NEW YORK, NEW YORK – SEPTEMBER 03: Naomi Osaka of Japan walks out on court prior to her Women’s Singles Second Round match. Day Five of the 2026 US Open at USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center. (Photo by Al Bello/Getty Images)
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Wimbledon answered the U.S. Open’s creator controversy by declining to create a category for them. The All England Club does not plan to introduce a dedicated accreditation for influencers or content creators at the 2027 tournament and will confiscate equipment such as ring lights under its existing conditions of entry, according to a Press Association report.
Its ticket terms for 2027, updated on September 1, already bar ticket holders from any “live or as live dissemination” of match audio or video.
It is a tidy response to an untidy fortnight in New York, but three organizations are answering different questions. The U.S. Open created a credential that gave creators access. The FIFA-TikTok program went further: defining what creators could cover, where they could go and what they could not film. Wimbledon is choosing not to create a separate creator category at all.
Why The U.S. Open Creator Credential Became The Story
The disruption that started the argument, during Naomi Osaka’s first-round match, did not come from credentialed creators. The people the chair umpire asked to sit down were not part of the creator program, Brendan McIntyre, the USTA’s head of communications, said in a statement to ABC News.
The USTA issued approximately 100 creator credentials this year, up from 54 when the program began in 2025, covering social-first creators and the social teams of established media brands. The credential, McIntyre said, “debuted in 2025 to engage with fans where and how they consume content.”
So the problem was not that the USTA defined nothing. It defined a credential. What was harder to see was the assignment, and public criticism collapsed credentialed creators and everyone else filming from the stands into one word: influencers.
How FIFA And TikTok Defined World Cup Creator Access
FIFA had already run the experiment at scale, naming 30 Creator Correspondents with TikTok for the World Cup. I reported on the program’s launch in May and on how the assignment worked in August.
The correspondents had access to training, press conferences, team arrivals, warm-ups, the mixed zone and the field after the whistle. They could not film live match play. “We weren’t going to film anything on the field during the match because Fox and Telemundo have those rights,” Simone Scott, one of the 30 creators, said.
What they filmed instead was everything around it: supporters, arrivals, warm-ups, press conferences and celebrations after the whistle. They added their own commentary for their followers and the wider football audience on TikTok. Posts went through approval, mainly on visual grounds.
The program sat inside FIFA’s Preferred Platform agreement with TikTok, announced in January, which gave official media partners the right to live-stream parts of matches and post curated clips.
Broadcasters streamed the opening 10 minutes of matches into the app and drew 660 million unique views, according to TikTok’s own recap. The figure is internal platform data and has not been independently audited.
FIFA’s boundary was easy to state and easy to see: everything around the match, never the match. A correspondent could stand near the goal during warm-ups because that access was part of the assignment. That was not just access. It was a role.
Why Wimbledon’s Creator Rules Answer A Different Question
Tennis has a harder version of the problem, because what went wrong in New York was audience behavior during points, and no media credential controls that. The USTA has since added signage and messaged ticket and suite holders about flash photography and ring lights.
But when the people causing a disruption are not part of the creator program, the organizer needs to be able to say who is in the program and who is not. Giving the creator group a name and clear rules makes that easier.
A seat at a Grand Slam is scarce. A phone in the stands is not. What the organizer can control is who gets official access, where they can go and what they are allowed to film. FIFA and TikTok made those rules explicit: creators got proximity while live match play stayed with the broadcasters.
The USTA created a credential, but the role was harder to read from outside. Wimbledon already has the boundary and is choosing not to attach a cohort to it.
The distinction is not creators versus no creators. It is access versus assignment.
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