be a game changer.

"One of the things that they've developed, and the NBA is all over this and the EPL as well, is motion signals. So they've got a computer vision, technology that through the algorithms can assess movement patterns and determine a risk, and they're actually predicting injuries four or five minutes before they occur."

"If you ask the question of someone like a Holger Rune and tell you, "hey, by the way, we think you're going to do your Achilles," what option would he take?"

"If he was confident in the technology, if he knew that was going to happen, I'm sure he would have tried something. Whether it would have been either retiring from the match or just changing his game plan."

Let battle commence

Rune will be absent from the Australian swing, as he continues to recover from his injury.

What won't be missing, though, is the tension, the physicality, the drama, that tennis provides. Now it will also have the technology to perhaps keep the sport's stars at their physical peak for longer and see them on the court in the best possible shape.