French Open keeps line judges for 2026 tournament, making it a Grand Slam outlier

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The French Open will retain human line judges for 2026, making it an outlier among tennis’ Grand Slams.

The French Tennis Federation (FFT) confirmed the decision in a statement Monday, in which it said it “will continue to show off the excellence of French umpiring, which is recognized across the world,” according to vice president Lionel Ollinger. Ollinger’s comments follow FFT president Gilles Moretton last year calling France “the best country for providing referees on the circuit.”

Wimbledon adopted electronic line calling (ELC) in 2025, leaving the Paris tournament as the last of the four tennis majors to use humans to adjudicate whether a ball has landed in or out. Instead, officials rely on marks left by players’ shots on the Roland Garros clay. The line judges make an initial decision, before the chair umpire verifies any contentious ball marks at the players’ request.

Those marks can be illusory, because clay is a “live” surface. It is affected by the amount of red brick dust in different parts of the court, weather conditions and a shot’s trajectory.

Tennis balls compress when they land, creating marks of all shapes and sizes that do not always tell an accurate story of the impact. ELC has also faced occasional problems with malfunctions, and players are largely split over which system they prefer, even when ELC removes the back-and-forth that can be created by human error.

More difficult is the discrepancy between having ELC at some tournaments and line judges at the French Open. It requires players to rewire their brains according to which system is in place, which some have struggled to do as ELC slowly replaces line judges at events further down the tennis ladder.

After years of relying on ball marks, players have had to reckon with being told not to believe their eyes. Some players, including world No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka and world No. 3 Alexander Zverev, used their phones to take photos of marks during the European clay-court swing earlier this year.

The Australian Open adopted ELC in 2021, while the U.S. Open adopted it in 2022 after using it on some courts in 2020. When Wimbledon removed line judges earlier this year, All England Lawn Tennis Club (AELTC) chief executive Sally Bolton described the move as “inevitable.” The French Open believes otherwise.

(Top photo of Frances Tiafoe and Timo Janzen at the 2025 French Open: Clive Brunskill / Getty Images)

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