The United Cup Explained: Mixed Teams in January

The United Cup is the mixed-gender national team tournament that opens the Australian tennis season. Eighteen countries, two cities, ten days, and a tie decided by one men's singles match, one women's singles match and a mixed doubles. It is played in Perth and Sydney in the first ten days of January, it carries ranking points on both the ATP and WTA lists, and it is the richest team event in tennis.

It is also the third attempt in five years to solve the same Australian problem: what to put in the two weeks between New Year and the Australian Open. The Hopman Cup did the job for thirty-one years and was scrapped. The ATP Cup did it for three and was scrapped. The United Cup is the current answer, and it is the most successful of the three by most measures that matter.

This page covers the format in detail, the qualification system, the tie structure and its quirks, prize money and ranking points, the champions so far, Australia's record, and the scheduling tension that shapes every squad announcement. The wider January calendar is covered in the Australian summer of tennis guide, and the men's international team competition is a separate story told on the Davis Cup page.

What the United Cup is

The United Cup is jointly owned and operated by Tennis Australia, the ATP and the WTA. That three-way sanctioning is the whole design. It is why the event carries points in both rankings, why the entry system is driven by tour rankings rather than by national federations, and why the top players show up.

Eighteen national teams enter. Each is a mixed squad of men and women, with a maximum of three of each. Nine teams are based in Perth and nine in Sydney for the group stage. The group winners and the best runner-up from each city advance to a quarter-final, and the tournament converges on Sydney for the semi-finals and the final.

The whole thing runs from about 2 January to about 11 January, finishing with roughly a week before Australian Open qualifying begins at Melbourne Park.

Why it exists

Australia has always needed something to fill the first fortnight of January. The Australian Open sits in the second half of the month and players arrive in the country wanting matches, but a straight run of individual tournaments in that window has never generated much attention outside the tennis audience.

Team tennis solves that. A national team gives a broadcaster a story that a first-round singles match does not, and it gives a city a reason to buy a session ticket for a tie rather than a player. The Hopman Cup proved the point in Perth for three decades.

The commercial problem is that the ITF owns the Davis Cup and the Billie Jean King Cup, so Australia cannot simply schedule an international team event of its own without the tours' agreement. The United Cup is what that agreement looks like: a joint venture in which Tennis Australia supplies the venues, the money and the operation, and the tours supply the ranking points that guarantee the entries.

The Hopman Cup years

The Hopman Cup ran in Perth from 1989 to 2019, named after Harry Hopman, the Davis Cup captain who built Australia's post-war dominance. Teams were two players, one man and one woman. A tie was a men's singles, a women's singles and a mixed doubles - the same three-match shape the United Cup uses now.

It was small, it was affordable, and Perth adopted it completely. Roger Federer played it repeatedly. The images of Federer and Serena Williams playing mixed doubles against each other in 2019 went around the world. Perth Arena, now RAC Arena, was full for a tournament that awarded no ranking points at all.

In March 2019 Tennis Australia and the ATP announced that Perth would host part of the new men's-only ATP Cup instead, and the Hopman Cup was discontinued. The decision was unpopular in Western Australia and among players, and it was reversed in substance three years later when the United Cup restored mixed teams to exactly the same building.

The name itself did not die. The ITF revived the Hopman Cup in Europe - Nice in 2023, Bari in 2025 - as a small invitational event with no connection to the Australian summer.

The ATP Cup interlude

The ATP Cup ran for three editions, from 2020 to 2022, across Brisbane, Perth and Sydney in its first year and then in a single bubble city during the pandemic seasons. It was a 24-team men's competition with two singles and a doubles per tie.

It never established itself. The first edition was played through the smoke of the Australian bushfire summer. The second and third were played under quarantine conditions with restricted crowds. And the underlying proposition - a men's-only team event in the country that had invented the mixed alternative - was a hard sell in Perth in particular.

In August 2022 the three organisations announced the replacement. The United Cup absorbed the ATP Cup's calendar slot and its ranking points and added the WTA, which is the single change that made the event viable.

1. 1Women's singlesEach country's highest-ranked available woman. Best of three tie-break sets.
2. 2Men's singlesEach country's highest-ranked available man. Best of three tie-break sets.
3. 3Mixed doublesAny combination from the squad. Two tie-break sets, then a 10-point match tie-break.
4. 4ResultFirst country to two match wins takes the tie.

The order can vary by session, but every tie is settled by these three matches. In the group stage all three are usually completed because differential separates teams in the table.

How the 18 teams qualify

There is no qualifying tournament. Entry is calculated from tour rankings on a cut-off date, and it works in three tranches.

Five places go to the countries of the five highest-ranked available ATP singles players. Five go to the countries of the five highest-ranked available WTA singles players. The remaining eight go to countries with the best combined ranking of one man and one woman.

Australia is guaranteed a place as host nation, and in practice would usually qualify anyway on the combined measure.

The word doing the work in all of this is "available". A player has to nominate. If the world number three does not enter, that country does not get the place, and it passes down the list. This is why the field turns over so heavily between editions and why some strong tennis nations miss out entirely in a year when their leading player skips the event.

The group stage

The 18 teams are drawn into six groups of three. Three groups play in Perth and three in Sydney, so each city hosts nine countries.

Each team plays the other two in its group. Because the groups are three-team round robins, a country plays only two ties in the group stage, which makes every match in every tie consequential.

Six group winners advance, plus the best runner-up from each city - so eight teams reach the quarter-finals. Perth's two quarter-finals are played in Perth, and the two winners fly to Sydney for the last four.

The best-runner-up calculation is the part that catches people out. It is decided on ties won, then matches won, then sets, then games. A country can win a tie 2-1, lose a tie 1-2 and still be eliminated by a country with the same record that won its matches more decisively. Australia went out this way in 2025 after beating Great Britain.

Inside a tie

Three matches, one session, usually across four to five hours.

The two singles must feature each country's highest-ranked available player of that gender. This rule is the most important one in the competition, because it removes the tactical option of resting a leading player in a live tie. If Alex de Minaur is in the Australian squad and fit, he plays the men's singles.

Singles matches are best of three tie-break sets - standard tour scoring, with a seven-point tie-break at 6-6 in every set.

The mixed doubles is where the format loosens. Any two players from the squad can be nominated, and captains use it. A country with a specialist doubles player and a singles star will pair them. The match is two tie-break sets, and if the sets are split, a 10-point match tie-break decides it rather than a full third set. The full doubles scoring conventions are set out in the doubles rules guide.

The practical effect is that a mixed doubles rubber can be over in an hour, and a tie that looks settled after two singles can turn on ten points.

Ranking points and prize money

The United Cup was the first mixed team event in history to award points in both the ATP and WTA rankings. The maximum is 500 points, which puts a good week roughly on a par with winning an ATP 500 or a WTA 500 tournament.

Points are awarded per match won rather than as a lump sum for the team result. The value of each win scales with the ranking of the opponent beaten and with the round, so a top-ten scalp in a semi-final is worth far more than a routine win over a wildcard entry in the group stage.

Prize money is a little over US$11 million across the event, distributed to teams by results and split within squads. Published totals differ slightly between the tournament's own materials and the two tour sites, which is normal for a jointly sanctioned event, but the order of magnitude is not in dispute: it is the largest prize pool in team tennis, comfortably ahead of the Davis Cup.

• 18Teams
• 2Host cities
• 3Matches per tie
• 500Maximum ranking points
• 11.2Prize pool, US$ million
• 4Editions played

Figures for the current format. Prize money is an approximate total across the event; published figures vary slightly between the tournament and the two tours.

The champions so far

Year	Champion	Runner-up	Final score	Hosts
2023	United States	Italy	4-0	Brisbane, Perth, Sydney
2024	Germany	Poland	2-1	Perth, Sydney
2025	United States	Poland	2-0	Perth, Sydney
2026	Poland	Switzerland	2-1	Perth, Sydney

The 4-0 in 2023 is a format artefact rather than a blowout: the first edition used five matches per tie, two men's singles, two women's singles and a mixed doubles, split across two days. That structure was abandoned after one year because it was too long and because it required deeper squads than most countries could field in early January.

Poland's record across the four editions is the best of any country - three finals from four attempts, and a title at the fourth time of asking. The United States has two titles. No host-nation team has reached a final.

The 2026 edition

The fourth United Cup ran from 2 to 11 January 2026, with the group stage in Perth from 2 to 6 January and in Sydney from 3 to 7 January.

Group winners were the United States, Belgium, Switzerland, Australia, Greece and Poland. Poland beat the defending champion United States in the semi-finals and then beat Switzerland 2-1 in the final at Ken Rosewall Arena for its first title. Belinda Bencic was named the tournament's most valuable player despite Switzerland losing the final, which tells you how much of the Swiss run she carried.

For Australia it was the best week the country has had in the competition, and it still ended in a quarter-final.

Australia's record

Australia won Group D in 2026 and drew Poland in the quarter-final in Sydney on 9 January. Iga Swiatek beat Maya Joint 6-1 6-1 in the opening singles. Alex de Minaur levelled the tie by beating Hubert Hurkacz 6-4 4-6 6-4, which was the best individual performance by an Australian in the event's history. Katarzyna Kawa and Jan Zielinski then beat Storm Hunter and John-Patrick Smith 6-4 6-0 in the deciding mixed doubles.

That is the shape of Australia's United Cup problem in one afternoon. The country has a genuine top-ten men's singles player and reliable doubles depth, and it does not have a woman ranked anywhere near Swiatek. In a format where the women's singles is one of three matches rather than one of five, a heavy defeat in that match puts a country one loss from elimination before its best player has hit a ball.

In 2025 Australia beat Great Britain 2-1 - de Minaur winning his singles and then partnering Olivia Gadecki to a mixed doubles win - and missed the quarter-finals anyway on differential.

33%33%33%

• Matches Australia has usually been favoured to win1
• Matches Australia has usually been underdog in1
• Matches decided on the day1

The three-match format weights the two singles equally. Australia's ranking strength has been concentrated on the men's side for most of the competition's history, which leaves the mixed doubles as the swing match more often than not.

Show the numbers

What decides an Australian tie

Item	Value
Matches Australia has usually been favoured to win	1
Matches Australia has usually been underdog in	1
Matches decided on the day	1

The scheduling problem

Every conversation about the United Cup comes back to the same fact: the Australian Open starts about ten days after the final.

For a player, January is the highest-stakes month of the season. Two weeks of good form at a Grand Slam is worth more in points, prize money and reputation than anything the United Cup can offer. So the calculation for every entrant is whether the match practice and the team environment are worth the injury risk and the accumulated fatigue.

Most players decide it is worth it, because arriving at a major with no competitive matches is its own risk. But withdrawals are routine, sometimes late, and they are not a sign that the event is failing. Nick Kyrgios pulled out of the first edition with an injury announced ten minutes before the team's press conference, and versions of that scenario recur every year in some squad.

The event mitigates it as far as it can. Ties are compressed into single sessions rather than spread over days. The mixed doubles uses a match tie-break instead of a third set. The whole tournament is over inside ten days. All of that is designed to get players to Melbourne fresh.

How it fits the Australian summer

The United Cup does not stand alone. It runs alongside and just before the lead-in tournaments that fill the rest of the January calendar - the Brisbane International, the Adelaide International, the Hobart International and the Australian Open qualifying event at Melbourne Park.

A player's January might be a United Cup group in Perth, a flight to Adelaide for a tour event, then Melbourne. Or a straight run from the United Cup final in Sydney into the Australian Open with no other match play at all. The lead-in tournaments guide sets out how the individual events fit together.

The broader effect on Australian tennis is that the country now hosts continuous top-level tennis from 2 January to the last Sunday in January, in five or six cities, which no other nation manages at any point in the year. The way the whole calendar is built is covered in the tennis season calendar guide.

What it means for Perth

Perth's involvement is the part of the event that carries the most local weight. Western Australia lost the Hopman Cup in 2019 and got a men's-only event it had not asked for, and the United Cup gave the city back a mixed team tournament in the same arena.

RAC Arena holds about 14,000 for tennis and it is the best indoor tennis environment in Australia. A Perth session with the local crowd behind a home team is louder than anything at Melbourne Park outside a night session on Rod Laver Arena.

The structural frustration is that Perth cannot host the closing weekend. The semi-finals and the final are contracted to Sydney, so the Perth quarter-final winners board a five-hour flight and the city's tournament ends on 7 January regardless of how well the tennis has gone.

Watching a tie

Tickets are sold by session, and a session ticket covers all three matches of a tie. That is unusually good value by the standards of Australian tennis: three matches involving ranked professionals, often including a top-20 player, for a fraction of an Australian Open ground pass. Ticketing for the major itself is a different exercise entirely, covered in the Australian Open tickets guide.

Both arenas are indoor and air-conditioned, which removes the heat variable that shapes so much of the Australian summer. There is no rain delay, no heat policy interruption, and no session that runs to two in the morning, because the three-match format has a natural end.

Australian sessions sell out first and fastest, which means the best-value tickets are usually the ties between two overseas nations. A Sydney session with Poland and the United States on court is world-class tennis in a 10,500-seat arena.

United Cup, Davis Cup and Billie Jean King Cup

They are three separate competitions and it is worth being precise about the differences.

Feature	United Cup	Davis Cup	Billie Jean King Cup
Owner	Tennis Australia with the ATP and WTA	ITF	ITF
Gender	Mixed	Men	Women
When	January, ten days	Across the year, finals in November	Across the year, finals in November
Ranking points	Yes, ATP and WTA	No	No
Where	Perth and Sydney	Home ties plus a neutral finals week	Home ties plus a neutral finals week

A player can play all three in one season, and several Australians do. The competitions do not conflict because the United Cup sits in the one window the ITF competitions never use.

The one thing the United Cup cannot replicate is the history. A Davis Cup tie carries 125 years of records behind it, and Australia's 28 titles are part of the country's sporting identity in a way that a four-year-old January tournament is not going to be for some time.

Criticisms

It is a warm-up and everyone knows it. The event sits three weeks before a Grand Slam and no result in it will define a player's season. That limits how seriously the deepest rounds are contested, particularly by players who have already secured their ranking points.

The qualification system produces uneven fields. Because entry depends on individual player nomination, a country can be in one year and absent the next without anything changing about its tennis. It also means the draw can contain a team that is one great player and two ordinary ones.

Two cities is one too many for a final weekend. Splitting the group stage across a five-hour flight makes commercial sense and competitive nonsense. A Perth team that wins its quarter-final at home then travels the width of the continent before a semi-final.

Mixed doubles as a decider divides opinion. Some see it as the best thing about the event - a genuinely different discipline deciding a national tie. Others point out that a ten-point tie-break can eliminate a country whose two singles players are demonstrably better.

What could change

The format has already been rebuilt once, from five matches over two days to three matches in one session, and further adjustment is likely. The three obvious pressure points are the number of teams, the two-city split and the calendar position.

An expanded field would require a longer event, which the calendar cannot absorb. A single-city event would fix the travel problem and lose Perth, which Tennis Australia will not want to do again. And moving the dates is impossible in either direction, because the Australian Open is fixed and the previous season ends in late November.

The most likely evolution is incremental: adjustments to the runner-up formula, to the mixed doubles scoring, and to how many players a squad can carry.

The captain's job

Every United Cup team has a captain, and the role is closer to a selector than a coach. Captains are usually a national federation appointment - for Australia it has been the same figure who leads the Davis Cup and Billie Jean King Cup programmes - and their real work happens in the hour before a session.

Two decisions matter. The first is the mixed doubles pairing, which is the only genuinely free choice in the tie because the singles line-ups are dictated by ranking. A captain has to weigh a doubles specialist's court craft against a singles player's raw ball-striking, and against how much energy that singles player has left after a three-set match an hour earlier.

The second is whether to play a marginally fit player at all. Because the highest-ranked available player must play, "available" is a decision rather than a fact. A captain who declares a player unavailable to protect them for Melbourne is choosing to lose a singles match, and the pressure to make that call rises through the week.

Captains also carry the on-court coaching, which the United Cup permits between points from the team bench. That is one of the visible differences from a normal tour event and one of the reasons the atmosphere feels like a team sport rather than a set of individual matches played consecutively.

How the format changed after 2023

The first edition looked substantially different and the changes are worth setting out, because most of the confusion about the event comes from people remembering the original.

In 2023 there were three host cities, ties were five matches rather than three, and each tie was split across two days - two matches on the first day and three on the second. Countries needed two men's singles players and two women's singles players plus a doubles pair, which is a squad of six at full strength. City finals decided who went through to the semi-finals.

That structure produced good tennis and an impossible logistical load. Squads of six are expensive to assemble in the first week of January, a two-day tie eats calendar space, and three cities meant three sets of operations for one tournament.

From 2024 the event settled on what it uses now: two cities, six groups of three, one three-match tie per session, six group winners and two best runners-up into the quarter-finals. The 2025 and 2026 editions used the same structure, which is the first time the event has run three consecutive years without a format change - a sign that the design has stopped being provisional.

Common misconceptions

That the United Cup is the Hopman Cup renamed. It borrowed the mixed format and the January slot, and RAC Arena is the same building, but it is a bigger tournament with a different owner, a different qualification system and ranking points the Hopman Cup never had.

That the doubles specialists play the singles. They cannot. Each team's highest-ranked available player of that gender must play the singles, which is a deliberate anti-tanking rule.

That the mixed doubles is an exhibition. It has decided ties in every edition, including Australia's 2026 quarter-final exit. It is worth exactly as much as either singles match.

That Australia should be winning it at home. Australia has one top-ten singles player and excellent doubles depth. In a format that weights men's and women's singles equally, that is a quarter-final team, and 2026 was in fact the country's best result.

That the ranking points are token. Five hundred points is a serious return for four or five matches in the first week of the season, and it is the reason the entry list looks the way it does.

For the rest of the Australian summer, see the Australian Open history guide and the tennis section. The wider Australian sporting calendar is set out on the Australia hub.