I’m proud to report a big new milestone for the Match Charting Project! We’ve completed the set of men’s Grand Slam finals back to 1980, something that I’ve aspired to since the early days of the project, and a project that has drawn on a lot of effort from many contributors to the project, especially Edo, who is responsible for a huge part of this accomplishment.

Here’s the complete list of charted slam finals, with links to the shot-by-shot data for each match.

From 1980 to this year’s Australian Open, that’s 152 consecutive men’s finals. I went on a bit of a spree last week, which extended the set back to 1979 and upped the total to 156. We’ve got a few earlier slam finals in the database as well, though there’s a limit to how much more we’ll be able to achieve: Before the late 1970s, video quality and availability decreases sharply.

For researchers, as well as those interested in tennis history, this is valuable stuff, made even more useful by its completeness. With the exception of a handful of missing points here and there, the Match Charting Project now includes a wealth of data for the entirety of all of these matches: serve direction, shot types, strategic choices (like serve-and-volleying), and much more, all in a standard format.

It’s particularly satisfying the check off the last few items on a list. (In this case, the final missing pieces were 1987 Roland Garros and the 1981 Australian Open.) Even though 156 matches is a small fraction of the nearly 4,000 contests tracked as part of the MCP, the subset’s completeness means that we can study it without worrying about the non-random nature of video availability and fan interest. If you want to look into, for instance, how net play has changed at Wimbledon over the last four decades, we’ve got the entire run.

In that vein, we are working on several other noteworthy subsets: Masters 1000 finals, 2018 tour-level finals, meetings between members of the big four, and finals played by members of the big four, among others.

We’re getting close to the complete run of women’s slam finals, as well. We’re up to 137 of the 152 since 1980, and have them all from 1999-present. We haven’t been able to find video for the rest, most notably the 1998 US Open (Davenport-Hingis), 1994 Roland Garros (Graf-Pierce), 1994 US Open (Sanchez-Graf), and 1991 Australian Open (Seles-Novotna). The complete list is here, and the remainder date from 1980-86. If you can help us find any of these, please let me know!

As always, if you find this project interesting, please contribute. Our 2.3 million shots worth of detailed data didn’t appear by magic–we rely on volunteers to chart matches, and I hope you’ll join our ranks. Here’s why I think you should, and here’s how you can get started.