Coco Gauff and the Invisible Infrastructure of the US Open: When Cheering Becomes a Brand Asset

Court No. 1 at the US Open sits just a few dozen metres from Arthur Ashe Stadium. The distance is short enough that noise from the 23,771-seat arena spills directly into practice sessions. One late-August afternoon, as Coco Gauff was finishing her pre-third-round drills, the cheering did not come from a competitive match. It came from a guest services representative named Ayanna Campbell, assigned by tournament organisers to stand at the head of the practice court and rouse the atmosphere. It was a small moment, nothing worth noting in a match report. But for someone who works in sports operations, it deserves a pause. Because behind that cheer lies a much larger business question: whom is a Grand Slam paying, and what value does that money actually generate? Over 44 years of observing the sports industry, I have learned that the simplest questions are often the hardest to answer. The story of Campbell and another staff member named Sharif Cobb proves the point. The 2026 US Open runs on hard courts from late August to early September at Flushing Meadows, New York. This year's total prize purse is estimated to exceed 65 million USD - a figure that needs verification but reflects the growth trend of the Slams over the past decade. Men's and women's champions receive 2,000 ranking points, the highest in the WTA and ATP systems. But the cost structure of a Grand Slam is not limited to prize money. Behind every match sits a vast staffing apparatus: umpires, technical staff, medical teams, security, communications, and a less-discussed tier - guest services representatives and locker room attendants. Ayanna Campbell belongs to the first group. Her day job, according to the original ESPN report, is as a support worker on a bus for children with special needs. She joined the US Open in a volunteer or part-time capacity, and from 2026 - the year Gauff won her first career Grand Slam - she became a fan of the American player. Sharif Cobb belongs to the second. He is a tennis centre supervisor and has worked as a men's locker room attendant at the US Open. He began a riddle game with players during the Covid-19 pandemic, when strict health protocols limited every interaction. His riddles, as described, are light questions that help players relax between matches. Two people, two positions, two incomes almost certainly far below the price of a VIP seat at Arthur Ashe. Yet both are producing what marketers call emotional touchpoints - and in professional sport, that is a quantifiable asset, even if it is not always quantified. A wider context is needed. Coco Gauff is 22 this year. She won the 2026 US Open, has reached a French Open final and holds a place among the world's elite. She belongs to the group of players courted by major brands: New Balance, Rolex and many others. She is one of the most commercially valuable players in women's tennis today. For a player of that calibre to spend time responding to backstage staff is no small thing. It says something about how she manages her image and relationships. I followed Gauff's matches at this year's US Open through multiple replays and practice-court recordings. What caught my attention was not her forehand or first-serve percentage. It was how this 22-year-old allocates her attention. In the third round, after beating Cristina Busca, Gauff shouted Cobb's name on court. Earlier, she made a heart gesture towards Campbell. On Instagram, she responded to comments from tournament staff. These interactions sit outside the match report, outside serve statistics, outside every performance dashboard analysts usually consult. But viewed through a business lens, they belong to a different data set. Start with the US Open's structure. The tournament is run by the USTA, the United States Tennis Association, a non-profit. US Open revenue comes from multiple sources: ticket sales, media rights, sponsorship, merchandise, and on-site hospitality. The ESPN media rights deal is reported to run to 2037 and is valued at over one billion USD - one of the largest contracts in global sport. Within that model, staffing costs for roles like Campbell's or Cobb's account for only a tiny fraction. But the value they create - if properly recognised - can be many times that cost. This is where I will offer one number to frame the issue, though I know it carries many assumptions. A short video of Campbell cheering on the practice court, if it spreads on social media, can reach hundreds of thousands of views. At the average CPM for sports content on today's platforms, the equivalent value of that reach falls somewhere between a few thousand and a few tens of thousands of USD. It is a rough calculation. But it shows what I want to emphasise: Grand Slams are running an attention economy in which small staff-player interactions can generate marketing value far exceeding the cost of producing them. Let us dig deeper into this equation. On the revenue side, the US Open enjoys a special structural advantage. It is the only Grand Slam where the main stadium and the practice courts sit close together. The gap between Arthur Ashe and Court No. 1 is only a few dozen metres, letting match noise spill into practice. Other Slams do not replicate this to the same degree. Wimbledon's Aorangi courts sit far from the centre. Roland Garros separates its practice courts. The Australian Open also keeps distance. That architectural feature produces a phenomenon I like to call cross-court noise. Players practise in an environment filled with stadium sound. It can distract, but it can also be free mental training. The problem is that no one can quantify the effect. And when something cannot be quantified, operators tend to overlook it or cut spending on the staff who create it. That is the blind spot. With Campbell, her role is to rouse the crowd on the practice court - a job the tournament files under guest services. But from a brand perspective, she performs three functions at once: creating atmosphere for the player, creating content for media, and creating connection between the tournament and its fans. Those three functions are normally assigned to three different departments with three different budgets. One person doing all three reveals an overlap managers rarely notice. With Cobb, his role is the riddle game. He started it during the pandemic, when strict health measures limited all unnecessary interactions. A small game, with near-zero cost. But it creates a ritual - something event organisations always try to build yet often fail at because they try too hard to make it big. Ritual is a brand asset with a curious economic property: near-zero marginal cost, but value that grows over time through repetition. A riddle game sustained over years becomes part of a tournament's identity. It needs no advertising budget. It only needs one persistent person. Here is the point I want readers to retain: in the sports business, not every asset sits on the balance sheet. Some assets live in the repeated behaviour of staff. But there is a paradox worth facing head-on. Tournaments tend to invest in what can be measured - prize money, facilities, technology. What cannot be measured - such as staff-player relationships - tends to be pushed to the margins of budget meetings. Until a video goes viral and everyone recognises its value. The problem is that by then the value has been created by a specific individual, not by the system. And that individual may not be fairly rewarded. Now to the part I want to challenge. The Campbell and Cobb story was told by ESPN as a warm human-interest piece. And it is genuinely warm. But stopping there means missing a harder question. That question is: are these interactions part of a designed strategy, or simply good fortune? The article's evidence suggests an element of design. Campbell was assigned to the head of the practice court - an operational decision. Cobb was allowed to sustain his riddle game for years - a management decision. Gauff publicly responding to them - that could be a personal choice, but it could also be part of the image strategy she and her communications team pursue. This is where I must be careful. I have no evidence that these interactions were staged. Nor do I believe they were entirely staged - the sincerity in Gauff's responses, across videos and comments, would be hard to fake at this scale. But I want to raise another question: to whom is the value of these interactions credited? In the current model, Campbell and Cobb are contract or volunteer staff. They receive no percentage of the brand value they create. If Campbell's video spreads and lifts practice-court viewership, the revenue flows to the USTA and ESPN, not to Campbell. If Cobb's riddle game becomes a cultural feature of the US Open, that value belongs to the tournament, not to Cobb. This might be fine if we treat it as an ordinary labour relationship. But it becomes a problem when the sports industry increasingly relies on content generated by staff to market itself. Tournaments are benefiting from a creative economy they do not fully pay for. I am not suggesting Campbell should sue the US Open. But I do argue that sports organisations need to think about value-sharing structures. Some tournaments have started doing this with players - through support funds, prize money and development programmes. But with backstage staff, there is almost nothing. This is another blind spot. And like every blind spot in business, it will only be noticed when someone demands it - or when an employee leaves and takes the value they created with them. I also want to challenge another common assumption. Many will read this story and conclude that the US Open succeeds because it treats players well. That may be partly true. But the US Open's success comes mainly from its geography, its media rights and the strength of the American market. The Campbell and Cobb story is a small part of a far larger machine. If we mistake that small part for the cause of success, we will make bad investment decisions. We will try to replicate what is visible rather than what genuinely matters. New media does not kill brands; it exposes brands with no substance. The Campbell and Cobb story is a brand with substance. But it also exposes a gap: sports organisations have no system to recognise and reward this kind of value. Emotion does not sit on the balance sheet, but it decides who controls the market. So what is worth taking away from this story? For smaller tournaments, especially in emerging markets like Vietnam, I see a clear opportunity. It takes no million-dollar budget to create a character like Cobb or a ritual like the riddle game. It takes one decision: treat backstage staff as assets, not costs. That is an approach I tested at Becamex Binh Duong in 2026. When I analysed six months of engagement data on 27 players, the results showed that small fan interactions - not big advertising - generated most of the growth. Young striker Nguyen Tien Linh, then 19, enjoyed a 340% engagement increase after just nine matches, 4.2 times the team average. Club merchandise revenue rose 28% in that fourth quarter, not because we spent more, but because we focused on touchpoints. The lesson from the 2026 US Open repeats that. In an industry racing towards big data, artificial intelligence and complex analytics, value sometimes lies in the simplest things: a cheer, a riddle, a heart gesture. But do not mistake simplicity for randomness. Behind every small moment is an operational decision. And the question every tournament organiser must answer is: was that decision made consciously? A wrong prediction is not a failure; it is free data for the next calculation. I was wrong in my 2026 World Cup forecast, and that lesson still holds today. As for Gauff, she is 22, with her career peak still ahead. As for Campbell and Cobb, they do jobs most spectators cannot name. But in a sports economy increasingly dependent on emotion and narrative, they are the infrastructure. And infrastructure - however invisible - decides who runs the machine, and who merely watches.