The men’s and women’s tours have made broader contingency plans to play their seasons later in the year, packing their schedules and continuing into late December while skipping what would have been their off-seasons.

“The players will have to create their own spacing in the calendar, but for the tournaments’ and players’ sake you have got to utilize all the weeks in the calendar that are available,” said Jim Courier, a former top-ranked men’s player.

The French Open, the Grand Slam tournament that precedes Wimbledon, already announced that it would push its dates back to Sept. 20 to Oct. 4 from its scheduled May 24 start. The move has generated widespread anger in the sport because the French Open leaders announced their plans publicly without discussing them with others.

The backlash could lead to more shifts for the French Open to account for other scheduled tournaments, compensatory payments to tournaments that would be disadvantaged or even to a punitive reduction in ranking points allotted to the French Open by the tours.

The uproar is the latest demonstration of the deep divisions in tennis, a sport with multiple governing bodies and agendas. “This was a golden opportunity at a difficult time to show our small tennis community is not that fragmented and that the leaders can make a decision together and cooperate. And we ended up showing a very selfish image of who we are,” said Tsobanian, whose Madrid event was postponed with no guarantee of finding another date in 2020.

Some in the game view the extreme situation presented by the coronavirus pandemic as an opportunity for the tours to streamline a cluttered calendar by finding ways to buy out dates from small, struggling events and focusing more on larger events that are more likely to attract top players and television viewers.

“Maybe we have to come to chaos so a new order comes about,” Tsobanian said of the tennis calendar. “But for now, everybody is afraid.”